【中英】乐评机构Pitchfork评Adele二专「21」

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「21」乐评：8.6分

21

Adele

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The green room was full of Adeles, nails all long and painted, hairdos puffed into the singer’s signature beehive. The BBC had corralled a cluster of impersonators into an experiment; they thought they were at an audition. But the real Adele was among them, disguised, plastered in a fake nose and chin, joining in on their jokes about how long it was taking her to release a new album.

演员休息室里到处都是阿黛尔，涂了颜色的长指甲，蓬松的发型成了阿黛尔的招牌发型。英国广播公司召集了一群模仿者进行实验;他们以为是在试镜。但真正的阿黛尔也在其中，伪装自己，戴上假鼻子和假下巴，和大家一起开玩笑说她要花多长时间才能发布新专辑。(这里指Adele曾经做客BBC的一档节目 里面有很多Adele的模仿者 其中Adele也假扮为自己的模仿者)

It was 2015, and for years, Adele had been everywhere. Signed to the British label XL at age 18, after a track her friend uploaded to MySpace gained attention, she released her debut album, 19, two years after graduating from the lauded BRIT School. It went triple platinum in the U.S. and catalyzed an almost feverish mass adoration. She pouted on the cover of Vogue, she belted on SNL, she swept the Grammys, she soundtracked James Bond. Adele never seemed to cast herself as an archetypal pop star—in interviews, she was giggly and crass, and often deployed what critics and fans called a “cackle.” In one of the few declarations of her pop supremacy, she held out on releasing her 2015 album, 25, to streaming services, a move then only wielded by artists like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. The gamble worked: People bought her physical records in droves, with such a fervor that some thought maybe Adele had single-handedly saved the industry.

那是2015年，多年来，阿黛尔无处不在。18岁时，她与英国唱片公司XL签约，在朋友上传到MySpace上的一首歌曲受到关注后，她发行了首张专辑《19》。两年前，她从这所备受赞誉的英国音乐学校毕业。它在美国获得了三白金认证销量，并引发了近乎狂热的大众崇拜。她在《Vogue》的封面上撅着小嘴，她在《周六夜现场》上大放光彩，她横扫格莱美，她为詹姆斯·邦德配乐。阿黛尔似乎从来没有把自己塑造成典型的流行歌手——在采访中，她总是傻笑和粗鲁，经常使用评论家和粉丝所说的“咯咯笑”。她在2015年发行了自己的专辑《25》，这是她在流行音乐领域为数不多的几次声明之一，当时只有Beyoncé和泰勒·斯威夫特(Taylor Swift)这样的歌手才会使用流媒体服务。这场赌博奏效了:人们蜂拥而至地购买她的唱片，热情之高甚至让一些人认为，阿黛尔可能凭一己之力拯救了唱片行业。

While her first album garnered Adele international attention, her 2011 follow-up, 21 catapulted her into the Guinness Book of World Records—21 is reportedly the longest-running No. 1 album by a female solo artist in the history of U.S. and UK charts. The album cemented her legacy as an artist who could make once-in-a-generation milestones out of her music. 21 is filled with colossal songs, elegant and glistening, bending but never breaking under the heft of Adele’s voice, which sounds like Amy Winehouse mashed with opera. (Adele said that she owed “90%” of her career to Amy Winehouse, before a concert on what would have been Winehouse’s 33rd birthday.)

阿黛尔的首张专辑获得了国际关注，2011年的第二张专辑《21》将她载入了吉尼斯世界纪录——据报道，《21》是美国和英国排行榜上持续时间最长的女歌手独唱专辑冠军。这张专辑巩固了她作为一名能够在她的音乐中创造出一代人仅有一次的里程碑的艺术家的遗产。《21》中充满了宏大的歌曲，优雅而闪耀，在阿黛尔(Adele)低沉的嗓音下却从不间断，听起来像是毒后艾米·怀恩豪斯(Amy Winehouse)与歌剧的结合。(阿黛尔说，她职业生涯的“90%”都归功于艾米·怀恩豪斯(Amy Winehouse)，当时她还在怀恩豪斯33岁生日那天开了一场演唱会。)

Beyond the similarities to Winehouse, though—the gritty, growled vocals that could stretch into big belted notes, often over jazzy piano—Adele seemed like a pop star flung out of social or temporal context. She swirled together soul and pop and jazz; Adele said she turned to country while writing the record. She revered Etta James as a kid. The first concert she went to was the Cure, with her mom, and her cover of “Lovesong” on 21 quivers and crawls, hovers above a scratch, one of the more subdued tracks on the album. “She takes you to places other artists don’t go to anymore—the way they did in the 70s,” Beyoncé said about her. Adele crafted her songs intentionally to be timeless—“I want to sing these songs when I’m 70 fuckin’ years old,” she told Vanity Fair.

除了与Amy Winehouse的相似之处——在爵士钢琴的伴奏下，阿黛尔粗犷、低沉的嗓音可以延伸成高音——阿黛尔看起来就像一个脱离了社会或时代背景的流行歌星。她的灵魂、流行音乐和爵士乐交织在一起;阿黛尔说，她在写唱片时转向乡村音乐。她从小就尊敬埃塔·詹姆斯。她和妈妈一起去的第一场演唱会是The Cure，她的“爱之歌”(Love song)是专辑中比较柔和的歌曲之一。“她带你去其他艺术家不再去的地方——就像他们在70年代那样，”Beyoncé这样评价她。阿黛尔有意让自己的歌曲成为永恒——“我想在我70岁的时候再唱这些歌，”她在接受《名利场》采访时表示。

Maybe too much credit has been given to Adele for ushering in a resurgence of the ballad—Bruno Mars’ grating “Grenade” had been climbing the charts around the same time—but there was something baffling about hearing her on the radio slotted between the hyperactive neon rush of the Black Eyed Peas and Katy Perry. A year before 21, Kesha released her glitter torpedo of an album full of breakups, blackouts, and tirades over texts. The trope of slickly calibrated female self-destruction, almost always conveyed through performative partying, would radiate throughout pop over the next decade, but never breach Adele’s songs. This is also what differentiated her from Winehouse: on 21 especially, she is desperate to tear down so much, but always protects herself.

也许Adele因为引领了民谣的复兴被给予了太多的荣誉--BrunoMars刺耳的“手榴弹”大约在同一时期也爬上了榜单，但在收音机里听她的歌时，我总觉得有些困惑，介于黑眼豆豆(Black Eyed Peas)和凯蒂·佩里(Katy Perry)的异常活跃之间。在她21岁的前一年，凯莎发布了她闪亮的专辑，充满了分手、昏迷和对文字的长篇大论。这种巧妙调整过的女性自我毁灭的比喻，几乎总是通过表演派对传达出来，在接下来的十年里，它在流行音乐中无处不在，但从未在阿黛尔的歌曲中出现过。这也是她和怀恩豪斯的不同之处:尤其是在21岁的时候，她非常渴望拆毁，但总是保护自己。

21 isn’t exactly a concept album, but it collects the songs Adele wrote at that age, centering around the dissolution of what she would call a “rubbish relationship.” She wrote 21 over a three month period, usually when she was wasted— “I was completely off my face writing that album,” she told Vanity Fair, “and a drunk tongue is an honest one.” She would go through two bottles of wine and chain-smoke while writing the lyrics, then look back at what she’d scrawled down in the morning. The emotional intensity scarred her. “How I felt when I wrote 21, I wouldn’t want to feel again,” she told The New York Times a few years later “I was miserable, I was lonely, I was sad, I was angry, I was bitter. I thought I was going to be single for the rest of my life. I thought I was never going to love again.”

《21》并不是一张概念专辑，但它收录了阿黛尔在那个年龄写的歌，讲述了一段她称之为“垃圾恋情”的结束。她在三个月的时间里写了21首歌，通常是在她喝醉的时候——“我写那张专辑的时候完全不顾脸面，”她告诉《名利场》(Vanity Fair)杂志，“酒后吐真言。”写歌词的时候，她会喝两瓶酒，一根接一根地抽着烟，然后回头看自己早上写下的歌词。强烈的感情伤害了她。“我写《21》时的感受，我不想再经历那种感觉，”几年后，她在接受《纽约时报》采访时表示。“我很痛苦，很孤独，很悲伤，很愤怒，也很痛苦。我以为我下半辈子都要单身了。我以为我再也不会去爱了。”

If there’s an inflection of melodrama in these songs, it’s because of those high stakes. She sings in absolutes, then rushes to fill in the nuance. Adele wrote “Set Fire to the Rain” to be a camp anthem for a queer audience, but its sonic surcharge and all-or-nothing lyrics (“I was over/Until you kissed my lips, and you saved me”) are at home on the album, nestled between titanic high notes that roar over cinematic piano and pleas about love dying. Listening to the album in one go can feel a bit draining, the weight of all these grandiose melodies slumped atop each other. Adele aims to disarm; you’re left clutching at the wisps of synths that sometimes close out a ballad.

如果在这些歌曲中有一种戏剧性的变化，那是因为其中充斥着的高风险。她唱的是绝对的，然后冲进去填补其中的细微差别。阿黛尔创作的“纵火焚情”是一首写给特殊的观众的夸张的圣歌,但其声音的负载和孤注一掷的歌词(“我已堕入黑暗，直到你深吻我的嘴唇,你救我于水火”),处于在泰坦尼克号之中,在电影关于爱情的钢琴和请求死亡的咆哮。一口气听这张专辑会让人感觉有点疲惫，所有这些宏大的旋律的重量都压在了一起。阿黛尔的目的是解除武装;你只能抓住一束束合成器的声音，有时会以他们来结束一段歌谣。

But the maudlin elements of the album also feel essential: they enable Adele to capture the specific sinusoidal hell of being 21, the emotional velocity that follows a first, serious love. There are refractions of her across the album—Adele Enraged, Adele In Love, Adele Avenging—as she tries to articulate identity through the shape of a lover’s absence. “I’ll be somebody different,” she begs on “I’ll Be Waiting,” “I’ll be better to you.” Much of the album shows Adele calibrating a relationship she’s experiencing with an inherited ideal of what love means. “If this ain’t love, then what is?” she moans on “He Won’t Go,” the question genuine, the prodding laid bare. She wrote “One and Only” as a fictional exercise, trying to imagine the conversation she’d want to have with a lover down the line, and it radiates with hope and expectation. “You’ll never know if you never try/To forget your past and simply be mine,” she belts.

但这张专辑的伤感元素也很重要:它们让阿黛尔捕捉到了21岁时那种特殊的、令人痛苦的地狱般的感觉，那种认真的初恋之后随之而来的速度。在这张专辑中有她的影子——她的愤怒，她的爱，她的复仇——她试图通过情人的缺席来阐明自己的身份。“我会变成另一个人，”她恳求道，“我会等着你，我会对你更好。”专辑的大部分内容都显示了阿黛尔用与生俱来的爱的理念来调整她正在经历的一段关系。“如果这都不是爱，那什么才是?”她在“他不会去的”这句话上抱怨道，这个问题是真实的，对她的刺激暴露无遗。她把《唯一的一个》写成了一个虚构的练习，试着想象她想和情人进行的对话，它散发着希望和期待。“如果你从未试着忘记你的过去，简单地成为我的，你永远不会知道，”她说道。

To some critics, 21 was a “bitter” album, a “vengeful” one. What I hear more pressingly is a woman trying to form agency out of the murk of devastation.”I won't let you close enough to hurt me,” she sings on “Turning Tables.” Adele said that she wrote the haunting “Someone Like You'” “because I was exhausted from being such a bitch” with other songs on the record—but while “Someone Like You” is beautiful and clear and stirring, Adele’s at her most fun when she lashes out. The winkingly vindictive “Rumour Has It” shimmies and shivers under the smoke in her voice. I’d heard “Rolling in the Deep” maybe forty times over the years before it came on shuffle one day and cut me, the sting and curdled rage. “Go ahead and sell me out, and I’ll lay your shit bare,” she murmurs. The ferocity of these songs isn’t dulled or disguised or smuggled in through tidy pop formulas. She continuously wrestles for control and reaches for a vision of herself across time—before she waded into her lover’s life, or decades later when they’re old—and that device is less about her trying on someone’s vantage point and more about her trying to narrow down who she actually is.

对一些评论家来说，《21》是一张“苦涩”的专辑，一张“复仇”的专辑。我听到的更紧迫的消息是一个女人试图在黑暗的废墟中组建一个机构。“我不会让你靠近到伤害我的程度，”她在《Turning Tables》中唱道。“阿黛尔说，她写了那首令人难忘的《像你一样》(Someone Like You)”，“因为我在唱片中其他歌曲里做那样一个让人讨厌的女人已经让我精疲力尽了”——尽管《像你一样》美丽、清晰、激动人心，但阿黛尔最有趣的是她的抨击。在她的声音中，带有报复意味的“谣言四起”(rumor Has It)在烟雾中颤抖着。多年来，我已经听了四十遍《Rolling in the Deep》，直到有一天它突然出现，刺伤了我，刺痛了我，凝固了愤怒。“你尽管出卖我吧，我会把你的丑事暴露无遗的，”她低声说。这些歌曲的野性并没有通过整齐的流行公式变得迟钝，也没有被伪装或偷偷带入。她不断地为控制自己而奋斗，为穿越时间的自己而奋斗——在她踏入爱人的生活之前，或者在几十年后，当他们老了的时候——这个方法不是她试图获得别人的优势，而是她试图缩小自己的真实身份。

On 21, she constantly moves between phases of a relationship, between dimensions of grief. “Only yesterday was the time of our lives,” she breathes in “Someone Like You,” a song about reaching out to an ex years after the end of their relationship and finding that he’s now married and content without her. “I lose myself in time just thinking of your face,” she sighs on “One and Only,” what she called the first happy track she wrote for the record. Her portraits of despair also involve surging between the past and present. “When was the last time you thought of me, or have you completely erased me from memory?” she demands on “Don’t You Remember.” Throughout the song, she struggles to cast herself as someone worthy of recollection, the last remaining way she can become a permanent fixture of her ex’s mind and life. Love is hitched to precarity in Adele’s world, always needing to be stated or defended or mourned.

在21号，她不断地在一段感情的不同阶段，悲伤的不同维度之间游走。“就在昨天是我们生命中最珍贵的时光，”她吟咏着《像你一样》(Someone Like You)，这首歌讲述的是在前男友分手多年后，他伸出手去找他，发现他现在已经结婚了，没有她也很满足。“一想到你的脸，我就迷失了自己，”她在《独一无二》(One and Only)中叹息道，这是她为专辑写的第一首快乐歌曲。她对绝望的描绘也包含了在过去和现在之间涌动。“你最后一次想起我是什么时候，还是把我从记忆中完全抹去了?”她问:“你不记得了吗?”在整首歌中，她努力把自己塑造成一个值得回忆的人，这是她能成为前男友思想和生活中永久固定的最后一种方式。在阿黛尔的世界里，爱是与不稳定相联系的，总是需要被陈述、捍卫或哀悼。

Part of this, perhaps, stems from the broad narratives in Adele’s songs. The other forces of breakup tracks at the time, Drake and Taylor Swift, filled their songs with details: a red scarf left at an ex’s sister’s house, an apology for having sex four times in one week. Adele’s writing is allusive. She sings in generalities — hearts melting, last goodbyes, pleas to forgive unnamed sins. 21 asks for your participation. You’re meant to summon your mottled heartbreak to fill in some of the blanks, and tap into the sorrow and rage and remorse that quakes through these songs. “21 isn’t even my record,” Adele told Zane Lowe in 2015. “It belongs to people.”

部分原因可能是阿黛尔歌曲里的叙述太过宽泛。当时，Drake和Taylor Swift的其他描述分手的歌曲中都充满了细节:前男友在姐姐家丢了一条红色围巾，为一周内做爱四次而道歉。阿黛尔的作品是影射性的。她笼统地唱着——心灵的融化，最后的道别，恳求原谅无名的罪过。21要求你的参与。你应该召唤你那斑驳的心碎来填补一些空白，并且利用这些歌曲中震动的悲伤、愤怒和悔恨。2015年，阿黛尔对赞恩·洛说:“《21》甚至都不是我个人的唱片，它属于每个人。”

Adele knew 21 would loom over her for the rest of her career. “My thing was, how do I follow up 21?” she said. “But I can’t, because it was so big, so many people took it into their lives. I can never live up to that again.” In the video of the BBC experiment, she watches as person after person tries on the character of Adele. She feigns nervousness—“I’m going to be sick,” she murmurs at one point, maybe a nod to her history of stage fright. But when it’s her turn to sing, it’s only an instant before the row of impersonators realize who she is. Their mouths flop open, cartoonish, and they touch each other’s arms. They join in and sing her words back to her, some starting to cry. Adele beams at them from behind the mic and stares at all these refractions of herself. She keeps watching them, transfixed.

阿黛尔知道《21》将在她的职业生涯中一直笼罩着她。“我的问题是，我该如何跟进?”她说。“但我不能，因为它太大了，很多人把它带入了他们的生活。我再也不能做到那样了。在BBC的实验视频中，她观看了一个又一个人尝试阿黛尔这个角色。她假装很紧张——“我要吐了，”她低声说，可能是对她怯场史的认可。但当轮到她唱歌时，一排模仿者只需要一瞬间就能认出她是谁。他们的嘴都合不拢了，像卡通片一样，碰着彼此的胳膊。他们加入到她的歌声中，有些人开始哭了起来。阿黛尔从麦克风后面向他们微笑，凝视着自己所有的这些折射，目不转睛地看着他们。

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