Billboard’s Greatest Pop Star of 2011: Adele
(In 2018, the Billboard staff released a list project of its choices for the Greatest Pop Star of every year, going back to 1981. Read our entry below on why Adele was our Greatest Pop Star of 2011 — with our ’11 Honorable Mention runner-ups, Rookie of the Year and Comeback of the Year pop stars at the bottom — and find the rest of our picks for every year up to present day here.)
Simply put: Anyone who says they saw the full extent of this success story coming is a liar. Yes, by early 2011, Adele had two major Grammys (best new artist and best female pop vocal performance), while her debut album 19 flew to the top 10 of the Billboard 200 following a performance on the year’s highest-rated episode of Saturday Night Live. But ahead of round two, The Guardian summed up the situation best: “Adele is not yet a very big deal in America, because her new album, 21, isn’t out for another week. Nobody’s sure if it will make quite the same splash as her first, 19.” Everyone agreed that her voice should warrant a world-class career, but in 2011, was a great voice alone enough?
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21, released that February, was an outlier from its arrival. Thumping, excitable anthems were still the queenmakers on radio and the charts, with Katy Perry’s “Firework,” Britney Spears’ “Hold It Against Me” and Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” among the era’s standouts. Big-budget music videos reinforced their communal spirit, with demanding mass choreography or jubilant crowds jumping in time to a high-octane chorus. Plus, thanks to the sharpest technology, even amateur singers could pass for good vocalists, and actual singers — the Gagas and Beyoncés of the world — still integrated spectacle into their shows. In short, image and flash were paramount. Adele — no colorful costumes, no backup dancers, wait, she just stands there and sings?? — seemed pre-ordained for the adult contemporary convent.
So, how did she storm to the top? Well, she bottled heartbreak into 11 masterful tracks that whisked listeners through a wild emotional terrain — rage, revenge, regret, resolve and release — without drowning in syrupy lyrics or cheesy production. Sure, the Perry and Spears bops were our friends at the club and every house party, but after a fight on the phone? A lonely Saturday night? Trying to make sense of mixed signals? That was uniquely Adele territory.
And so she reaped the rewards. Upon release, 21 debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with an impressive 351,000 copies sold, ultimately settling into a long-term affair with the top spot: The album weaved in and out of No. 1 eight times, outlasting new projects from Spears, Chris Brown, Gaga and Beyoncé. No surprise, then, when it became the year’s top seller, with over 5 million copies purchased, and effectively carried the industry during an historic down period: For the first time since 2004, total album sales rose from the previous year.
Yet even with almighty sales, 21’s singles were more of a shock. Lead offering “Rolling in the Deep,” a blues-dipped scorned lover’s cry punctuated on a booming “we could have had it aaaaalllll,” powered to No. 1 on the Hot 100, but the riskier second single, “Someone Like You,” coronated the new queen. If 21 was a jolt in the pop landscape, Adele performing a piano ballad under a single spotlight at the MTV Video Music Awards — the most eye-popping three hours of pomp and circumstance on television — could have incited a riot. And though Beyonce’s pregnancy reveal snatched the show’s headlines, Adele claimed a not-too-shabby consolation prize: “Someone” flew 19-1 on the very next Hot 100.
Adele’s annus mirabilis ended on a low note: The singer cancelled the final dates of her tour as she battled a vocal-cord hemorrhage and did not perform publicly for the rest of 2011. But her comeback was the grandest affair: She returned to the stage at the following year’s Grammy Awards without a rousing performance of “Deep” and swept her six nominations, including wins for record, song and album of the year — proof that she’d taken the industry and rewrote the pop rulebook on her terms. If only for a night, she, at long last, did have it all.
Honorable Mentions: Katy Perry (“Firework,” “E.T.,” “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)”), Lady Gaga (Born This Way, “Born This Way,” “The Edge of Glory”), LMFAO (Sorry For Party Rocking, “Party Rock Anthem,” “Sexy and I Know It”)
Rookie of the Year: Lana Del Rey
In the year of Adele, another indelible voice rose to prominence as a retro-leaning torch singer — but the artist formerly known as Lizzy Grant wasn’t made to top the pop charts, exactly. Lana Del Rey’s emergence as a blog sensation in 2011 with the haunting, sweeping ballads “Video Games” and “Born to Die” was a polarizing one, leading to questions about her past identity, her authenticity, even her feminism. But while Del Rey rarely provided easy answers for her fans, the allure of her songwriting, her always-expanding mythology, and her singular distant croon kept them in rapt attention for the remainder of the decade.
Comeback of the Year: Jennifer Lopez
The charts were Jennifer Lopez’s playground in the early 2000s, as her slick blend of pop, R&B and hip-hop yielded hit after hit. Yet, between a new wave of burgeoning pop and R&B stars and albums that lacked direction and purpose, J. Lo’s chart fortunes waned after 2005. After a label change, she reinvigorated her sound with the first single from 2011’s Love?, “On the Floor,” a bumping, Eurodance- and Latin-influenced track that appealed to every corner of the global market. She updated her musical partner, too: Goodbye LL Cool J, hello Pitbull. But her smartest play was banking a deal to judge on the tenth season of TV’s No. 1 program, American Idol, which provided an unparalleled promotion platform. “Floor” remained in the Hot 100’s top 10 in all but one week of the season’s run, and gave the new judge her biggest hit since 2003.
(Read on to our Greatest Pop Star of 2012 here, or head back to the full list here.)
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