78 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021
POP MUSIC
IMPERFECT UNION
Adele finds inspiration in the throes of divorce.BY CARRIEB AT TA N
ILLUSTRATION BY CECILIA CARLSTEDT
W
hen Adele set out to finish her
new album, “30,” her record label
wondered how to make it resonate
with a younger crowd. Adele is a vocal
powerhouse with an out-of-time sen-
sibility, and she takes long hiatuses be-
tween albums. It has been six years
since her previous record, “25,” and
much has changed in the world of
popular music, whose pace Adele has
long been proudly out of synch with.
“The conversation of TikTok came up
a lot,” the singer told the radio per-
sonality Zane Lowe, in a recent inter-
view. “They were, like, ‘We’ve really
gotta make sure that these fourteen-
year-olds know who you are.’” Adele
is one of the few figures in entertain-
ment with the authority and the gravi-
tas to brush off such misguided sug-
gestions, and her solution was defiantly
simple. “They’ve all got moms, and
they’ve definitely been listening to my
music, these fourteen-year-olds,” she
told the label.
One reductive description that has
been used to characterize Adele’s music
and her cultural imprint is that she is
“for moms.” Since her career took off,
in 2011, with her sophomore album,
“21,” a potent breakup record that grad-
ually became canon, Adele’s contem-
porary take on soul, blues, and gospel
has been appreciated as a monumentto tradition. Strictly concerned with
matters of the heart and committed to
the unshowy principles of songwriting
and musicianship, she’s a modern star
who feels eternal, and also maternal—
reliable, steady, and nurturing. She was
only a teen-ager when she broke out,
but womanly dignity was the bedrock
of her work from the get-go.
And yet to sum up Adele’s music as
“for moms” is to understate just how
wide-reaching her impact has been.
Adele is not only the highest-selling
pop star in history but also the most
institutionally acclaimed. She makes
music that everyone can feel good
about, in particular the voters of the
Recording Academy, who have given
her fifteen Grammy Awards over the
years, most of them in major catego-
ries. Even if you don’t seek out Adele’s
music, you absorb most of it; her cat-
alogue of thundering torch songs has
become part of the atmosphere. Adele
does not participate in most customs
of contemporary celebrity, and often
recedes from the public eye, leaving
only the songs behind. These songs are
missives from her personal experiences
with love and heartbreak, but they are
designed to be universal. At times, it
feels as if her music were a utility that
belongs to everyone and no one, like
electricity or running water.
“30,” which was released earlier this
month, is the first record that sounds
as if it belonged to her alone. Born
Adele Adkins—although she is so de-
serving of a mononym that to see her
surname in print is disconcerting—
and raised mostly in North London,
she studied at the same performing-arts
academy that Amy Winehouse had
dropped out of, several years before.
Like Winehouse, and like many other
British women in her wake, Adele was
primarily interested in the traditions
of Black American music, including
blues, Motown, roots, and gospel. But
she also had a knack for modern pop
balladry, and the vocal talent to exe-
cute it. Adele’s catalogue is a longitu-
dinal study of her life, each album fo-
cussed on a specific age. Her début
recording, “19,” was a scattered and
plucky but accomplished musical port-
folio of sorts. Its smash follow-up, “21,”
zeroed in on a particularly tumultu-
The album is gratifyingly uneven—an authentic chronicle of personal turbulence. ous breakup, harnessing and refining