Disappointment with a fulfilled dream. Why are we arguing about Adéla

The unique breakthrough of Slovak singer Adéla Jergová into the upper reaches of the American and British charts has sparked heated debates here as well. Is she an outsider, an Eastern European girl who reached the top through talent and hard work, or a child born with a silver spoon in her mouth, and therefore proof that money can buy you everything – ballet lessons in Moscow from the age of three, participation in American reality shows, and ultimately a place at the top of the Billboard charts?

Disputes about Adéla arise from a certain misunderstanding, since Adéla has never claimed to come from a poor background. Her hit Ain’t in L.A., with a music video filmed on a housing estate in Petržalka, may create that impression, but in reality it is a tribute to her mother and her unfulfilled dreams of a career in pop music; dreams that Adéla is realizing a generation later. If you have heard only this song, it is easy to overlook the transition from the first person, in which Adéla sings throughout the album, to the third person at the end of Ain’t in L.A.. Let us therefore take it as an invitation to examine her two recordings – the EP The Provocateur (2025) and the album PRIMA (2026) – more closely. Surprisingly, it is quite worthwhile.

Origin story

Let us begin with a biographical note. Adéla’s father is former Penta investment manager and IVF clinic executive Ján Jerga. This invites easy conclusions: she is a girl from a wealthy family whose career is merely another ostentatious investment by predatory capitalism, sucking up common resources. Adéla’s songs, however, do not indicate idyll; on the contrary, they suggest considerable family disharmony. In Red Bottoms she sings about “dad issues,” and in Therapy about being angry with her father and wanting to move her mother away from Slovakia. Homewrecked points to infidelity in the family: “Hotel bills and dirty sheets / She said she had a feeling / But I said ‘surely not, mum, please’ / Young and naïve / I hate how I could not see it.” And it seems that she addresses her father: “You were warned / Watch your back, I’ll get you, and that dirty bitch too.” We do not know the details, but he would not be the first manager to reduce caring for his family to paying child support.

She tells her own origin story in the first song on the album PRIMA, KGB: she presents herself as a determined, cheeky, alien element that studied the American pop-cultural industry and managed to infiltrate it. “I’m like a spy / I studied that shit / Call me K-G-Bitch.” Hedonistic beats intertwine with Adéla’s cheeky non-musical vocal modulations. The party mood is interrupted in the music video only by the closing announcement that it is all a joke, that Adéla understands the KGB was bad, and that she stands with Ukraine (as a footnote to her political views, it can also be mentioned that she clearly positioned herself against Trump and supported the Democrats in the midterms). In a certain sense, KGB follows on from DeathByDevotion from The Provocateur. In it, dense synthesizers mix with ecstatic cries, and the chorus is like an incantation: “Hard / Firm / Give it to me / God, I want it.” The predominantly downtempo song enthusiastically explodes in its final dozens of seconds into uninhibited, pulsing dance beats. The music video shows Adéla undergoing exhausting ballet training. Pain mixes with euphoria, the drill is simultaneously self-destructive and orgasmic, one transforms into the other and back again.

The Provocateur is overall a more interesting, more entertaining and (of course) more provocative recording than PRIMA. “You won’t get what you want from me” are the stubborn final words of the EP’s last track, FinallyApologizing. By contrast, PRIMA is a more calculated, more accessible album. Subversion is present in it as a gesture, but in terms of content it is, with one exception that we will come to below, completely muted. In the dreamy slow song Nicole Kidman, there are only hints of sarcasm: “Every night I pray / That my breasts will stand correctly.” Adéla also refers here to the actress’s role in the film musical Moulin Rouge (2001), while Luhrmann’s film certainly has the potential to open up questions of class differences and the commodification of art; in relation to Adéla’s song, however, they remain merely superficial.

I’m the Man is a gentle variation on the theme of dominance in relationships, “I like boys who are a little feminine,” but it brings nothing disturbing. In Marijuana, the drug is a metaphor for love, and Hitachi is not an ode to a vibrator, as the title might suggest, but a straightforward piano love ballad. The provocation here seems merely habitual. Several fans of The Provocateur complained that PRIMA is a sell-out, but the truth is that selling out is to a large extent the point of operating in the pop-cultural industry.

Give Me a Cage

The most interesting thing about Adéla is that she directly thematizes this exploitative nature of the pop-cultural industry. In MachineGirl, she reflects on being perceived as an “annoying girl” in the Netflix docuseries Pop Star Academy: Katseye. “What if we asked the audience?”, Adéla gestures toward the oppressive consumer panopticon that watches her every step, and which seems to respond: “An empty projected body / You’ll find the brain only behind her lips / The perfect pop poster / Misinterpreted effort to become famous.” The theme returns in Superscar and especially in SexOnTheBeat, about sexual objectification. Adéla’s pornographic moans are disembodied in the style of musique concrète and become an inhuman, almost machine-like musical underpinning. The chorus plays with the alliteration of “rage / stage / cage”: “Give me rage / Give me a stage / Give me a cage / I’ll deliver sex on command.” The transition to the chorus directly addresses the audience: “I’ll serve myself to you on a silver platter, baby / You’ll think I chose it myself / All by myself, myself, myself, myself / I’ll beg you to fetishize me / I don’t care if you want to fuck me or save me / Bend me however you want.”

This darkness from the EP returns in PRIMA only in the penultimate song, Therapy, which is the last song in which Adéla speaks in the first person – as I have already written, the sunny, positively charged hit Ain’t in L.A. is about her mother. Therapy is not really pop; it is a half-collapsed skeletal anti-ballad, nothing entertaining. “I can’t really sing” are the first words, immediately violently processed by the production into ostentatiously acknowledged autotune. The rest is very blunt: “I would like to move my mum here / But I don’t have the money / So I hang out with the people I have to hang out with / They’re old white men and they’re terribly annoying / But they have the keys to my future / So I have to do it anyway, because that’s how life works, hm.”

Such metacriticism of the pop-cultural industry from within is of course neither new nor revolutionary; we could consider Madonna its pioneer (whom Adéla also references in Marijuana). The industry demonstrates its greatest cruelty by being able to commodify, promote and make part of its brand even criticism directed inward. It cannot be defeated on its own playing field; the only way is to leave and refuse to play its game. But once you are directly inside it, this requires rejecting decades of hegemonic cultural conditioning, present from childhood, and recognizing the falseness of the dream. And at the same time, you have to live off something.

The Tragedy of Perfect Success

For this reason, debates about whether Adéla’s success is the story of an outsider who realized her dream through determination, or the story of a rich girl who demonstrated the purchasing power of capital, miss the point. To the question of whether money, talent or hard work mattered most, the prosaic answer is: yes. Such a debate, however, falsely implies that there can be any success stories in the pop-cultural industry at all. In reality, there are only catastrophes and tragedies. Some are purely destructive; others – and in my view Adéla belongs among them – reveal something interesting about the conditions of their own emergence and thus about the political-economic system in which we all live.

Put more directly: Adéla sounds disillusioned by the dream that came true for her. Her best songs seem to capture two contradictory desires: on the one hand, to communicate something of her authentic humanity through the wall of oppressive production; on the other, a desire to ecstatically merge with the marketing mask that was created for her. To preserve her individuality while simultaneously turning herself into a perfect product. Selling out is an alluring resolution to the dilemma of human dignity, but alluring in much the same way that death is an alluring liberation from pain. Perfect “devotion” is truly a kind of death, a sacrifice during the black mass of capitalist art; “death by devotion.”

Adéla is an interesting tragedy in pop music because humanity truly penetrates through the cracks in the production. She tells us something fairly trivial: money and success do not automatically guarantee happiness. Such a message, of course, is not warmly received by those who lack not only happiness but also money and success. Applying a strictly material analysis, they could raise against all this the objection that Walter Benjamin once raised against Proust, namely that he “made art into the veil of the sole and most important mystery of his class: the economic mystery.” Benjamin, however, never stopped there either; he understood very well that the superstructure cannot be avoided, that if capitalism were ever to be overcome, it would be necessary to examine the superstructure thoroughly, and that shallow economism solves nothing.

Let us therefore refine that message further. If the pop-cultural industry sucks in poor talents, there is something romantically tragic about it: the age-old story of a good heart and naivety cynically crushed by the powerful. But if it sucks in confident, determined and materially secure girls, it is horrifyingly tragic, because it reveals much more intensely the impersonality and machinelike nature of the industry. At the end of the day, it is just business.

The presence of Penta  as one of the possible sources of her material security also makes it possible to connect her story to Slovakia’s post-communist transformation, in which, as part of a kind of delayed primitive accumulation of capital, a few well-positioned men were able to loot common assets. If you were in the right place and willing to sell your soul Faustian-style, prosperity was the reward. The perfect sell-out of oneself demanded within pop culture is ultimately also a form of such a transaction. But if the result is broken families and burned-out children realizing other people’s dreams, the equation becomes even more complicated. Its result is an even more dystopian vision in which no one is actually happy. Alienation ultimately permeates every layer of society.

Through Adéla, this specific post-communist experience is being connected for the first time in a thorough way to the mechanisms of global cultural capitalism. We are entering the world stage, with all these layers, and the expected joy of a simple “Slovakia mentioned!” unexpectedly merges with disillusionment. Adéla essentially forces us to reflect, which may result in the problematization of pop music itself, the hegemonic cultural behemoth that helps keep capitalism running. Thanks to this, it can be said that Adéla is the ideal Slovak landing on top of the world charts; it would be difficult for it to be better.

Left-wing cultural critics should of course not avoid examining works listened to by the masses, works that shape their consciousness, create dreams and occupy their attention. Listening to and reflecting on Adéla’s recordings, on that strange mixture of euphoria, burnout, rage and playfulness, is certainly one of the more useful things that can be done within pop music. And ultimately, she is worth continuing to follow: as I wrote, the only way to fight perfect commodification is ultimately not to play its game. And it seems that Adéla has still not given up searching for possible lines of escape.

Author is a philosopher and lawyer

This text is part of the PERSPECTIVES project - a new brand for independent, constructive and multiperspective journalism. The project is funded by the European Union. The views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views and positions of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA accepts responsibility for them.