My mum used to frequently wonder what I did when I was sitting on my chair, before and after dinner time, gawking at my laptop. And after I got married, she told me one day that she thought that I must have been catching up with a lot of things because I had given her the impression that I was reading a lot of the time. Although that is to a degree correct, I had also spent a reasonable quantity of my time listening to random music and watching literally every movie trailer I could get my eyes on.
A couple of months ago found me watching an American reality talent show, The Voice, and the song one of the singers' performed caught my attention. A simple Yahoo! search revealed the reputed woman behind the curtain that went by the name Adele.
At the start I didn't want to not know more about the artist as in my head she was the one-hit-wonder with "Chasing Pavements", if only a tad more distinctive, replica of the overall development in popular music. The calculation runs like this; subject (a girl) plus cosmetics who's made to croon over an arranged and composed milieu of fittingly up-beat music, who then has to move out and make space for another fresh new star. Although this calculation habitually marks money and plays on air with innumerable and unremarkable top ten hits, it does not repeatedly yield decent and respectable music. And I, well I don't listen to terrible music and neither should anyone else.
So that takes us, in a rather obvious way, to Adele. You see the obvious is that I was bored stiff with my music collection. I was uninterested by what was supposedly riveting and I was also uninterested with most of the hottest new remixes moving around which in actuality came out several years ago. In this tediousness I turned on the TV, to this singing competition, and there it was, one of the contestants performing this song by Adele.
And I'll tell you why she just isn't one more pop princess offshoot. Certain, she's been photo'd, digitally touched-up, enhanced and glossed over, highly styled, buffed, trimmed and altered... to be made to look as good as humanly possible, but that is the cost for being a celebrity. Her song "Rolling in the deep" from the album, 21, has both a gravity and an element of excellence that many of her equals lack (and to be fair-minded they don't even know it in their competition). I'm not implying this is the greatest song or album I have listened to, or even will listen to in the coming years, but it is unquestionably worth listening to.
I cannot seem to go beyond the intense nature of the song - the thumping piano and the backup singers along with the rhythm that sits in perfect harmony with the lyrics. And although you could probably write this song off as yet another stagy breakup tribute, that inimitable voice, that mark of Adele, lends a magnitude and profundity to this track which makes it worth playing again and again and again. And If you didn’t already know, Adele has been nominated for 6 awards at the The 54th Annual Grammy Awards due to take place in Los Angeles on 12th February. If this is the future of popular music then it is a bright future indeed.
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