What Does ADÉLA's 'Ain't In LA' Mean? It Beats 'Nicole Kidman' in 12 Countries

On Spotify's daily charts for 5 October, ADÉLA had two songs in the global top five: 'Nicole Kidman' at No. 2 and 'Ain't In LA' at No. 4. Country by country, the two songs split the world between them. We read 63 national charts, and 44 of them carried at least one of the two.

'Nicole Kidman' was the higher of the pair in 32 countries. They include the United States, where it stood at No. 2 and 'Ain't In LA' at No. 10, and Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Ireland. 'Ain't In LA' was the higher in 12: Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Paraguay. In the Philippines it stands at No. 7, with 'Nicole Kidman' at No. 22.

The older song is the one about staying where you are. 'Ain't In LA' came out on 23 July, six weeks before 'Nicole Kidman', as the third single from PRIMA, ADÉLA's debut album on Capitol Records. It made her the first Slovak artist on the Billboard Hot 100. The searches typed with its name ask one thing first: what it means.

What 'Ain't In LA' means: a bedroom shared with a little brother

The song opens on a boast in a deep, half-rapped voice, and the picture it paints is a night out that never makes a postcard: a subwoofer rattling the boot of a car, jewels set into teeth, a cigarette lit off a propane flame, a Honda Civic spinning donuts on a wet road. That picture comes back four times. It is the town, not the dream.

The first verse moves indoors. A girl sleeps in the same room as her little brother, wears clothes passed down by a friend's mum and cuts them up until they look like her own idea. A Madonna poster shares her wall with Destiny's Child. The lines before the chorus say she knows she is beautiful and has been told, all the same, that her dreams belong somewhere else.

The chorus answers that. Maybe nobody has to run away tonight, it says, and the belief that the baddest women live in Los Angeles is a lie. It allows that you might still want to escape, and tells you to enjoy the ride anyway. The second verse turns from 'she' to 'you': girls in cities nobody names, with faces that look like no one else, and a singer who prefers being nobody to being like everybody else. The last chorus comes back stripped down and ends on the same denial. The full words scroll with the song on Spotify and Apple Music; here we only say what they say.

ADÉLA has given two sources for it. One is her own life as a Slovak immigrant in Los Angeles. The other is a set of photographs of her mother at 18, posing in front of a wall of Western pop pictures, a girl with plans nobody outside her town ever saw. The video, directed by Fred Gervais, was filmed in Bratislava, ADÉLA's hometown.

'Ain't In LA' or 'Nicole Kidman': who picks which

The map in our first two paragraphs fits that story better than we expected. 'Nicole Kidman' is a fantasy of Hollywood glamour, and it leads in the English-speaking markets, where Hollywood's stars are household names; in the United States it also went to rhythmic radio on 6 October. 'Ain't In LA' holds a band of Central Europe around Slovakia, from Austria and the Czech Republic to Germany and Hungary, and three countries in Southeast Asia, among them the Philippines, where it spent three weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's Philippines Hot 100. Under the official video, which had 30.1 million views on 7 October, seven of the 40 top-ranked comments are about Slovakia or Bratislava, with 102,027 likes between them, and six come from viewers who say they grew up in the Balkans, another Slavic country, or South or Southeast Asia, with 35,427.

The rule is not clean, and we will not pretend it is. Singapore, where 'Ain't In LA' reached No. 1 on Spotify, now has 'Nicole Kidman' first and 'Ain't In LA' second, and the United Arab Emirates looks the same. The newer song also has the newer push. What the split does show is that ADÉLA's two hits are not one audience counted twice.

Why 'Ain't In LA' sounds like 2016

Eight of those 40 comments, with 75,587 likes, say the song sounds or looks like the mid-2010s, and the video leans into it with an old-style VEVO logo in the corner. There is even a remix titled 'Coachella 2016'. One of its five writers, Theron Thomas, also co-wrote Miley Cyrus's 'We Can't Stop' from 2013, and has acknowledged the resemblance people hear between the two. We measured both. Our readings put each song in C sharp minor, but not at the same pace: about 136 beats a minute for 'Ain't In LA', about 81 for 'We Can't Stop'. So they share a key and little else we can count. Key and tempo readings are estimates, and that is as far as our numbers go.

We ran the official video's audio through our listening tools, which cut a song into sections, measure loudness and time the voice. The opening boast runs at more than four words a second, rap speed, and our sound classifier hears it as hip hop before the song turns to sung pop. Everything after the three-minute mark is street noise and an engine, the film running on after the song has ended.

Our Kidman bet, a week on

On 2 October, writing about 'Nicole Kidman', we bet that ADÉLA's English Wikipedia page would draw more readers than Kidman's every day through October. It is losing. ADÉLA led from 28 September to 2 October. From 3 to 6 October Kidman led every day, by 17,598 readers to 16,493 on the 6th. We cannot say what moved her page on 3 and 4 October. The 6th is easier: on 5 October, at Chanel's show in Paris, Kidman lip-synced 'Nicole Kidman' with Pedro Pascal, Dua Lipa and Kristen Wiig, and both pages rose the next day. The bet is judged on 31 October and we will report it either way.

There is one more Kidman detail, and it points the other way. When the actress posted her first TikTok, a clip from the London premiere of Practical Magic 2, the song she chose to play under it was not the one named after her. It was 'Ain't In LA'.

So what does 'Ain't In LA' mean? It is a song telling girls far from Hollywood that the glamour they were promised elsewhere is already at home. Overtaken on the biggest charts by a glossier song that came six weeks later, it is still winning in a dozen countries, mostly far from the English-speaking ones. Our bet, and it is only a bet: in the Philippines, where Billboard had it at No. 1 for three weeks, 'Ain't In LA' stays above 'Nicole Kidman' on Spotify's daily chart through 31 October. If you came for the other song, our piece on 'Nicole Kidman' and what it samples is here, and ADÉLA's old Dream Academy classmates are in our story on KATSEYE's 'Hootie Frutti'.