BY LENORE SKENAZY | Walk into the grocery and there she is. Shop for shoes, she’s shopping by your side. Need to cross a lobby? Drive to Jersey? Drink yourself into a stupor? My God — she is there, too: in the hotel, the car, the seedy bar’s seedy bathroom, seeping through the pipes. She is everywhere, always ready to start a conversation:
“Hello. It’s me.”
Of course it is. It always is. It is Adele.
Now I know there must be some people — okay, several — who can’t get enough of Adele. Her “Hello” video on YouTube has, well, lemme check — 1,361,430,235 views so far.
Not bad.
But I was relieved to learn that it isn’t just me who is on the other side (as it were) of Adele-mania.
“The only reason she’s popular is because Amy Winehouse is dead,” is how lifestyle blogger Amanda Lauren put it, rather bluntly, in a phone interview before using a very strong word. “I hate Adele.”
Google those three little words and you will find a tsunami of similar sentiments, some laced with the kind of venom usually reserved for presidential frontrunners. “On behalf of the British nation, I apologize,” wrote one guy. “I can’t take it anymore!,” another.
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A bit more thoughtfully, one blogger wrote, “Every Adele song is so damn formulaic, it is unbelievable. I can’t imagine any kind of emotional process that went on during the recording of any Adele song other than, ‘Hey, remember that one song I wrote with the four sad piano chords and I belted the song title in the chorus? Let’s try that again.’”
He’s anti-Adele for artistic reasons. But others are simply staggering under Adele Overload.
“Today I heard it” — we know what song “it” is — “four different places,” Yvonne Lederer, a marketing director in Westport, sighed. “She’s an entertaining singer, but enough! I just feel like everywhere I’m going she wants me to be really upset about a past lover, and I’m not going to go there.”
Ah, but where else can you go? Adele is harder to escape than Mister Softee — and shares a certain stickiness.
In a desperate attempt to pare the Adele quotient down in her life, Lederer and her friends have actually stopped using the word “Hello.”
Now, instead, they say, “’Sup?” Explained Lederer: “We’re protesting.”
This can be an act of psychological self-preservation. When poet Erica Gerald Mason took her Toyota to the dealership for some warranty-required work, she had just settled into the waiting room, when you know who started singing in the background. The mechanic walked in and Mason practically burst into tears.
“This can’t be good news!” she cried. “You’re going to tell me you have to rebuild my engine, right?”
He looked at her quizzically.
Uh, no.
He’d just come out to say… “Hello.”
“He asked me why I had that reaction and I said, ‘Someone Like You’ is playing right now. This is not a song for good times. This is the song you hear when you need a new transmission. Play something else.”
The problem is that that “something else” is likely to be something else by Adele. She’s not just popular, she has redefined popularity.
“Hello” was played almost five million times in just its first 24 hours on Spotify. (Take that, Taylor, honey.) Her album “25” sold eight million units last year — more than any other album since 2011.
And I think you know whose album that was.
So now I’m taking my cue from my pal Hannah Pazderka, whose family has turned Adelemania into a game.
“Whenever we’re out shopping and Adele starts playing, it means we’ve probably been there long enough, so someone invokes the ‘Adele rule’ and we have to leave,” she said.
That one trick means spending less — and actually heading out into the day, where it’s probably not nearly as gray and rainy as you thought it was.
Hello to the outside.
Lenore Skenazy is editor and founder of the book and blog Free-Range Kids and a contributor at Reason.com.
