Adele Doesn’t Owe You A Break-Up Album, And It’s Gross To Demand One
Last week, Adele announced her divorce. Almost immediately, the memes began.
Last week, British superstar Adele announced she and husband Simon Konecki were divorcing after seven years together — and almost immediately, the memes began to roll in.
On social media, fans responded to the news with a series of jokes expressing their mixed reactions to the news: essentially, they were sad for Adele, and happy for the ‘inevitable’ break-up album. Then news outlets picked up on the spin, and ran headlines like MTV’s “Adele Has Split From Her Husband So Cue An Album Of Fantastic Heartbreak Songs”.
adele: announces split from her husband of 7 years
her fans: pic.twitter.com/4MRyn36qPI
— A.J. (@ajhisnandez) April 20, 2019
The article’s body copy was much more neutrally toned and sympathetic, with the only reference to new music being a single line saying “we’re frankly not ready” for the “devastating mega ballad” to come. They play it safe, knowing the difference between memes and reporting, but the headline plays with the jokes online. To put it bluntly, it’s gross — not for its subject, which, like it or not, is news, but for the way the headline generates clicks by turning pain into a punchline.
And we get the appeal: Adele has a body of work intertwined with heartbreak, and the joke practically writes itself. She’s even in on it, to some extent. Back in 2011, Adele told the UK’s Telegraph, “When I’m happy, I ain’t writing songs, I’m out having a laugh. If I ever get married, it’ll be ‘Darling, I need a divorce, it’s been three years, I’ve got a record to write!’”
Still, there’s something in the immediacy of the turn to jokes — the viral proliferation of them, the way in which outlets reported the news with a joke — which speaks to our sense of ownership over female pop-stars’ romantic lives, as their real pain becomes fodder for memes.
A Double-Edged Sword
It goes without saying that most artists and musicians do pull from their experiences and pour it into their art.
And yes, that’s even the case with hyper-produced, manufactured pop — well, the best of it, at least. Take Kelly Clarkson’s smash ‘Since U Been Gone’, a song she absolutely hates and never wanted to release (you can find the full story in John Seabrook’s book The Song Machine). Even with that in mind, ‘Since U Been Gone’ still, to use a technical term, slaps: whether Clarkson likes it, the song’s ‘success-is-the-best-revenge’ brand of empowerment pop works perfectly with her voice and persona.
Whether or not it’s written by Clarkson, or ‘true’, there’s a nugget of emotional ‘truth’ in the performance. And given what we know of Adele as an artist, how both 19 and 21 were written in the wake of terrible break-ups, we know that she can perform heartbreak well, especially when she’s inspired by real-life experiences.
Her success, in many ways, isn’t just her powerhouse voice, but her knack for selling the pain. Take ‘Someone Like You’, which is as sappy and melodramatic as Eastenders. But Adele’s performance — those vocal cracks, strains and breaths — carries it beyond the cringe of the cliché, belting it into something bigger than herself. It’s understandable that fans could lean a little sadist about the news of her divorce: after all, the catharsis for both them and Adele is coming, right?
Despite how personable Adele has been in interviews and on-record, she’s been notoriously quiet about her marriage. Not only is her social media presence negligible (even on Instagram, where she’s most prolific, her posts lack context or insight into her life), but the fact she was married was announced down-the-track, off-handedly, when she thanked her husband in an acceptance speech at the 2017 Grammys.
For all her emotional intensity in performance, it’s clear there’s a demarcation with her private life. Even the divorce was announced via a spokesperson, and has so far received no acknowledgement from Adele online. This isn’t always the case with fellow arena acts, mostly because they can’t avoid the attention — and so must control the narrative.
Adele: I’m getting a divorce.
Adele fans feeling bad for her (but thinking about the next album): pic.twitter.com/3VNrOjVwWh— Racial Dolezal (@SirCoach) April 20, 2019
Rumour Has It
Taylor Swift is the most immediate example: If every pop-star has a sellable quirk, hers, over the years, has largely been her relationships.
Each prolific break-up or rumoured flight is responded to with glee by tabloids and fans alike. After sleuthing fans began connecting her country-confessional lyrics to past lovers, Swift seemed to play more and more with the knowledge that her relationships were essentially promo for the next album.
Take 1989‘s ‘Blank Space’, which plays with the idea that Swift essentially uses relationships for material, playing a sort of musical mad-libs with each lover. Which, when looking at some of the most obviously staged photos with Tom Hiddleston, might not necessarily be such a joke.
There’s a power in playing with tabloid’s interest — and, in the era of more and more artists rebranding with ‘stripped-back’, ‘personal’ albums, it’s clear that its an established marketing strategy too.
That isn’t necessarily new, of course; from Oscar Wilde’s outlandish persona and his a-moral characters to Joan Crawford as the wasting older actress in …Baby Jane and Lindsay Lohan’s ‘Rumours’, artists have long created works that play off the rumours and melodramas of their lives or public personas. Whether it’s true or not, it’s an easy, sellable narrative for the masses to take hold of.
And that can make audiences cynical or hardened. It’s easy to joke that Ariana Grande had ‘thank u, next’ before her romance with Pete Davidson even began, rather than accept she wrote one of 2018’s biggest songs in a week.
When an A-list act sells ‘authenticity’, it’s easy to be suspicious — how could anything produced by the song machine be real? But Sweetener or thank u, next are no more produced than the narratives around the past few years of critically-acclaimed indie albums about trauma and death, such as Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked At Me or Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell. These are all ‘true’ and performed at the same time — Phil Elverum and Stevens both repeat the same lines in interviews and hit the same marks on-stage each night, albeit with less costume changes.
But neither men receive the same calls of being phoney that Grande faces. For all of our think-pieces on ‘poptimism’, we’re still more likely to believe in the old adage of True Music being closer to ‘three chords and the truth’ than something you can dance to — especially if it’s by a female.
With that in mind, it’s easier to shirk off a pop-star’s emotions as artificial or purely performative. This isn’t just the mindset of the pop- and top 40-adverse, but fans who have become so deeply invested in a narrative that they only see the pedestal, not the person.
The jokes bypass any empathy by imagining her pain as product, only existing to be produced into pop.
Writing for The Guardian last year, Brian O’Flynn examined how gay fanbases can effectively silence the pop-stars and divas they love by turning them into caricatures of people to project power and pain onto. As he wrote, “stan culture can fail to grant humanity to the subjects of their worship.”
Which is why the treatment of Adele’s divorce is so gross. The memes rely on an understanding of Adele as an artist and person — of both her hard luck in love and of her recent happiness, of taking a step back from music since 2017 to raise her infant son with Konecki. There’s an intimacy in knowing these things, but the jokes bypass any empathy by imagining her pain as product, only existing to be produced into pop.
Chances are, we probably will hear Adele sing about her divorce in some form. But there’s a process — human, not mechanical — to these things. If she chooses, Adele will transform the emotions of this moment into something she’s willing to share, perform, and let go of — to let it be both her own and anyone who hears themselves in it. But that doesn’t mean we have the right to demand it.
Jared Richards is a staff writer at Junkee, and co-host of Sleepless In Sydney on FBi Radio. Follow him on Twitter.