A couple summers ago, I was one of the most wretched humans this world has ever seen. I wasted what could have been a great summer by taking out my anxieties about my upcoming my college career on my family. At that time, very few things soothed me. One of those things, though, was music by a singer named Adele, a young British songstress who has risen to stardom internationally over the past few years. “Crazy for You” and “Best for Last” were the songs that got me through Summer 2008. Now, two years later, I continue to adore her music but I’ve always wondered one thing about Adele: why does she sit in almost all of her music videos?
In the videos for “Chasing Pavements,” “Make You Feel My Love,” “Rolling in the Deep,” “Cold Shoulder,” and “Hometown Glory,” Adele is seated in a chair while a story (acted out by other people) unfolds around her. Her music videos all express a type of confinement that seems unnatural given the types of songs she writes. She’s only 22 and she happens to be perfectly able of walking and moving. While not everyone her age enjoys that privilege, she does. It makes little sense for her to sit, then, as if she cannot use both her voice and her body to convey her messages like most other singers do nowadays.
Her songs are definitely not dance songs and I don’t expect Britney’s “I’m a Slave 4 U” moves to pop up on the screen when I’m watching Adele sing “Chasing Pavements.” I guess I just find it interesting that, unlike her counterparts both in age and musical style (think Amy Winehouse, Duffy, etc.), she never has the opportunity to move around in her videos. To me, mobility represents not only a certain type of (physical) freedom but also the capacity to express oneself.
Maybe I’ve been wrongly indoctrinated with the notion that singers must be mobile in their videos in order to fit into the canon of a typical music video and this might be problematic in and of itself. The thing that’s interesting to me about Adele’s case, though, is that even if that standard about motion is inherently wrong, she is still treated particularly problematically within that unfair paradigm. One of the main things that distinguishes her from all of these other women is her weight. At a US size 14-16, she is not the stereotypical size 0-4 singer who is allowed to walk or dance or even stand in her music videos.
While I am sure Adele does what she finds comfortable and may be designing videos this way because it suits her taste, it’s distressing that her videos have the potential to reinforce the notion that being fuller means you are limited in your capacities to express yourself physically. In the same way that she constantly wears big layers of black clothing to cover up her body, she also hides herself allowing actors in the video to communicate her messages on her behalf in her videos. I see her literal confinement to a chair as a sort of figurative confinement of female bodies: if a woman’s body is bigger than the industry standard, it must remain still and as unnoticeable as possible.
Why would a woman with lyrics as powerful as “think of me in the depths of your despair” and "you were just the filler in the space that happened to be free" be confined to a music video life spent in pretty wooden chairs simply because of her "plus-size" frame? Furthermore, why do recent media and advertising endeavors like the Dove “Love Your Body” campaign pretend that there is size acceptance in our society when women with actual curves feel the need to use multiple methods to cover themselves on a regular basis? There’s no need for Adele to rock a string bikini in order to get her messages across but it'd be nice if she could fully participate in her own music videos. My main question, then, is this: why can’t a curvy woman use her body to express herself, too? What’s up with that?
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