Friday, July 22, 2011

I Can't: Adele's Lyrics...


...Or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace Shitty Poetry

Welcome to the first (and maybe only) edition of my ‘I Can’t’ series.

First all, let me state that I already hate myself for using the twitticism/popular hash tag “I Can’t.” But, this time, I honest CAN’T.

Don’t get me wrong, I like (tolerate) Adele. She has a fantastic, soulful voice and is a positive role model for plus sized/curvy girls (did I just say that?). She has an awesomely powerful chin butt and a British accent. So, those are the pros.

I cannot and will not, however, praise her song writing as some fans do. My first issue is with the album titles themselves. The debut was ‘19’ and the follow-up is ’21.’ Really? Your age? Way to think outside the box, Adele. That’s about half-a-notch above a self-titled album, which will no doubt be the title of the third CD.

When Adele appeared on the charts with ‘Chasing Pavements’ the incredulity of this phrase nearly made me have a seizure. While I understood what she was trying to say and that she was trying to be clever, it’s just not clever. I can just see the wheels of her 19-year-old brain turning. “I don’t want to use clichés like running or spinning in circles. What can I replace that with? Well, running is kind of like chasing nothing and if I were running, I’d probably be running on pavement. Oh my God! Chasing Pavements! I’m a 19-year-old prodigy!”

“I really like poetry: I’m not very good at reading it, but I love writing it. Singers like Jill Scott and Karen Dalton are amazing; proper poets.”

That’s a quote from Adele. So, these are the “proper” poets?! My whole life I thought Shakespeare, Keats, Browning, Hughes, Angelou, etc were proper poets, but I was wrong. Next, she admits that she’s not good at reading poetry, but she likes it. How do you like something you don’t even read? Songwriters are not poets, they are songwriters. In special cases (Bob Dylan, Curtis Mayfield, Flo Rida), you can strip away the music and read the lyrics on their own, but it is not a poem. It’s a song. That statement is why I have no young friends. Young people are just…stupid.

With ‘21’, Adele has in two years reached that level of maturity that should give her songs more depth, right? Wrong. The songs are still face-value, teenage commentaries that could have been written by Derek Zoolander. All the lyrics boil down to “Remember that time you hurt my feelings? Well, my feelings were hurt.”

Her bad songwriting, though, is not entirely her fault and it does not make her music any less enjoyable. If you are 21 and haven’t been in a war, done heroin or suffered from severe abuse, you simply don’t have the life experience to write deep lyrics. It’s okay. I think it’s a blessing to not have experienced something that made you FUBAR. Her voice his phenomenal so she doesn't need to try so hard or try to be something she's not. Look at Whitney Houston. The deepest she got was believing the children were the future. Didn't take away from the talent, though.

Nothing has happened to Adele other than light heartache (that I know of. I'm not her friggin' biographer). Oh, boo hoo. Some jerk cheated on you. Get over it and stop turning insufferable break up poetry into songs! Your voice and chin are better than that. I don’t know how much Adele knows about the music industry, but there are professionals she can hire to write songs for her. I don’t think Avril Lavigne is busy these days.

Let me conclude with some social commentary. I can’t truly be annoyed with Adele and her lame lyrics because everyone’s lyrics suck these days. We’ve simply run out of things to say. Everything of substance has already been said and done. Also, it takes copious amounts of drugs to write good lyrics. From Coleridge to Winehouse, it helps to be in a state of opiate-induced insanity to reach that "zone." I don't want to see that happen to Adele. She's a good kid.

P.S. I'm at work, so I don't have time to break down all of her lyrics or cite the source of that quote. Google them. Peace!

1 comment:

  1. Bottom line is: Adele can blow!! Music distracts from the lyrics, because it's not what you say it's how you say it.

    I love me some 2 Chainz, but it's people like him who have changed how we look at lyrics. Maybe complex is too much?

    http://princeakeem.com.

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