ADÉLA’s album, ‘PRIMA’, is one of the albums of the moment. It has sold more than 100,000 copies globally in its first week and the album’s hits follow one another. Although ‘KGB’ is still my favorite due to its preference for European electro, ‘Ain’t in LA’ is the one that has taken the lead, and now the singer has added another hit with ‘Nicole Kidman’.
Track 2 of the album continues to rise on Spotify Global and rose to number 12 yesterday, while ‘Ain’t In LA’ continues at number 5. “Nicole” is our Song of the Day today.
Apart from a commercial level, which was already beyond doubt after being shared half a million times on TikTok, the recording works on several levels. The most obvious is as a tribute to Nicole Kidman herself, which the actress herself has reciprocated by sharing the topic.
ADÉLA wrote the song thinking about her relationship with fame, and the song is ostentatious when it comes to choosing between “Louboutins or Jimmy Choos.” But it also has a point of humor and social reflection: ADÉLA tried on a corset, felt “like Nicole” and also used it to think about the things that male artists don’t wear.
The lyrics contain references to Nicole Kidman films such as ‘Moulin Rouge’ or ‘Babygirl’, and taking things further, the video, in its modesty, also contains references to ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ and ‘Reincarnation’ (my favorite nod), which someone has already compiled on TikTok.
But the level at which ‘Nicole Kidman’ works best is that of production, as it proves how that idea from the 2000s, so Kanye West and so Common, of recovering a lost classic, sampling it and using it as the basis for a current hit, can still be valid. In fact, it is very reminiscent of ‘Bound 2’ (2013), but it does not sample ‘Bound’ by the 70s vocal group The Ponderosa Twins Plus One. In this case, the sample that plays throughout comes from ‘In My Father’s House’, a lost recording by a gospel group called God’s Gospel Angels. This recording is not on Spotify, it belongs to a 1986 album called ‘Praise Him’, an album that no one has ever bought or sold on Discogs. 29 users have it, 400 want it.
Aside from all this, there is a final level on which ‘Nicole Kidman’ works and it is simply like background music, sexy, pleasant song to listen to without thinking about the actress, or who sampled what, or where the song is going viral. ADÉLA is singing that “her bra should be bigger” because people “don’t look her in the eyes”, so it wasn’t so difficult to imagine an audience for this after all…
