Not "Someone Like You"

- By Michael Thurston

A couple of weeks ago, Adele won six Grammy awards. I haven’t ever paid much attention to the Grammys; the music I most like doesn’t really echo in that chamber of the culture. This news caught my attention, though, because it was yet another reminder of how much how many people really really love Adele.

And I hate Adele.

Not her personally. I’ve never met her, never heard or read her in an interview, even, but I’m sure she’s very nice. But I loathe her songs and I despise her singing.

Why? And what does this have to do with the literary magazine whose blog I’m posting this on?

I think what I dislike about Adele’s music is suggested by what I like in literature. I’m a modernist. I like estrangement, complexity, indirection. I am a big fan of the objective correlative, the image or plot point or cluster of these that elicit, rather than express, emotion. Adele is nothing if not expressive, and it is this expressive insistence that I chiefly hate, both in something like the execrable and inexplicably popular “Someone Like You” and (here’s the relevance part) in much contemporary writing.

Literary writing should aim to create an experience for the reader, rather than an opportunity for expression for the writer. It’s not about whether the writer intensely feels something; it’s about whether the writer can manipulate language so that a reader might intensely feel something. And we tend not to feel intensely when we’re a) told to or b) told that someone else does.

Even that way of putting it, though, misplaces the emphasis, because if a writer’s primary aim is simply to elicit a feeling then it seems as though we, rather than language, are being manipulated. If everything in a text – a story or essay or poem or song – works toward that singular end, then it’s as though we’re driven to empathize rather than being left to find our own way to emotional response. I remember once listening to a Ferrari owner’s loving (and obsessional) description of his car’s engineering, to his description of how even the carburetors had been rotated ninety degrees so that they worked along the horizontal rather than the vertical axis, so that all motion under the hood contributed to forward propulsion rather than complicating that with any other vector. That’s great in a sports car, but it’s fatal in writing.

Ah, but can’t you hear the authenticity of anguish in those broken phrases and half-missed notes, the resignation signaled by those much-discussed episodes of appoggiatura? Well, yes, I can. And that’s the problem. Authenticity, in this sense at least, the sense of really, really truly, deeply feeling the feeling the work expresses, seems to me at once the wrong ambition and the wrong criterion for judgment.

The unified effort at unidirectional propulsion makes for bad culture not only because it compels and prescribes response but also because it leaves no room for thought, which, if it’s real, moves along numerous and often contradictory lines of force. Thought slows us down. It introduces eddies and countercurrents. It troubles and questions. It helps us toward our own complex experience rather than the easy digestion of someone else’s slickly produced simulacrum.