Adele is
white but she defies the white image of beauty because she is not slim. She is larger than most of the females that
we see in music today. In a way, she is
the total opposite of Nicki Minaj.
Adele’s focus is on her music not on the way she looks. Adele is a good representation of women
because she shows that not all women are slim.
You do not have to be slim to be beautiful. Real women come in all shapes and sizes and
Adele brings attention to this. She is
represented as a powerful female willing to defy society’s image of beauty.
Her music
videos are not sexualized like many of her counterpart female musicians. Videos such as “Rolling in the Deep” and
“Someone Like You” have an artistic feel that accompany the lyrics of these
songs. The focus is always on the music
which is what being a singer is about.
This obsession with image in music and other popular media is
ridiculous. Music is about the singing,
not the way the artist looks. The way an
artist looks has no bearing on their ability to sing. You usually hear an artist’s song first
before you see an image of them or their music video. Adele represents the voice of women. Women have something to say, they are not
just there to look aesthetically pleasing for men.
Adele further
defies the social norm by having a child out of wedlock. There are many women that are faced with
unwanted pregnancy and choose to be single parents. But there are also couples like Adele and her
boyfriend that have a child before getting married. This shows women that are in similar
positions that it is not wrong. You do
not have to be chained down by the masculine institution of marriage.
In the music
video for “Rolling in the Deep” Adele is sitting in a chair singing. The room
she is sitting in looks like someone has been painting it. It panes out to a house full of glasses of
water. Another shot is of a samurai
dancing with a sword in a room lined with sand.
Someone (unseen) is throwing white ceramic dishes that form a large pile
at the end of the stairs. The more
powerfully Adele sings, the glasses of water vibrate, the samurai dances faster
and the dishes are broken faster. This
culminates to sparklers falling upon a table covered with a model of white
buildings. The white buildings are
finally set on fire. Women have the
power to destroy the male hegemony that these white buildings represent. These buildings represent the male thinking
that is only one sided. Without women
society is bland and colourless, and has no life to it. All these different images intertwined represent
the power of Adele’s singing. The music
video is not only focused on Adele unlike other videos that prominently feature
the singer. The video is focused more on
the singer’s power. This video
represents women’s ability to let their voice be heard. When women are heard they have the power to
do anything, including setting a house on fire.
Sources:
Image 1:
http://jezebel.com/adele-says-fanks-but-no-fanks-to-seven-figure-memoir-pa-474712342
Image 2:
No comments:
Post a Comment