Mackenzie Dawson

Mackenzie Dawson

Music

Adele is the patron saint of basic bitches

Adele’s much-anticipated album “25” came out last week, and everyone went predictably nuts. The 11-song album sold 2.433 million copies in its first four days, reports Nielsen Music — surpassing the previous record for copies sold in a week by *NSYNC for their 2000 album, “No Strings Attached.”

Just a week in, “25” is already a mega-hit, and its lovely 27-year-old singer undeniably a mega-star, proving her Grammy-winning album “21” from five years ago was no lark — she’s got staying power.

There is nothing not to like about Adele. I like Adele a lot. Not only does she belt out songs that become instant hits and can reduce you to tears in a grocery store, she keeps it real, gives swear-packed interviews, and shows great deftness with liquid eyeliner.

She is, as a spot-on “SNL” skit recently pointed out, the one thing everyone at the Thanksgiving table can actually agree on; during tense turkey-time arguments about Syrian refugees, cops and Ben Carson, the only thing that can get the extended family to stop bickering is the song “Hello,” at which point they’re swept away by a wave of nostalgia and emotion and blond hair, morphing into the singer.

But there’s a difference between broadly appealing and brilliant, and there’s a lot of the latter being tossed around these days.

Adele has a powerful voice, but her singing tends toward the theatrical and overblown. “She’s the character who would win on ‘American Idol,’ ” said a co-worker, not meaning it as a compliment. Her songs are maudlin, lots of Feelings with a capital F. All the feelings, but none of the nuance, none of the dark, tortured, funny cleverness that you’d find, for instance, in an Amy Winehouse song.

Adele’s is a kind of one-size-fits-all sadness that everyone can get in on, much as she herself described her new song “When We Were Young,” which is, she told SiriusXM, about “Seeing everyone that you’ve ever fallen out with, everyone that you’ve ever loved, everyone that you’ve never loved, and stuff like that. And where you can’t find the time to be in each other’s lives and you’re all thrown together at this party when you’re like 50, and it doesn’t matter and you have so much fun and you feel like you’re 15 again. So that’s the kind of vibe of it really . . . My favorite lyric in it is ‘You look like a movie, you sound like a song/My God this reminds me of when we were young.’”

Adele is the patron saint of basic bitches, the pumpkin-spice latte of pop music. That’s not a full knock, even if it sounds like one: We all need breakup songs, ex-boyfriend songs, sad reunion songs, cry-with-girlfriends-over-glasses-of-red-wine songs, and she delivers all that in spades. But wildly popular is not the same thing as genius. Maybe Adele’s mass appeal lies not so much in her talent but in her ability to bring about catharsis — she lets us have a good cry so that we can move on with our day.