The Metropolis

Adele's lyrics reveal a deep engagement with tax policy

Mike Pollitt | Friday 27 May, 2011 13:16

Adele pays so much tax that when she got her bill she was “ready to go and buy a gun and randomly open fire”. She’s been accused of selfishness by some workshy freeloading Guardian commenters for her remarks, but a close reading of her material reveals a principled and long standing interest in fiscal affairs.

“But go on, go on and take it,
Take it all with you,
Don’t look back,
At this crumbling fool,
Just take it…
Just take it all”
In Take it All, Adele addresses the rapacious state in a moving illustration of how oppressive taxation can corrode personal dignity, rendering the overtaxed as “crumbling fools”. It’s a very personal response, aching with resentment.

“We could have had it all…
Rolling in the deep.”
In Rolling in the Deep, Adele strikes a lighter note, playfully introducing the idea of her rolling in a Scrooge McDuck style pool of money. But this humorous approach does not eclipse her more serious message: she could have had it all, but the government took half her money away.

“Fed up of biding your time,
When I don’t get nothing back.
When I don’t get nothing back,
Boy I’m tired.”
In Tired, Adele addresses George “Boy” Osborne directly. She’s tired of the punitive tax regime, and she doesn’t feel that the public services she receives are commensurate to the money she puts in. She thus reveals herself to believe in taxation as a personal transaction between individual and government, rather than a social contract in which the whole community is bound. Here Adele begins to explore the wider societal effects of her hitherto very personal response to fiscal policy.

“God only knows what we’re fighting for
All that I say, you always say more
I can’t keep up with your turning tables
Under your thumb, I can’t breathe.”
In perhaps her most overtly political work, Turning Tables, Adele moves on to interpret her philosophy in practical terms. Specifically, she seems to question the huge government expediture in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Libya. She’s unpersuaded by the need for these foreign excursions (note the biting “God only knows…” – a suggestion that the religious motivation of the Bush/Blair years still rankles), and resents that she is asked to fund them. Under the thumb and unable to breathe, she raises the paradox by which artists who create wealth from personal expression are asked to submit these funds to the discretion of a bureacratic state, especially when the state then chooses to use this money for destructive purposes. Better, suggests Adele, that creativity be allowed to keep its own fruit. We can criticise this view by all means, but it behoves us to take it, and her, seriously.

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