Adele leads a female wave of change in pop culture

Charli XCX, the English singer who's written big hits for fellow female pop acts such as Australian rapper Iggy Azalea and Swedish duo Icona Pop, is the star of a new BBC documentary called The F-Word and Me.

The word in question is not profane but political: Feminist. Beyoncé, author of a 2014 Shriver Report essay called "Gender Equality is a Myth," flashes a definition of it on a giant video screen at her concerts: "A person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes."

An F-word discussion is timely, as Charli (last name: Aitchison) explains in the doc streaming on YouTube, for one good reason: "Girls are ruling the charts like never before."

So they are. By any objective measure, most, if not all, of the biggest pop stars in the world are women.

The person with the most Twitter followers on the planet, with 78 million, is Katy Perry. Taylor Swift, Rihanna, and Lady Gaga are in the Top 10. The big winner at last week's American Music Awards was Nicki Minaj, the rapper who has the ninth most-followed account on Instagram, where Swift tops the list.

Until recently, 2015 had belonged to Swift. The 25-year-old pride of Wyomissing used the tour for her 1989 album to position herself as the alpha female in pop culture.

Enter Adele.

It's an era when first file-sharing and now music-streaming services have led to the obvious conclusion that people just don't buy music anymore. So when Swift's 1989 sold 1.2 million copies in its first week out last year, that was impressive.

But on Nov. 20, Adele's third album, 25, arrived - and since then, it has blown 1989's numbers out of the water.

Until 25, the biggest-selling first week ever belonged to N' Sync's No Strings Attached, with 2.2 million moved. The boy-band's mark was thought unassailable because it was achieved at the peak of the CD-buying age, before Napster's disruption of the industry had done its worst.

It took Adele a mere three days to topple that mark, a remarkable achievement no doubt aided by the British vocalist's decision not to allow the album to be played on on-demand streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music. "Hello," the single she charmingly performed on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon last week, with Philadelphia hip-hop band the Roots playing toy instruments, is on both services. For the whole album, you have to pony up.

Adele is, without a doubt, part of the girl-power pack. Women perform and women buy: According to industry-monitoring service MusicWatch, 53 percent of digital music was purchased by women in 2014, up from 40 percent in 2004. And in a Rolling Stone cover story this month, Adele called herself a feminist: "I believe that everybody should be treated the same, including race and sexuality."

Of course, guys have not been air-brushed out of music. From Justin Bieber to One Direction, teen-idol pop is as big as ever, and 2015 has been a huge year for the likes of Canadian rapper Drake, whose hit "Hotline Bling" relies on a telephonic connection, much like "Hello." And though country music is currently full of strong women, such as Miranda Lambert and Kacey Musgraves, the genre is dominated by beery bros like Luke Bryan and Jason Aldean.

But a take-no-mess attitude courses through female pop, down to a grittier indie level, with Canadian DJ-producer Grimes and reunited punk trio Sleater-Kinney, whose guitarist Carrie Brownstein has just published her memoir/manifesto Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl.

And empowerment narratives course throughout pop culture, from comedian Amy Schumer's rom-com Trainwreck to Jessica Jones, the Marvel superheroine Netflix series starring Krysten Ritter that all the cool kids are bingeing on.

The same weekend 25 arrived, the fourth and final film of the Jennifer Lawrence-starring Hunger Games franchise topped the box office. Bow-and-arrow-wielding Katniss Everdeen offers female fans a role model of indomitable toughness - but the movies' success highlights gender inequity in Hollywood. In 2013 and 2014, according to a Maureen Dowd article for the New York Times magazine, a shocking 1.9 percent of directors of the top 100 grossing films have been women. Meantime, MPAA data show that women buy about the same number of movie tickets as men do.

Which brings us back to Adele. Her return, somewhat surprisingly, has been met with nearly unanimous rapture - even among indie outlets like Pitchfork, which went overboard in declaring her "inarguably, the greatest vocalist of her generation."

Yet Adele (last name: Adkins) is an anything-but-edgy powerhouse ballad singer with much in common with MOR divas like Streisand and Céline Dion. In 25, she does experiment with au courant hitmakers, including Bruno Mars and song doctor Max Martin. But the album goes lightly on the blue notes heard in songs like 21's "Rolling in the Deep." Songs on 25 like "Sweetest Devotion" are unabashedly corny, just this side of schmaltz.

And yet, Adele, 27, has emerged as pop music's unifying figure. An amusing Saturday Night Live sketch last week portrayed her as the woman who can make bickering relatives at the Thanksgiving dinner table put intractable differences aside. Maybe that's because the anguish and longing in which she specializes satisfy a universal yearning, particularly in a post-Paris sociopolitical moment in which our instinct is to treasure all we hold dear.

Or maybe it's her obvious authenticity as a singer. She also makes music that sounds familiar to an older audience, certainly a factor in her success, as 61 percent of CD buyers are 36 or older, according to MusicWatch.

Another factor: Adele is not just a woman but an Everywoman. Jillian Mapes cuts to the chase in the New York magazine site Vulture: "Adele is among the first plus-size female cultural icons to reach the highest echelons of commercial success without having to make herself the butt of fat jokes. . . . She's shaped like me - and like two-thirds of American women."

In other words, she sends a feminist message by being who she is. She put it in her own words in Rolling Stone: "I think I remind everyone of themselves. Not saying everyone is my size, but it's relatable because I'm not perfect, and I think people are portrayed as perfect, unreachable, and untouchable."

ddeluca@phillynews.com

215-854-5628@delucadan

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