I can’t explain or discuss why Adele has this phenomenal success, it is something that totally escapes me, but when Iman wrote that Adele’s album ‘21’ was the most overrated album of 2011, he got criticized for being ‘misogynistic’, and using ‘a blanket criticism of chick flicks, lifetime movies’.
Was he really misogynistic and sexist when he wrote this?
‘Adele is the chick flick of singers: she is a Lifetime Movie, a broiling, bitter broken psychotic moaner. No wonder women love her. All the clingy, needy, demanding, bullshit men hate in women are manifested here: women saying men are uncommunicative, perhaps heavy metal with its sex and violence is an easy version of the male id. Men think women are Adele and women mistake her neediness for girl power.’
First of all, I don’t understand what is girl/woman culture, for me there is culture, and I don’t participate into this strange phenomenon that consists at separating what could interest men on one side and women on another side. I simply can’t support this part of the woman population that watch Oprah’s show and Lifetime Movie, or anything 'targeting women'… have you ever watch that stuff? It is simply dumb, simplistic, shallow, it lacks anything that could challenge your brain, it is all exclamation points, excitement, sexual advices, with an overly-touchy-feely-watery material,… girly culture is not empowering culture, it is talk-down and infantizing or patronizing material for women who confound the spice girls with feminism, but who need to be told everything from how-to-seduce-your-man to how-to-change-your-man.
So was Iman right when he compared Adele’s songs to this stuff? I bet he was, because Adele’s songs are kind of dumb too, with more clichés than the entire Nora Ephron’s filmography.
You want the proof? ‘There’s a fire starting in my heart’ she sings in ‘Rolling in the Deep’… how long did she search for that line, I wonder. ‘You had my heart inside of your hand/and you played it/to the beat’,… heart, beat, music, is it even a metaphor? When metaphors are that obvious, they don’t work at all, there is no mystery, no looking-in-the-meaning. In ‘Set Fire to the Rain’, many key body-parts are mentioned, hands, lips, knees, heart, feet, eyes, face,… it is female pornography at its basics, whereas ‘Someone Like You’ incarnates one of the strongest girlie fantasies, getting back with an ex, because yeah, we are all irresistible.
What Adele is selling is no more different from this Lifetime culture, a channel devoted to female suffering because of bad men, a series of fantasies about failed romance, but like her lyrics, all these stories are trite and overwhelmingly predictable.
Of course it pleases a lot of women, her songs-for-angry-and-vengeful-women hit all the right spots, which woman hasn’t felt a victim once in her life? It is easy and unchallenging, and people will always pick easiness to anything more challenging when they see it, believe me, I work in the education system.
There is so much indulgence and cry for attention in Adele’s songs, that she will continue to be sold like the emotional girl for a long time, after all, there are tons of women who had bad breakups. But I don’t care if her audience is very large, this doesn’t make her art more valuable than it is.
What Adele only manages to produce is predictability, cliché-songs that are written with the knowledge in advance of how people are going to react to them, especially women. Shallowness, and sentimentalism should be avoided in art,… ‘Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail’ said Jean Cocteau, and Adele’s songs are exactly that, sentimental blackmail.