If you want to see Adele looking glamorously crabby and crabbily glamorous, then this spread is for you. There was a time when I would have read this cover line as, “Oh my God! Adele!!!!” But after all the overblown promo for 30 and the drama with the Vegas cancellations, I admit I said it first in my head as, “Oh my GOD, Adele,” with an implied eye-roll. The story is exactly what you imagine: She talks about how she’s a perfectionist, how tortured she was by spiking all the Caesar’s Palace shows, how much she cares about the fans. And that may all be true! It probably is all true. But it is also classic image control, and while two things can be true, it does bring me back to rolling my eyes a little when the piece does stuff like this:
It was “brutal,” she says, but it was also a choice in line with what she is known for: a generational talent who has earned the right to engage with her fame on her own terms, and share her art and self with the world only when she feels most ready to do it. “With her, everything’s about authenticity,” says Jonathan Dickins, who has been her manager since she was 18 years old. “For her to go out and perform a show she’s not happy with would be a lie to the fans.”
I mean… is that really a legit excuse for what a shitshow that timing was? Reading the piece, one can definitely imagine that in the context of Las Vegas, she might’ve felt like the show needed to be a physical spectacle beyond the scope of what she’d done before. It does not, though, help me understand any better why it took until the night before to be like, “This doesn’t work, CANCEL THEM ALL,” especially when it’s been proven that you can just plonk Adele on a stage with nothing else happening and people STILL will weep and sing along for two hours and end the night screaming on their feet. Unless she wasn’t vocally feeling it, they honestly could have improvised something like that for the first week’s worth of ticketholders who’d likely already traveled far and wide and might not have been able to repeat the journey; that could’ve billed as an actual once-in-a-lifetime experience. So yes, Adele has earned the right to do a lot of things, and yes, theoretically she owes people nothing… except, arguably, when those people have dug that deep into their own pockets and you’re cancelling the show the night before for reasons other than illness or technical dangers. This piece doesn’t make any of that sit much better with me, because it still suggests that nobody involved in this process REALLY considered the fans as anything more than cans they could kick down the line, as opposed to people who make sacrifices to afford a night with their favorite stars.
The new show does sound great, and Adele was absolutely correct about what it should have been all along, so that’s positive news for the people with tickets in hand. But still…
“The first couple of months was really, really hard,” Adele says. “I was embarrassed. But it actually made my confidence in myself grow, because it was a very brave thing to do. And I don’t think many people would have done what I did. I’m very proud of myself for standing by my artistic needs.”
I mean… I guess. But it’s a real choice to paint yourself as an artistic hero in this situation, and not one I’m sure was totally warranted. This will all blow over, and almost certainly be forgiven; Adele has nothing to worry about there. She’ll open her mouth and everyone’s tear ducts will go into overdrive. But as the oil to lubricate this PR machine, I’m not sure the article is very effective. I don’t feel sympathy. Honestly, I mostly just think, “Oh my God, Adele.”
