Listening to Adele today, I detect three elements of singing: here is the melody: pretty, recognisable, anthemic, melancholic, the transport for the song; and here then are the words, the narrative, the story told, the because, the why, the I, the you; but listening, there is a third element nesting: a texture, a lubrication, a grain.
This grain is the substance that fills the gaps between words, between notes, between meanings. Like the droning bagpipes of earlier, there is a legato, a slurring of words, a substance, a glue beneath the fine surface of language, which provides it’s ‘other’ meaning. Is it the words which bring us back to these songs (I’ve made up my mind, don’t need to think it over, if I’m wrong, I am right); will we weep & morn, sing & swoon, vicariously ‘live’ out her story; is it the precociousness of melody, a preoccupation with the accepted rules of singing, the perfection of diction and breath, that draws us in, or is it, like the trembling prose of the book we cannot put down, yet dare not pick up because we rue the stories foreclosure, is it here that we hear something outside of language, is it here that we find the erotics of performance?
It has nothing to do with the representation of feelings or expression, but is the crest of a rolling wave of voluptuousness, where the melody really works at the language, not at what it says; a kind of ‘body’ of sound, we hear the tongue, the teeth, the glottis, the mucous membranes, the nose, the heart, the blood, the meat, the grit of singing; as the face of Garbo once plunged cinema audiences into deepest ecstasy, there is an ‘essence’ in the singing voice which is not communicated in the articulation of its songs.
It is this grain in Adele’s voice that reminds me of why I read my favourite texts, rejoice over passages in a newly found book, remember, re-read or recite aloud lines from poems and songs, and why I play loudly again and again the same tunes, twirling insanely about my flat because, although the words and the music repeat unchanged, my reading is forever reinvigorated, for at each new listening I rewrite the song, I hear it for the first time, I sing out the lyrics without knowing what they are, I drown in that wave of voluptuousness, because I don’t know what it is that I want to hear, I don’t know what it is that I want to read, I don’t know what it is that I want to write.
