Five years ago, which now somehow feels like twenty, Adele graced us with the first single from what was her third album, 25–reportedly the last one to be named after her age, as no one really wants to remember what it is after thirty. As she starts to re-emerge into the public eye, greedy to see her in her new “incarnation” a.k.a. being thinner, one can’t help but think back to the simpler time of that late October in 2015, when Adele had her “curves,” and was still at the point in her career where talking about love lost was a bankable tactic. “Hello,” released on October 23rd, was drenched in the regret and sorrow that comes with having the time for introspection, which is what makes it a more relevant song in 2020 than it was even in 2015.
While her next album, she’s stated, won’t be out until “at least” 2021, whatever it contains isn’t likely to recreate the same “melancholia about the passage of time” or “yearning for her old self.” The crisis that comes at twenty-five visited Adele at full force as she realized it signaled “becoming who I’m going to be forever without a removal van full of my old junk.” Perhaps this is why she pushed herself to lose weight, not wanting to be “forever fat” in her adult life. Or rather, scrutinized forever for it by the media.
In 2015, however, Adele was perfectly content to keep wallowing in the past as she reckoned with the future, one that seemed much brighter because it was not yet November 2016. Part of such effective reflection can only stem from retreating to a quiet place in isolation. Luckily for Adele, Xavier Dolan had recently completed Tom at the Farm, and seemed to remain in an idyllic mood–even if the tone of despair belies the beauty of the setting. Then again, tragedy and beauty so often go hand in hand. Opening on Adele talking to someone on a flip phone (a prop choice much talked about, even to this day), she warns she’s already losing reception as she heads up to the house she seemed to have long ago abandoned after ending things with her boyfriend.
It’s here that Adele’s choice for having a black man as the lead seems to now be an “a-ha” moment considering her controversy-inducing SNL sketch and the rumors that she’s been dating Skepta (despite her assurance that she’s a single cat lady who will now return to her cave alone until 2021). Then there was that unpleasant incident earlier this summer where she put her hair in Bantu knots to celebrate the Notting Hill Carnival “in her own way.” So yeah, her black leading man, Tristan Wilds, in the “Hello” video also suddenly seems rife with fetishized meaning. But that’s beside the point.
Instead, what comes across most with the blessing and curse of hindsight is how the isolation of Adele in this pastoral environment foreshadowed, in many ways, the loneliness that would befall most people by the time the song’s five-year anniversary rolled around. As she looks forlornly around the house, removing furniture coverings, making herself a cup of tea and trying her best not have too many flashbacks, it’s almost a shot for shot preenactment of what les bourgeois would be doing on the East Coast as they continue to retreat to Upstate New York or even, like Adele, Quebec, where it’s even more removed from the riffraff overrunning the city. Particularly for those who never had a chance to find a quarantine companion or, that even worse term, a “quaranteam.”
Left alone with nothing but her thoughts, it’s easy to travel back in time through the lens of her memories–echoing the phenomenon of how a number of exes felt obliged to reach out during the early months of the pandemic in a rare instance of disobeying “the rules of the game.” One supposes that’s what happens when you’re thrown off the hamster wheel of simply surviving and at last given the time to actually think. As Adele’s memory bank goes from the moments when the relationship was all new and glorious to the ones where the fights started to begin, we see her outside scream-singing, an activity that’s also been enjoyed more and more by those in enough isolation to let out the extent of their rage and loneliness through the primal method of scream therapy. She also encounters a British-style telephone booth in the woods that’s so overrun with vines, it leaves a certain 28 Days Later impression, as though Adele is the last woman standing on this Earth after a virus wiped everyone out (and, to be honest, it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility considering only the rich can survive by remaining vacuum-sealed from the rest of us–something Kim Kardashian knows all about).
What’s more, lyrics like “Hello from the other side” and “The both of us are running out of time” seem presently laden with mortality references against the backdrop of corona. The fact that Adele is constantly on an old school landline trying to communicate with someone also speaks to our current limited means of contact, which no amount of Zooming can truly mitigate. Indeed, using Adele’s analog telephone would probably be more effective for genuine communication than Zoom.
As she continues to wander through various deserted abysses in nature, we come to the final scene in her flashback montage: the breakup. In other words, the moment he leaves the house. As Adele peers out the window, it reminds one of the barrage of images of the elderly forced to wave to their loved ones from their perch inside a rest home. She’s on her own now. No touch, no contact, no tactile expressions of love. Just an endless prison sentence spent with herself as she wallows in where it all went wrong. Wondering if maybe she should have tried to stick it out so as to at least have someone to spend time with during the lockdown. If that’s not a quintessential quarantine experience, then one doesn’t know what is.
