After Adele: is the diva leaving the building once and for all?

Guess how many piano-led ballads by a female artist have topped the UK singles chart this decade? Just one – Adele’s Easy on Me – and that was almost three years ago. There was a time you simply couldn’t escape the powerhouse vocals of legendary divas and their huge, impossible-to-sing (but don’t let that stop you trying) epics. But these days, the pop diva – fusing untouchable vocal prowess and range with a larger-than-life aesthetic – is becoming something of a rare breed.

With her huge hair, dramatic gowns and almighty voice Adele is one of those divas. Earlier this summer, she announced that she will be taking a “big break” from music once the curtain falls on her final Las Vegas show on 23 November; this weekend, she told an audience in Munich that after those 10 shows, “you won’t see me for an incredibly long time”.

While women remain a dominant pop force – with the likes of Charli xcx, Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan ruling the summer, not to mention Taylor Swift – hardly any of them exist in the tradition of, say, an Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand, Cher, Whitney Houston or Mariah Carey, as Adele does. With the exception of perhaps Beyoncé, said Dr Kirsty Fairclough, co-editor of Diva: Feminism and Fierceness from Pop to Hip-Hop, new divas “are at risk of becoming a cultural relic. There is a diva deficit right now.”

One reason for the decline, said DJ Louie XIV, host of the Pop Pantheon podcast, is changing public attitudes to female vocal styles: “The last 10 to 15 years has seen a precipitous decline in people caring about big vocals.” While there are plenty of exceptional female vocalists out there – from FKA twigs to Jazmine Sullivan and Billie Eilish – the voice is often not their primary selling point, as it was for divas of the past. Even Ariana Grande, renowned for her Mariah-like vocal range, has “reined in her voice quite a bit”, said Louie XIV. “She has adapted to doing a lot of really rhythmic singing.”

For years, TV talent shows such as The X Factor and American Idol promoted the idea that your local shopworker or neighbour could be secretly harbouring this kind of superhuman talent: the likes of Alexandra Burke, Kelly Clarkson, Leona Lewis, and Susan Boyle were plucked from obscurity to shatter the illusion that powerful vocal gymnastics were the province of legendary divas, and “dismantled the mystique of ‘the voice’ being otherworldly”, said Fairclough.