The 22-year-old singer Adele Adkins, whose sophomore release "21" is currently storming toward the top of the Billboard chart, is far from unknown on these shores. Two years ago, on the strength of her hauntingly romantic "Chasing Pavements," she took home the Grammy for best new artist and best female pop performance.
Since then, she's continued to steadily build a devoted following for her distinctively smoky, blessedly non-Auto-tuned style. But at the same moment that Gaga herself has a new release -- the calculated, Madonna-aping "Born This Way" -- who'd have imaged the young woman from Tottenham would emerge as the victorious chart topper, pop queen, and just for the hat trick, gay icon?
What is it that makes Adele so compelling? Surely much of it is her charismatic blend of retro glamour and easy accessibility. Katy Perry, Ke$ha and Gaga all have their charms, but none of them are trying too hard to cultivate an image as a living, breathing human being. Something about all the glitter and gun bras will do that for a lady. In contrast, Adele's version of being really out there is wearing heavy eyeliner. And though even MTV vixens go to the supermarket and get their hearts broken sometimes, there's something about a woman who doesn't look like she just stepped out of a UFO -- or the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated -- that makes her that much more relatable. She's the kind of woman you can imagine blowing the roof off the nightclub with her powerhouse pipes, then shooting back shots with her mates at the bar afterward. As she shrugged to the Guardian in 2008, "I'm very confident. Even when I read people saying horrible stuff about my weight. Until I start not liking my own body, until it gets in the way of my health or stops me having a boyfriend then I don't care. I'm fine."
BY MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS. Fuente: Salon.com