paglia - adele the true voice of america

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The true voice of America - Adele from Tottenham

Camille PagliaSunday Times, London, England, Feb. 19, 2012: p3

With her armload of six trophies, Adele was the golden girl of the Grammys

last weekend, matching Beyonce's record for the most awards received by a

female artist in one night.

Adele's performance of Rolling in the Deep, which won Grammys for record

of the year and song of the year, triggered one of the biggest, loudest standing

ovations in the history of award shows.

Normally a tribute of that kind would be reserved for fabled figures brought

out of mothballs to be honoured for their lifetime achievement. It is astonishing

that this response was accorded to an affable, unassuming 23-year-old womanwho was born in Tottenham, north London.

The high emotion was intensified by anxiety and suspense: this was Adele's

first public performance since a benign polyp was excised from her vocal cords in

November. Furthermore, there was surging momentum from the death of

Whitney Houston the previous day.

With her subdued dress, appealingly modest demeanour and empathic

vocal delivery, Adele was in total sync with a crowd swaying between grief and

joy. Lady Gaga, in contrast, bizarrely costumed with a tight veil and pretentious

gold sceptre, looked repellently egotistical. Her boorish kissing of Paul McCartney,who mugged surprised discomfort to the camera, was a crass publicity stunt.

Gaga, who won nothing and did not perform, was flattened by the Adele

juggernaut.

Award shows have become so numerous and generic that they rarely have

much impact. For a parallel to Adele's triumph at the Grammys, one would have

to go all the way back to Elizabeth Taylor winning the Oscar for best actress for

Butterfield 8 in 1961.

Taylor had atoned for her reputation as a heartless vamp (for stealing Eddie

Fisher from Debbie Reynolds) by nearly dying in London, where an episode of

pneumonia had led to an emergency tracheotomy. As Taylor whisperingly

accepted her award, the scar was freshly visible on her neck. Strangely, the dual

themes of throat surgery and death recurred on Adele's big night.

Partly energising the audience's response to Adele's performance was its

subliminal recognition that Rolling in the Deep (co-written and produced by Paul

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Epworth) belongs to the magnificent tradition of African-American music that

produced Houston.

From its opening raw guitar strum to its soaring, thunderous climax, Rolling

in the Deep recapitulates the entire history of black music. We hear the

percussive accents of early rural Southern blues, with its hand-clapping and foot-stomping, along with a defiant touch of Native American war drums.

Next is Adele's incarnation as a voluptuous belter in the "big mama" style of

rowdy roadhouse blues, typified by Bessie Smith. As an agonised torch song,

Rolling in the Deep also evokes the subsequent phase in musical style, the urban

jazz sophistication of Billie Holiday and Lena Horne.

Black gospel music, originating in 19th-century negro spirituals, is

wonderfully captured in Rolling in the Deep, with its commenting background

voices, the "call and response" format that has been traced from field songs

under slavery all the way back to west African communal ritual.Hip-hop, which began with rap and break dancing in the 1970s, now

dominates the American music market. It is a style that has conquered the world

and become the idiom of political dissidents everywhere. But it can too often

become forced and mechanical, a pastiche of piratical sampling, robotic Auto-

Tune and technical gimmickry.

At the Grammys Adele was a revelation, bringing back to America one of

our authentic native genres: the spiritual power and purity of the unadorned

human voice. It wasn't just the live audience who leapt to their feet and shouted

in ecstasy: it was music-loving television viewers from coast to coast.Despite her saturation of our airwaves for the past year, Americans had no

idea who Adele was or what she was like. Given her melancholic motifs, one

feared she might well be a morbid mope. The first time we got a good look at her

was in a television interview on the weekend of the Grammys. To universal

amazement she turned out to be a bubbly, spunky, impishly self-satirising bundle

of energy.

Accepting her awards, she charmed everyone with her warmth, vitality and

deftly economical thanks, despite her rapid and sometimes incomprehensible (to

us) London accent. The Spice Girls never gained traction in America, which wasMadonna's domain, and so the last time Americans saw a hearty, scrappy,

effervescent working-class girl like Adele was when Lynn Redgrave appeared in

the film Georgy Girl in 1966.

Many Americans stereotype Brits as theatrical swells with posh accents.

Thus Adele is doing path-breaking work as a cultural ambassador.

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As a career teacher at art schools, I bless Adele for the example she has set

for aspiring artists in any field. She has shown in this age of glitzy image-making

and frenetic, obscenely costly stage routines that a singer can reach a worldwide

audience with simple emotional truth. With her womanly dignity and her primal

imagery of ocean, rain and fire, Adele has set a new standard for young artists byhumbly returning to the richness of the past.

Camille Paglia is a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in

Philadelphia

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paglia - adele the true voice of america

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