Saw some advertisement for the album...it zooms in on Adele's face while one of her undistinguishable ballads plays in the background. Bleh.
I actually have another Adele theory concerning "identity politics" of sort and why her album was so popular. In fact, "21" is the most popular album of all time when you adjust for the album sales of a given era (and was given that distinction recently by Billboard). It's sold like 25 million copies when the annual top album tends to sell 4 million copies nowadays. Which leads me to believe that Adele being overweight has led to a large part of her success. Not that she didn't deliver great tunes that were big hits and all, but "21" hardly has a stack of hits like Thriller or Rumours or Born In The USA or whathaveyou. It was really two awesome songs and a few other hits that rode the coattails of her success. Her being overweight likely led a lot of overweight women to identify with her and purchase the album. Another case in point? Susan Boyle. That woman is considered aesthetically grotesque, yet her album as well sold far beyond what the top annual seller usually does and that's in spite of having basically zero hits.
People can purchase music for whatever reason they choose and I don't come at this in a way that's meant to be mean or anything (the opposite of my "Rolling In The Deep" nonsense in a post above), but it's clearly more than just the music when an album sells about six times what you would expect of the biggest album in a given year. Now it begs the question of whether Adele training and changing her diet is suddenly going to hurt her commercially.
As for the "production" side of things...of course an album like this is going to be way too slick but I'm sure it's also in that ear bleeding Loudness War territory where everything is amplified to the hilt in order to make this songs scream out "buy me damn it!" when they're played on the radio. That's the major labels for you.
