Adele

[Borracho]

I'm just back from a holiday in New York, and this woman is omnipresent in the city -- huge billboards of her everywhere, front cover of Rolling Stone, the works. I was subjected to the "We could have had it aaaaaaaaaaaaalllllll" song something like twelve times in eight days -- it's oozing out of every speaker in every bar and restaurant and bookshop. Columbia must be spending multi-millions on her.

Someone (Simon Reynolds?) recently wrote that this whole white-female-soul revival thing is merely the contemporary equivalent of those mid-1980s adverts for Levi's 501s where the male model in the launderette was soundtracked by Ben E King/Sam Cooke/whoever. Any thoughts on why this sort of watery, pallid fare (a photocopy of a photocopy of something that happened 50-odd years ago), which practically comes with a big sticker on the CD case that says "I AM REALLY CLASSY", is selling so well? Aural comfort food in turbulent times, or is there a different explanation?

[steveeeeeeeee]

Adele

I like it, I think the only singer I've really not enjoyed is Duffy, but I like Adele.

It's good for all involved, musicians get to play real instruments, live shows are better, singers get to sing songs that display their vocal ability without being Disney ballads and there is a connection of sorts to the artist and the song they're singing. The new Lykke Li album has a song called "Sadness is a Blessing" and whilst it treads many of the same boards laid by Amy Winehouse, it's a f*cking great song and I really think she means it, man.

Still, it's going to suffer from overkill sooner or later, in the case of your experience, it sounds like it'll be sooner.

[Femme Folle]

Adele

She seems to appeal to the white female 40-55 demographic (probably the same group she appeals to in the UK, I would assume).

I had never heard of her until a few weeks ago, and I had not heard that song (consciously, anyway) until one of the contestants on American Idol sang it. After hearing the Adele version, I think the AI contestant's version was more enjoyable.

I won't be rushing out to buy either, however. Not my cuppa.

[Borracho]

Adele

I wouldn't say it's awful stuff. It's just very run of the mill and half-baked. Alison Moyet was doing this kind of thing 25 years ago, for god's sake, and she had much better songs.

It's a real case of "find me the next ten Amy Winehouses", except there's none of the genuine strangeness that you get with her.

[hobbes]

Adele

She did a shocking cover of Lovesong by The Cure. Real sub-sub-sub Nouvelle Vague dogshit. Therefore she is dead to me.

[Auntie Beryl]

Adele

This is a real music-industry position to take, but without Adele selling a million albums in the first ten weeks of release (plus another 500k of her debut), the business pages headlines would be "music business 20% down year on year" rather than 10%.

It's up to you how shit she is. She's not the Vengaboys.

[erwin]

Adele

I hadn't heard of her until recently, either. The other day I nipped onto YouTube to get a taste, and this was the first song that popped up, the one that ABII mentions, I suppose.

Ah, man - that's a cracking song. (I might get bored with it if it were stuffed down my lugholes every minute of the day, mind ... but then that goes for any song, really).

[G-Man]

Adele

Analogue Bubblebath II wrote:

I wouldn't say it's awful stuff. It's just very run of the mill and half-baked. Alison Moyet was doing this kind of thing 25 years ago, for god's sake, and she had much better songs.

Quite so. Moyet's sound was soul influenced, whereas this current lot is more or less recreating classic soul (or, as someone somewhere pointed out, Dusty In Memphis). If it's a pale copy of what came before, it should be dismissed as pastiche (I dismiss Amy Winehouse on that count).

The only contemporary artist I can think of who really pulls of the soul recreation is James Hunter, who has no commercial success. But he actually is a soul singer. Good though some of the pastiche artists' songs might be, they seem terribly artificial.

I bet that all of them talk about how they grew up with records by Marvin, Aretha, Sam, Bobby, Al (and all the other surname-deprived giants of soul) records, "and all the Motown and Stax records (never Hi or King, somehow), in addition to the obligatory "old blues guys" who merit no name.

The one saving grace is that Winehouse, Duffy and Adele seem to understand that soul music is not about excessive yodelling, the Mariah Carey way. They don't try to be Patti LaBelle, whose gratuitous gospel-inflected vocal pyrotechnics in the '80s (and those by Aretha Franklin) did so much damage to the soul music that followed them.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

Adele

19

21

3.14159

[George]

Adele

erwin wrote:

Ah, man - that's a cracking song. (I might get bored with it if it were stuffed down my lugholes every minute of the day, mind ... but then that goes for any song, really).

Which is the problem. Rolling In The Deep is a fine song - the same can't be said of Someone Like You - but it's been played to oversaturation since the back-end of last year. The broadest possible field of radio stations will play her songs as well. Radio 1 and 2 as well as the more dance/RnB' orientated stations like Capital. A rare achievement.

Still, it's better than Duffy whose recent album as stiffed.

[Mumpo]

Adele

She seems to be doing pretty well for someone signed on the coat-tails of Amy Winehouse. I like her policy of giving her albums the same titles as her age, and look forward to hearing 38, 44 and 52. Which coincidentally are also her vital statistics.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Adele

I find them comically unmemorable, most of these big hits in a sort-of-soul-via-Jools Holland style. Duffy's like the biggest selling UK female artist of the last few years or something, and no one can sing you one of her songs, cause they're like a cartoon duck doing Northern Soul: non-hit soul 7"s, a very strange sound to contrive, strip of oomph and get a mega selling formula from. And Adele's hit there is a big load of nothing; it's not horrible, you just wonder who'd notice it.

Adele's definitely not a pastiche in the way the mid-late eighties lot were. They were taking off 25-year-old music, which must still have had a tang of style and perhaps authenticity, in the same way the the eighties revivalists did in the 2000s. This is a sort of culture-post-culture idea of soul music, I suppose, as you might expect with the source sound being half a century old. Boring, though, innit: just a vague idea of real instruments and voices and that behind it.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Adele

Speaking of Northern Soul ducks, here's Marsha Gee.

[Sean of the Shed]

Adele

She seems to be having the kind of impact Simply Red had in the 80's, and she's just as bland. Our own Spearmint Rhino sums her up pretty well for me in last week's Independent on Sunday.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Adele

What an age we live in when I find myself saying, "I think that's a bit unfair on Simply Red."

[George]

Adele

I can think of an handful of Simply Red songs which I'd sooner hear over this recent spree of nothingness any day of the week.

[Wyatt Earp]

Adele

Me too, as long as by "a handful of Simply Red songs" you mean "Fairground".

[George]

Adele

Fairground is awful!

Holding Back The Years; A New Flame; Do The Right Thing and You've Got It are all ok.

Pretty much everything else is fairgame for abuse, especially the singles off Stars which lingered like a bad fart through much of the early 90's.

[Wyatt Earp]

Adele

George wrote:

Fairground is awful!

Holding Back The Years; A New Flame; Do The Right Thing and You've Got It are all ok.

Be a dull old world if we all agreed.

[Borracho]

Adele

'Something Got Me Started' is great. Worthy of George Benson.

I got sent along to review Simply Red years ago, around the time of 'Fairground' in fact. Hucknall's effect on the (95% female) audience was astonishing. They treated him like he was George Clooney.

As for Adele, worth remembering that none of this would be happening to her if Amy Winehouse had shown up as scheduled in 2010 and dutifully delivered her third album on time.

[historyman]

Adele

I can't understand what all the fuss is about. Female soul singers with distinctive voices are ten to a penny, but having a distinctive voice doesn't guarantee that people will buy or listen to your music.

The few Adele songs that I've heard have done nothing for me, and 'Someone Like You' is beginning to grate on my ears. I'm sorry Adele, but when one of your ex boyfriends finds someone new you've just gotta move on babe.

Well, it's reassuring for us lesser mortals that not everything Rick Rubin produces turns to crtical acclaim.

[MsD]

Adele

The fuss is about Rolling in the Deep, which is a very good pop song judged on its own merits, rather than against rather arbitrary notions of authenticity.

People are nice about Alison Moyet now, but she got exactly the same criticism for her first solo work - that this was some kind of ersatz soul, that a white bird from Essex shouldn't presume to steal from the greats, who of course all have soul and authenticity just like they got rhydm.

On that basis, that "eat your greens" approach to music that often makes Jools' show so dull, we would reject most of our best loved pop music. Sometimes I want to listen to old jazz, rock, soul, rockabilly or blues and it's wonderful to explore the roots. Other times, it's nice to just listen to a new take on it. Or to listen to someone who's still alive, young even.

I don't want to make great claims for Adele because the other work seems pretty so-so, but I think she's having an unfair standard applied here, not that it will hurt her career much.

I do like the fact that she's not your standard sized babe and that she's common as, too.

[steveeeeeeeee]

Adele

I think the fact that erwin and I like her demonstrates she must be on the radio and TV non-stop in the UK and USA. In Portugal, she's completely unknown, I only hear her stuff when I listen to English radio.

Like MsD says, it's also nice to have a pop-star that doesn't fit MTV's current mold of what pop-stars should look like.

[Freestyling buck wilding Stijn Stijnen]

Adele

G.man, I'd never heard of James Hunter.
Nice.

My evening will be spent downloading his musical stylings. Splendid.

Mind, he probably didn't go down the route that almost every musician/actor/presenter/shameless wannabe/dead-eyed fiend, full of blind ambition, goes down nowadays, and by that I mean the dreaded stage/acting/drama school route.

You cannot teach someone how to sing like James Hunter, even though that is a concept wasted upon those who stand to make money from the music industry, and all of those who try to sail in her.

And they certainly try to teach the young of greater London area (although everyone is welcome, as long as you have a pushy parent, living their dreams through you, and a child with an ounce of talent, dreams can come true! NOW GIVE ME JAZZHANDS!), be it at the Italia Conti or Sylvia Young theatre schools, or in Adele's case, that proving ground of unfettered genius, the BRIT school, which features quite the shitlist I can tell you.
Same goes for the other two schools. Basically, think of everyone who's ever annoyed you on telly, or the cast of Eastenders.

The Alumni (Haha, fuck off!)

Dane Bowers!
Jessie J!
The fucking feeling
Leona Lewis!
Kate Nash
Amy Winehouse*And Katie Melua!

Music for people with weak pulses!
Katie Melua, another young 'un, attempting to interpret the complexities of the human condition at the age of three.

Any one who is taught by themselves has a fool for a master, Kate.

So, we train the kids as though they are dancing, prancing ponies, the artistic equivalent of a trained sealion and then scratch our heads as to why they sound like something good from years ago, albeit a watered down version thereof**.

As long as the process of locating talent prevents those with the talent from blooming of it's own accord, by letting a soul develop, grow, and learn for itself, it will only ever sound as artificial as what it has become.

Fucking hell, Beyonce and Christina Aguilera were trained up from the age of 3, and it shows, yes their voices are powerful, (or should that be POWERRRRRRRRRRFULLLLLLLEEEEEEEEAAAALLLLL, that's them going through the vocal range on every line, as if I had to explain,) but power aint soul. I hear no soul, I hear an inevitable note from the voice of somebody who has been trained to sing that way.

There's nothing organic about it.

No emotion, and if I had to explain, you wouldn't understand, some things HAVE to be known. Standard.
Live, learn, love, lose, move forward.

*Law of averages, one's gonna be good, monkeys, typewriters, etc. That aint no vetting process, homey.

**I say water, I meant piss. Full of blood.

And what everyone's saying about her size and what have you, I wouldn't much worry if she looked like something that was rejected from even the internet for being too freaky, as long as she could sing.

I don't want that to be my reason for listening to music.

Besides, the stage schools cater for all shapes and sizes!

Gobble up them demographics people! There's money to be made.

[Freestyling buck wilding Stijn Stijnen]

Adele

Listening to old soul is one thing, and yes, the current crop do that, but understanding it is another thing entirely.