By Adele Zhou
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What makes good music?

It’s the golden question, isn’t it? It’s the question the starving artist is asking as she waits tables in the underground New York bar, hungry for her big break. It’s the question the washed-up singer asks himself as he looks at his aging face in the mirror, yearning for a comeback. However, many performers today have strayed from that question and have lingered on to a new territory: “What can I do to get more attention?”

Maybe it’s what rising artist Adele (no relation) is thinking—but probably not. In many ways, the British singer-songwriter is a breath of fresh air, using her music and not her image to fuel her success.

Adele was already famous in the United States after her song “Chasing Pavements” was broadcast nationwide on “SNL” last year, and her success has been further proven in early April when her album “21” broke a record for the longest run at number one for a female singer in the United Kingdom album chart, according to The Official Charts Company. She recently appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, and her single “Rolling in the Deep” is now one you can hear frequently on the radio. In fact, it feels like Adele is showing up everywhere.

Perhaps what attracts the world to the British-born singer-songwriter is not only her unique voice and heart-wrenching lyrics, but Adele herself. She seems to be different from many artists today who put as much weight on their explosive performances and defined images as they put on their own music.

For example, Lady Gaga, who had consumed most of pop culture’s attention for 2010, turned so many heads during the Grammy’s with her egg-ified entrance and her unforgettable meat dress. To clarify, I love Lady Gaga, but her live performances with the blood and the near-nudity are louder than life and can sometimes cause more controversy than her actual music. Watching Lady Gaga strut basically all of her stuff in the “Telephone” music video in a scantily-clad bra and panty ensemble made me question what she was actually promoting—her music? Or herself?

Also, Lady Gaga has built an entire empire around her “little monsters” and her shocking, avant-garde music videos (I cringe thinking about the birthing scene in “Born This Way”), while Ke$ha writes whole albums devoted to catchy pop songs about booze and clubbing until the early morning. They both maintain their shock value by continuing to push the envelope of conservative society.

These artists have worked hard to create an image for themselves, starting their own revolutions, and it really does work for them. But overall, it takes the focus off of their music and puts more emphasis on them, the products.

But Adele’s different. She gets stage fright and anxiety attacks. She’s projectile-vomited on an audience member before because of nerves.

Adele, unlike many modern pop artists, reminds me of a normal person, one who wasn’t “born for show business” but who had feelings to express and just sang about it. Her albums are compilations of raw feelings: isolation, rejection, utter devotion. She focuses her attention primarily on her music, and she knows it. Instead of succumbing to choreographed dancing to liven up the show, she performs solely on the foundation of her voice alone.

In fact, she hates performing, saying in a Rolling Stone interview how her anxiety never really leaves her until she is off of the stage. With Adele, it is usually just a standing position in front of the microphone and an unforgettable voice. No tight outfit, no choreography. Just music.

Her fuller figure also sets her apart. Adele is a bigger artist than many female artists we see today, the Disney teens who are half the size of their predecessors, the mega-stars who come under fire if they gain weight and all the other artists who seemingly have to stay fit to stay successful. Adele seems to have a different mindset about her weight compared to those of her fellow artists.

“My life is full of drama and I won’t have time to worry about something as petty as what I look like,” Adele shares in a Rolling Stone interview. “I don’t like going to the gym. I like eating fine foods and drinking nice wine.”

You have heard it preached again and again. “Don’t pay attention to the media. All those girls are airbrushed. You are just fine the way you are. Stop pinching your love handles. Stop dieting. You are beautiful just the way you are.”

But it is difficult, especially with magazines like Seventeen continually pumping out issues of rail thin models wearing skimpy swimsuits and celebrities with celebrity trainers in the peak of their fitness.

Finally, we have an artist that we can look up to not only for her talent but for her feeling of security in her own body. And the best, most modest part is that she is not even trying to lead a revolution.

She is just herself. And that was what got her to the top of the charts.