Adéla Jergová is a singer-songwriter and dancer from Slovakia. She broke out during the survival show Dream Academy, a show built to construct an international pop girl-group using a combination of American and Korean label expertise. This show went on to produce the group Katseye, known for songs such as Touch, Gnarly, and Daniela. Adéla was the first to be eliminated from the show after coming last in the first ‘Mission’, or round. ADÉLA’s music is a much-needed insight into the world of the ‘survival show reject’, discussing the joy, pain, and grief that the industry systematically causes in the endeavour to create ‘good telly’, and more broadly the commodification of the self under the late-stage capitalist music industry.
For those unfamiliar with the format, a survival show is a competition reality show operating on procedural elimination of a small number of contestants at a time. Hit examples of this format include RuPaul’s Drag Race, X-Factor, and Big Brother. They are often criticised for their distortion of personalities and events to the benefit of showrunners, as well as their manufacturing and broadcasting of interpersonal ‘drama’.
Labour and framing
A critique of survival shows is immediately evident from the second line in ADÉLA’s post-Dream Academy song Superscar, “prove how bad you need it, put on a show for me”. Competitors in survival shows are forced to grovel at the feet of executives to even get in the door, to “count themselves so lucky”,1 but especially once the studio lights are on them. Gratitude, determination, and kindness must be performed whenever the camera is rolling to avoid a negative typecast. The emotional labour extracted by showrunners in seeking this ‘proof’ is rarely acknowledged, and even less frequently actually appreciated. After the show, a documentary about its production was released, which takes great lengths to show ADÉLA’s grief for being eliminated so soon, turning her emotional sincerity into yet another thing to watch, sell, market.
Going back a step, the fact she is also “prov[ing] herself” and “put[ting] on a show” for an anonymous “me”2 is also pertinent—contestants must perform for not only industry experts, but also the audience. Audience votes made up a large portion of the Dream Academy scoring, so any negative read could instantly destroy someone’s chances. Indeed, this is what happened to ADÉLA. She was almost immediately typecast as the “mean girl”3 by a large part of the audience. Her response to this label? “Why you coming at me baby, yell at the machine, girl”. This was the second line of her 2025 single MachineGirl, which feels like a letter to the music industry and to the audience of these shows. The song also features the line “woah, why don’t we ask the crowd?”, cementing the complicity of the viewer in the violence that these shows produce. If showrunners decide they don’t want someone anymore, all they have to do is create a negative portrayal and let voyeurs do their dirty work for them. It therefore serves as an attempt to ‘democratise cruelty’, pushing the responsibility for the decision onto the audience rather than the studio.
Mean girl
Everyone loves (to hate) a villain, and studios know it. That’s why every single reality show produced in the last 30-40 years relies on having a few people portrayed as evil, selfish, and insincere. They create “products of distortion”,4 as in ADÉLA’s case, because it gets eyes on the show and audiences emotionally invested. Getting cast as the “mean girl” immediately ruins your chances of winning the contest. An environment is created where the audience is waiting for your downfall, because that is the narrative conclusion of the arc prescribed for you. A show where ‘evil’ wins and ‘victims’ fail is hardly going to be popular, is it?
The allegèd victim of ADÉLA’s “mean girl”iness was Manon, who went on to win the show and début with Katseye. This instated binary of ‘bully/victim’ reduced both girls to a caricature, a trope. Audiences sympathetic to bullying voted to ‘save’ Manon from the other contestants who the showrunners cast against her, stripping Manon of the agency to stand up for herself, and stripping the ‘bullies’ of the agency to be people. Audiences were rewarded with a voyeuristic saviour complex as a result of decisions taken to remove the humanity from contestants.
Superscar and the commodification of identity
I would like to focus in on some of the more specific attitudes conveyed by Superscar. The song was released about a year after Dream Academy aired, and discusses the commodification of identity more broadly, rather than the specific faults of the survival format (although does link into it, as previously discussed). I’ll start with the first verse’s last two lines, “kid, you got it, go on, flaunt it, sell your sex and soul to me”. I could write a whole dissertation on this section, but I’ll keep it brief.
“Kid” immediately creates a predatory dynamic and highlights the age gaps so ever-present in the music industry. ADÉLA was 17-18 when she entered Dream Academy, competing in front of judges who were twice her age. The youngest competitor was Hinari, who was only 14 years old. The use of this word highlights the grooming of teenagers into these ‘idol’ roles—14 is not exceptionally young to begin training, and many start younger. This mention of childhood rings dissonant against the next line, “sell your sex and soul to me”. The sexualisation of minors is a recurring, deep-rooted issue in the music industry, especially in K-pop, where many idols début at the age of 14 and 15.
Into the chorus, we get the thesis of the song: the equating of idol-hood to bondage. “Tie me up, pull my strings and make me sing”5 is incredibly sexualised language, but speaks to the puppeteering of human beings as props to sell the image the label desires. From the second section of the chorus, “tell me just how far, push right past the bar”, we get the impression that this “tying up” is not consensual, that her boundaries and grievances are being “push[ed] right past” as she is being told to push herself more and more. Why is this being done? To make the executive’s “wallets sing”,6 to fulfil their “monetary fantasy”.7 All of this labour, all of this suffering is done in the name of someone else’s bottom line.
ADÉLA speaks to the industry’s predation through the bridge, “shut my lips to speak, stick to your strategy, I know you like them weak, sold you a piece of me”. She is spoken for, strategised over, predated on, and consumed like any other product. Her public and private life become columns in a spreadsheet, quarterly earnings reports, and all authenticity is outsourced to the label for them to manufacture.
Conclusion
Throughout all of this, one thread remains clear: exploitation for profit. The goal of the machine is to make as much money as possible and it will accomplish this by any means it can get away with—the emotional manipulation of audiences, the total domination of artists’ lives, and the manufacturing of personas all play to create an industry that keeps turning record profits year-on-year, even after high profile suicide after high profile suicide from artists who cannot take the strain any more. ADÉLA serves as a story of an artist trying to stand against this concerning trend and reclaim agency from within the confines of the system.
As a society, we need to talk. And artists need to be at the table.
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