Cultural Momentum

I listened to Adele's chart-storming single "Rolling in the Deep" this afternoon while driving to acquire lunch.  Given the track's surging popularity and my general affinity for that style of cross-genre music that's not surprising.  What's surprising is that this was on 101.9 WRXP, an otherwise 100% red-blooded rock station.  They also played Rolling in the Deep on my morning commute, and there's a decent chance I'll catch it at 5pm also.  This is the kind of station that wouldn't dream of playing The National and their brand of melodic folk rock, or (say) The Decemberists, or even KT Tunstall, but they're all-in on Adele right now.

WRXP has entered this territory before, temporarily expanding their otherwise narrowly focused rock library for specific track exemptions that surpass a certain mainstream popularity threshold, provided the existence some tenuous link to the larger caucasian musical culture despite a much heavier genre influence by rap, R&B, or soul.  They experimented for a whle with Eminem (white), Gnarls Barkley (half-white), and there was a 3-month period where Bob Marley (pot culture) was in heavy rotation.  No NERD though, no Roots, no Lil Wayne doing his rock thang.

Adele is an interesting test case for mainstream popularity because 1) she doesn't fit the typical female starlet mold and 2) she had already won a Grammy for her debut album in 2008 but didn't seem to catch any kind of major zeitgeist presence until Rolling in the Deep in 2011, so she wasn't carrying the hipster groundswell that blessed Feist an Apple commercial.  So she's not the Hot New Thing.  Why such sudden interest, then?

If forced to guess, I think it's based purely on the raw power of her singing voice in Rolling in the Deep.  It feels unprocessed and unedited, a stark departure from the autotuned nightmare on any pop or Top40 station.  She's a singer with a voice so astounding that even rock addicts who leave WRXP fixed on the car radio have to take notice.

In terms of collective cultural comprehension, that's a big fucking deal, no?  How many times has somebody done one particular thing so well that knowledge and appreciation of the performance broke through the popular boundaries of the event's normal audience?