Adele's "Hello"

About

"Hello" is a 2015 song by the British pop singer Adele. The song was notable for its extreme popularity as well as the fact that it marked the artist's return to the music industry after a three year hiatus. In addition, the song inspired many notable parodies.

Origin

On October 18th, 2015, a teaser for the song aired on British television during an episode of The X Factor. The video was a 30 second snippet of the lyrics, sung by Adele.^[1] On October 22nd, 2015, the singer released the actual video through her Vevo account.

The song was announced to be the first single from Adele's forthcoming record 25.^[2]

Spread

Within 24 hours, the video broke the YouTube viewing record, previously held by Taylor Swift's "Bad Blood", by gaining over 27.7 million views.^[3] In a week after it's release, it had over 147 million views. It was the second fastest video on YouTube to hit 100 million views, reaching the milestone in 5 days, and the fastest video on Vevo to hit the same mark.^[4] In addition to being incredibly popular, the song was critically acclaimed; the Guardian said "Adele sounds great: she sells the song without over-singing it, leaving the melismatic vocal fireworks to the inevitable spate of X Factor cover versions."^[5] The song's release trended on both Facebook, where there were over 12,000 individual posts^[7] and Twitter, where there were more than 220,000 tweets about the song.^[8]

Parodies

After the song premiered, both viewers and late night talk show hosts both started to create parodies on the songs. Frequent recurring comedic themes included the age of Adele's phone, which in the music video is an early 2000s flip phone, instead of the smart phones commonly in use in 2015. Parodies also tended to attempt to answer the question of who the song was written by. As of October 30th, 2015, there were over 149,000 results on YouTube for "Adele Hello."^[6]

Search Interest

External References