Adele – “Button in the teeth”
It’s hard to avoid Adele. That’s not a thinly veiled comment on her size, it’s a comment on the ubiquity of the nation’s new “Heartbroken Commoner Laureate”. Leave a radio on for long enough and Adele honks her way into your affections with a series of 60s-pastiche soul songs that signal music is ready to begin its second 50-year cycle of style repetition.
Few people have been able to say “There’s a fire starting in my heart” less convincingly or with more affectation. A quick trip to Spotify reminds us of that powerful first entrance of the chorus, with its deeply affecting lyrics, as rendered perfectly by said young lady:
“We could have had it aaaa-aaaaalll
Button in the teeth
You had my hard on, sod your hair
And you paid it to the bee-ee-eeee”
Perhaps the surreal lyrics do not surprise you – this is, after all, a woman who previously sang about “Chasing Pavements”; a concept so obscure that nobody dared argue with it as long as she kept hitting the notes on cue.
With a title like Rolling in the Deep, this parasitic radio tune ought to describe an epic underwater brawl between a giant squid and a humpback whale. In fact it’s about Adele – a girl so poor she was born without a surname – breaking up with a man so earth-shakingly important to the grand scheme of the world that together - with her gigantic sorrowful hoot and his almighty power - they could so easily have had that button in the teeth she so desired. As her largely fact-based Wikipedia page confirms, Adele had in fact been dating a giant iron-clad nuclear Stalin.
Adele herself is to blame of course. Gifted songwriter that she is, it was her idea to make a song where it takes literally ages to say “all”. She took the lyrics on the page and emoted her way through four minutes of quality instrumentation and production into our affections
A public softened by wheezing autotuned X-Factor ninnies soon took Adele to heart and, finally beginning to tire of Satan’s house band The Black Eyed Peas, accepted her as ‘real’. She lives with her mum and clearly eats chips. She’s a failure like many of us Brits, but she’s a successful one. We love an underdog, and in the beginning Adele was one, but at any one time half of the soundwaves in the UK are carrying one of her songs from a distant car/office/builder’s radio. Here’s hoping the nation has an enormous cultural change of heart. To treat Adele as anything less than the second coming of music, when there are so many talented nobodies out there, would require chart-radio happy clappers to suddenly tire of endless repetition and mediocrity.
Oh well, there’s always the lottery…
