【搬运】【译】叉婊Pitchfork评Adele 2015年专辑《25》

搬运自：微信公众号【评论搬一堆】（在原文基础上添加了英语原文与排版调整）

翻译：Tyler Smith

校对：Emma.Z

推送：Lynn Liu

Adele is still young by any sensible metric, but much of 25, her third album, concerns itself with the passage of time: the inevitable accumulation of both years and vantages. Almost every song addresses heartache in one form or another and her instincts as a singer remain unmatched.

无论你以任何标准去衡量，阿黛尔都还很年轻，但在她的第三张专辑《25》中，大部分歌曲故事都已成沧海桑田:无法抗拒的时光飞逝与名气的提升而带来的一切。几乎每首歌都以这样或那样的形式来表达心痛。阿黛尔作为一名歌手的天赋是无与伦比的。

Adele is only 27 years old, still young by any sensible metric, but much of 25, her third album, concerns itself with the passage of time: the inevitable accumulation of both years and vantages. It’s as if she knows intimately the nauseating experience of waking up one morning, surveying a half-lived life, and thinking, "Oops." She never adopts a schoolmarm’s consternation (and she is entitled to some authority, having sold a boggling 30 million copies of her last record, 2011’s 21), but she is nevertheless cautionary, encouraging her listeners to do better, act faster, stop being such a bunch of clowns. Get up and get over, friend, she seems to be saying—you are a grown person now.

阿黛尔年仅27岁，无论以任何标准去衡量都还很年轻，但在她的第三张专辑《25》中，大部分歌曲故事都已成沧海桑田:无法抗拒的时光飞逝与名气的提升而带来的一切。仿佛她清楚地知道她会经历一些令人瞬间反胃的事：在某天早上醒来后回想自己的前半生，然后大吃一惊。她从不惧怕古板人群的错愕(她是有底气的，因为她的上一张专辑《21》(2011)的销量达到了惊人的3000万张)，但她仍然谨慎地走好每一步，她的歌曲鼓励听众做得更好、行动更快，不要再像个小丑一样。她似乎在说：朋友，振作起来，你已经长大成人了。

Or: "We both know we ain’t kids no more," which is how she puts it on "Send My Love (To Your New Lover)", a song co-written by Max Martin, the 44-year-old Swedish super-producer who has now penned almost as many number one singles as Lennon and McCartney. Stack ‘em up, and all of Martin’s songs follow a particular formula: they’re prickly, quick-moving affairs that braid the precision of Swedish pop like ABBA with the more groove-oriented rhythms of American R&B. To that end, Martin is as exacting of a songwriter as I’ve ever heard: like he did with the tracks he made for Taylor Swift ("Shake It Off", "Blank Space", "Style") and Katy Perry ("I Kissed a Girl", "Teenage Dream", "Roar"), he relies on some enigmatic internal cadence, clipping syllables like a hiccuping poet, taking a tiny scalpel to his melodies. He keeps his lines pointy and balanced. "Send-my-love/ To-your-new/ Luh-uh-ver." The results are like encountering a person with perfectly symmetrical features—both instantly appealing and deeply, existentially unsettling. The song opens with carefully plucked acoustic guitar, and when the chorus comes in it’s as if someone yanked the curtains up on a dark room.

或者：“We both know we ain’t kids no more（我们都知道我们不再是孩子了）”，这就是她在“Send My Love（To Your New Lover）”中的表述，这首歌是她与瑞典超级制作人马克斯·马丁（Max Martin）共同创作的，马丁现在创作的冠军单曲几乎可以和Lennon和McCartney比肩。马丁的所有歌曲都遵循一个特定的公式：它们是尖锐的、快节奏的东西，将诸如ABBA的瑞典流行乐的精准与更注重节奏感的美国R&B编织在一起。马丁是我听过的最严格的作曲家：就像他为泰勒·斯威夫特（Taylor Swift）所作的"Shake It Off", "Blank Space", "Style"与为和凯蒂·佩里（Katy Perry）所作的“I Kissed a Girl”、“Teenage Dream”、“Roar”一样，他依靠一些神秘的内部节奏，像打嗝的诗人一样剪裁音节，用一把小手术刀剪切旋律。他保持歌词的抑扬顿挫。"Send-my-love/ To-your-new/ Luh-uh-ver." 这样做的效果就像让听众遇见一个完全对称的人一样，既吸引人又深沉，又有着令人不安的感觉。这首歌以精心弹拨的原声吉他开场，当合声切入时，就好像有人在一方黑暗的小屋里猛得拉开了窗帘。

Lyrically, Adele leans on a familiar kind of outrage, reckoning with a lover who broke every promise he ever made to her. There's unrequited love, but then there’s love that changes shape; if you’re unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of that transaction—made unwilling witness to the mysterious, alchemical shift in which devotion suddenly thins, sours—true understanding is impossible, a fool’s errand. This is the love that Adele sings of, the kind where there’s nothing left to do but resign: "I’m giving you up, I’m forgiving it all." Nurturing grudges is a young woman’s game.

在情感方面，阿黛尔依靠的是一种熟悉的愤怒感：认识到一个爱人打破了他对她的每一个承诺。这世上有不计回报的爱，但也有会变质的爱；如果你不走运地处在爱的接受端，即使你不愿意，你也不得不亲眼见证这一神秘又莫名其妙的转变：在这种转变中，你的爱人对你的奉献突然变少，甚至引起的你厌烦。你无法理解其中真正的原因，去尝试理解的人也十分愚蠢。这就是阿黛尔所唱的爱情，那种只能默默离场的爱情：“I’m giving you up, I’m forgiving it all.（我放弃你，我原谅一切。） ”怀恨在心是年轻女人的游戏。

Almost every song on 25 addresses heartache in one form or another. "Send My Love" is anomalous in its confidence; more often, Adele sounds excruciatingly aware of her own blunders and bereavements, and the ways in which time has made them indelible. Sometimes, Adele herself is the agent of grief, like on "Hello", in which she attempts to reach an ex-lover on her flip-phone. Surely, on some level, Adele knows the message she’s so hungry to deliver—"I’m sorry/ For breaking your heart"—is not the kind of sentiment that’s going to yield her much more than a slowly raised middle finger (the indignation of the recently forsaken is vast, merciless). She is arguably more desperate to reach an earlier iteration of herself, to correct something, quiet some panic.

《25》中的几乎每首歌都以某种形式表达心痛。”"Send My Love" 这首歌的自信心是反常的；通常，阿黛尔听起来极度清楚自己的错误和丧爱之痛，以及时间如何让它们变得不可磨灭。有时，阿黛尔自己就是悲伤的代理人，就像在"Hello中，她试图用她的翻盖电话联系陈年旧爱。当然，在某种程度上，阿黛尔知道她渴望传达的信息——"I’m sorry/ For breaking your heart"（对不起/伤了你的心）——和一个慢慢抬起的中指（刚被抛弃的人的愤怒是巨大的，疯狂的）对她的打击是一样的。可以说，她更迫切地想回到最初的自己，纠正一些错误，平息一些恐慌。

Other times she is a victim of loss. In the piano ballad "When We Were Young", which was co-written with Tobias Jesso Jr., she sings: "Let me photograph you in this light/ In case it is the last time/ That we might be exactly like we were/ Before we realized." The instrumentation swells, quiets. The precise nature of that realization is not named, but of course it doesn’t need to be, or not explicitly (as Joan Didion wrote, in 1967, "It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends."). The song itself is a kind of homage to the booming, soft-focus singer-songwriters who dominated AM radio in the 1970s (Barbra Streisand, Shirley Bassey), and Adele’s vocal performance is astonishing, full of vigor and beauty.

其他时候她是失去的受害者。在与Tobias Jesso Jr.共同创作的钢琴民谣 "When We Were Young"中，她唱道："Let me photograph you in this light/ In case it is the last time/ That we might be exactly like we were/ Before we realized." 让我在这光影下给你拍照/以防这是最后一次/我们仍未被岁月改变/在我们尚意识得到之时。”乐起，乐终。至于意识到什么，并没有被明确指出，但当然，它不需要被指出，或者说，不需要被明说（正如Joan Didion在1967年所写的那样，“看清事情的开端很容易，而看清事情的结局很难。”）。这首歌本身就是对20世纪70年代在AM电台（Barbra Streisand，Shirley Bassey）主流的红极一时、风格柔和的唱作歌手的一种致敬，阿黛尔的声乐表演令人惊叹，充满活力和美感。

Still: the cumulative effect is sometimes as treacly as the heavily frosted sheet cake being slid onto the buffet table in the carpeted banquet hall where this song will be blasting, on a loop, for all of eternity. Even your most adorable aunt—the one who loves a Yankee Candle—will eventually drain her flute of sparkling wine, lean forward, and be like, "Dog, this shit is corny."

尽管如此，老一套的累积效应有时还是像厚厚的糖霜蛋糕滑到铺着地毯的宴会厅里的自助餐桌上一样，在某处，歌曲的情绪迸发，回环反复，无时不刻都是这样。即使是你最可爱的阿姨，一位扬基蜡烛的忠实粉丝，也会啜干香槟杯的汽酒，俯身向前，然后说：“天呐，这太土了。”

Taken as a whole document, it is truly staggering how many of these songs—all of them, as far as I can tell—address the foibles of romantic love. It’s not so much that Adele’s lyrics are platitudinous (although they often are), it’s that the album’s prevailing sentiment eventually becomes wearying. In his book The Song Machine, John Seabrook interviews Bonnie McKee, the 31-year-old songwriter behind some of Katy Perry’s bigger hits and a frequent collaborator of Martin’s; McKee offers a pat, sorry-dude response to the question of lyrical uniformity in contemporary pop. "Most people still just want to hear about love and partying," is what she tells Seabrook. A shrug—a "Hey, it’s not us, it’s you! You dummies are the ones who want that!"—is implied.

作为一个完整的记录，《25》真正令人震惊的是它里面如此多的歌曲都表现了浪漫爱情的弱点。与其说阿黛尔的歌词平淡无奇（尽管它们经常如此），倒不如说这张专辑的主流情绪最终变得令人厌倦。John Seabrook在他的《The Song Machine（歌曲机器）》一书中采访了31岁的Bonnie McKee，她是凯蒂·佩里（Katy Perry）一些大热门歌曲的幕后操刀者，也是马丁（Martin）的合作常客；McKee对当代流行音乐中抒情一致性的问题给出了一个轻描淡写且差强人意的回答。”她告诉西Seabrook：“大多数人还是想听关于爱情和派对的事。她的肩就好像在说“嘿，不是我们，是你！你们这些笨蛋才是想要这些陈词滥调的人！”

Perhaps that is what people want: Adele is presently on track to break N*Sync's record, held since 2000, of 2.24 million copies sold in the first week of release (on Friday, more than 900,000 people downloaded 25 from the iTunes store alone). And perhaps these songs are trifles, foregone conclusions that, instead of facilitating or inviting a deepening, allow for just one outcome: a peaceable head-bob, a wistful smile. They are one-way, dead-end roads, emotional shortcuts to wells of loss and contrition. But regardless of how one might feel about the spiritual utility of pop music, Adele’s instincts as a singer remain unmatched; she is, inarguably, the greatest vocalist of her generation, an artist who instinctively understands timbre and pitch, when to let some air in. It does not seem unfair to ask that dynamism of her songs, too.

或许这确实正是人们想要的：Adele打破了N*Sync自2000年以来的记录，在发行的第一周就售出了224万份（第一个周五，仅iTunes商店就下载了90多万份）。也许这些歌并不伟大、都是能被预见的定论，而不是深化挖掘的过程，它们只允许一个结果：一个点头，一个沉思的微笑。它们是单向的死胡同，通往失落和悔恨之井的情感小道。但不管人们对流行音乐的精神效用有何感想，阿黛尔作为一名歌手的本能仍然是无与伦比的；毫无疑问，她是她这一代最伟大的歌手之一，是一位本能地理解音色和音高、何时要留白的艺术家。当然，希望她交出充满活力的歌曲似乎也没什么不对。