The Marketing Of Adele
Maura Johnston, music critic of The Village Voice, appeared on today's Here & Now radio show, and offered an interesting counterpoint to the received wisdom about Adele: “all these artists have publicists, they all have marketing plans… Once you start prizing 'whose really feeling it' over another person, you're really looking into motivations that might not be there, and you might be reacting to extra-musical factors that aren't necessarily present.” posted
from Village Voice Blog:
[The Music Industry] is trying to paint Adele as some sort of anti-Lady Gaga who eschews arena tours and Tweeting and putting her songs in commercials so that she can Focus On The Music.
But this is--how to put it kindly?--horseshit. Look, it's obvious that Adele's music is striking a chord that not many other artists have struck lately, and good for her--she's a great singer and a fantastic songwriter. But painting her as some sort of anti-selling-out princess is a snow job; there's a deliberate confusion of aesthetic (she sings without Autotune! she's taking her cues from the greats, and not from dancepop! she doesn't look like your typical pop star!) and the apparatus bringing that aesthetic into millions of iTunes libraries. We are talking, after all, about a woman who is hyped for being involved in her marketing yet who had Gwyneth Paltrow murder one of her songs on freaking Glee, a.k.a. the show where no song can be too electronically smoothed-out. And then she gave Lea Michele a pass to do the same to another one. Is Autotune OK if you only use it during the marketing of your music? Is putting a song in a commercial OK if it's for a movie that flopped almost as soon as it entered theaters? Is appearing on TV shows for a straight week and taping an episode of Unplugged OK because it's "about the music"?
2. SNL Showcases Adele's Powerful Appeal
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