Turning tables on sad Adele
When you say you don’t like Adele, people look at you like you’ve just tried to kidnap and dissect their dog to sell off for body parts to local satanic ritualists. ‘‘But it’s Adele,’’ they repeat in a stunned, terrified voice, ‘‘Everybody likes her …’’ [stage whisper] ‘‘What kind of freak are you …?’’
Yes, I know. I know. Everyone likes Adele. She’s the vocal equivalent of a steaming plate of sausage rolls emerging from the oven at 1am at a house party. There are probably only four people in New Zealand who don’t like her; me and three grumpy buggers in a bungalow somewhere who’ve hated everything on principle since 1973.
But, as I’ve been explaining a lot since last week after her new album, 30, dropped, I have an excellent reason for disliking her music. Because you know for the next six months, Adele will be serenading you everywhere from your morning commute to your Friday night Countdown shop.
You’ll go in for some pasta, Adele will come on, and suddenly women will be sobbing on the shoulders of strangers while newly-divorced dads tear up over the metaphorical significance of their ‘‘soup-for-one’’ cans.
The problem is, I know I’m going to be one of those wailing white women.
Adele rips off my protective layers with the same remorselessness my Mum would whip off the duvet at 7am on a winter school morning. One minute I’m an adult calmly buying mince, the next I’m a shivering kid crying hysterically in the wine aisle.
Now I know most people find her music deeply cathartic. It gives them the same brutally cleansing feeling as cleaning your ears with a cotton bud. And studies show humans prefer the twanging of heartstrings over harp strings, because it allows us to access and process our own unresolved pain.
But I’m part of a small minority who don’t find sad music cathartic. I actually find it does the opposite. It takes a small niggle and blows it up into epic, operatic, utterly unrealistic proportions.
Yes, sometimes they’re things I do need to address. But mostly they’re just dumb things I only ever think about when tired. Like the snarky comment my high school crush made when I wore cowboy boots to mufti day. Then I’m in a dumb, day-long funk just because Adele was playing when I went to fill up the car.
And speaking of tiredness, we’re all exhausted now. Auckland’s mental health is more precarious than balancing an egg on your nose and playing hopscotch.
The last thing we need is Adele encouraging us to access our sad side at 30-minute intervals. We don’t need to access it. We know where it is. It’s been standing too close behind us and breathing in our ear like a creepy commuter on the bus for three months now.
But look, I know I’m on the emotionally constipated side of the argument here. Most people love the communal catharsis of standing under the bursting dam of her heartbreak.
So how about we compromise? Every time Adele is played publicly in the next month, we then play Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is
You? That way we’ll be bouncing repeatedly between gasping heartbreak and maniacal happiness every five minutes.
And either those two emotional extremes will balance each other out, or it’ll be the final straw, we’ll go completely loopy and all start screaming hysterically, barricading ourselves behind the selfservice check-outs and pelting each other with Ferrero Rocher.
Which, to be honest, is what we all feel like doing right now anyway.