Rolling In the Deep

Whatever became of Adele?

This is not a flippant question. The British singer Adele has kept an awfully low profile as of late. Well, she is working on her third album right now, having rested her vocal cords after having surgery to repair them and having sired a baby boy. Although she hasn't performed a full-length concert since 2011, she's getting ready to release her next album (25?) later thsi year and perform at Royal Albert Hall this October.

Too bad no one in America is likely to care.

I'm assuming the position that Adele's time has passed. Or, she's had fourteen minutes and thirty seconds of fame, and the clock is ticking. At least in These States. She may continue to be a star in Britain - she may even become the Cilla Black of the twenty-first century - but then, who cares? Americans never cared about Cilla Black, anyway. 

Why do I think Adele is yesterday's news in the United States? You might think it's because she's been out of our consciousness for so long that her latest career endeavor is being called a "comeback."  While being out of the limelight for nearly three years has hurt her, that's not why I think she can't make a comeback in the States. Besides, she's been away from her singing career for understandable reasons. 

No, it's because of what Tris McCall of the Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger pointed out, which I noted in an earlier post: Adele's music does not represent trends in American popular music today. The 2014 Grammy Awards ceremony made that clear. Adele's records are a throwback to sixties British songstresses like Black, Dusty Springfield and Petula Clark, while most of the "music" you hear on American hit radio is either electronic disco or hip-hop. Or, if it's Miley Cyrus, a fusion of both. Adele was hardly a female Elvis, changing popular music in favor of her style; exactly how many singers on the pop charts did you see try to emulate her? If record companies other than her own were falling over each other trying to sign the next Adele, I must have missed it.

Yes, it would have been nice to see Adele bring traditionalism back in such a big way that it would have led to many, many more traditionalist performers on the Billboard charts, but if I listen to Top Forty radio for five minutes - that's all I can take, really - I'm convinced that the only way you can have a long career in American pop these days is to rap about comin' from the 'hood and showin' off your bling or produce a dance song with instruments you need a computer operating certificate to play. And if you can't twerk, you'd at least better know what twerking is! Adele's music isn't concerned with any of that, and it appeals to people who don't like what's on Top Forty radio these days. Mostly, that means old people. (Young people are the ones who buy the records.)  I should have known that Adele was a freak success with no staying power when a woman in my writers' group said she loved Adele. This woman is in her seventies. Me, I'm 48, which is almost as bad. 

As I have said before - over and over, in fact - hip-hop and synth-pop have been mainstays on American hit radio since at least the late eighties, and traditionalists who have hits are exceptions rather than the rule. Adele satisfied a lot of Americans who dislike current pop trends - i.e., those who are square - but every time there's a backlash against hip-hop and electronic music, there's a backlash against the backlash, and so I wouldn't expect Adele to repeat her stateside success. Part of the problem is that she's British; Britain isn't as musically relevant now as it was in the sixties and seventies, and so when a British act does get on the American charts these days, it's an aberration. I've already noted that the British folk rockers Mumford & Sons, currently on "indefinite" hiatus, will have a tough time following up their earlier success here; even if Marcus Mumford and his crew don't stay away too long and aren't forgotten, their next album is likely to flop in the U.S. "Mumford & Sons?" the kids will say. "That is so 2013!" 

I want to be wrong about Adele.  After all, she's had the longest-running number one album (21) on the charts of any female performer in Britain and America, and she's the first woman to have had three singles in the Billboard Top Ten at the same time, among other impressive accomplishments.  I'm probably not wrong, though. Never mind, we'll find someone like her, and we'll get our hopes up that, after a quarter century and change of disappointments, we'll have finally found a traditionalist performer that will rescue American pop from all that rap and electronica rubbish. And then we'll go back to the status quo and be disappointed again. 

And we'll keep thinking that we almost had it all.