The true voice of America - Adele from Tottenham

Sunday 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 woman who 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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Camille Paglia

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 footstomping, 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 AutoTune 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 was Madonna'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 by humbly 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