This 500-word post was originally written for the Aesthetics and Criticism 2021 WordPress Blog. The article discussed is Adorno's 1941 article. It has been hyperlinked below. The original title of the blog post was, "Popular Music Listeners don't Listen to Music."
Please enjoy reading and as always, thank you for stopping by.
In Adorno’s 1941 article “On Popular Music,” the assumption of recreational liberties and ownership over our aesthetic-preferences is interrogated, eventually shown to be the tailored byproduct of forces beyond our control, but not outside awareness. Adorno first delineates that popular music [Tin Pan Alley and the post-Impressionists] and serious music [Beethoven and the Symphonists] can be differentiated by the listener’s attunement to “framework and…detail”, along with the way that the dance rhythms [the catch-all for popular banalities] are metaphorically weaponized by the composer. Further, while “living” music has organicism built into its fabric, “non-living” music is stagnantly “absolute.”
Where did this come from?
Adorno argues “standardization” [stylistics/theoretics] is key, meaning the way the observer has formed their auditory experience. But it’s through imitation and corporate reproduction [Attali’s “Era of Reproduction”?] that the “Natural [“primitive”] language” of the musical neophytes is truly concretized.
He then introduces the central paradox, the “stimulatory and natural,” what he calls the “backwardness of musical mass production.” Through an inoffensive adoption of the open-market-model, we were convinced of freedom, “pseudo-Individualism” coating our minds with promises. Adorno uses the codification of jazz improv to prove this, yet one only has to look at “precapitalistic” music, as Attali says, to see how notation killed the ad-lib artist. Even more, the emergence of arbitrary differentiation, the segregation of the “pure sign,” effectuated the further demise of “aesthetic freedom.”
Having set the abysmal scene, Adorno introduces the concept of “plugging,” the inevitable desensitization to sameness, bolstered by repetition, causing in-turn mental lethargy and, eventually, cognitive decline. In order for Katy Perry to make a hit song, she must find the ill-fitting, truth/post-truth “compromise.” Other aesthetic idiosyncrasies are mentioned like “glamour” [i.e., Socialist-Realist idealism], and “baby talk” [adult infantilization], capping off with the all-too-familiar iniquity of “journalistic bias.”
But the determining factor in the popular vs. serious dialectic is recognition, and the redistribution of sonic material rather than maintaining a seething, moment-by-moment soundscape. In popular music, that newness rides side-saddled with understanding, while serious music’s universal recognition relies on play-by-play externalizations on pre-ontological “энергетизм.” After yet another methodology, Adorno lays the golden egg. If the purpose of popular music is “distraction and inattention” from “boredom and effort,” where do desires come from?
Big Brother of course.
By catering to human-fundamentals [“Deficiency Needs”], the culture-industry makes us willing prisoners. Music becomes a cavern of self-conformational “organized noise.” Therefore, I stand by Adorno when he says popular-music listeners “do not understand music as a language in itself” [myself included]. They understand feelings/moods, sure, but not music. They look for musical escape, and so they find it, just another low-risk, low-cost drug. As the controversial artist Richard Serra says, “if something is free, you’re the product.” This is Adorno meaning when he says that we, as the voracious masses, are aware of our plight, yet still do nothing. We ignore the onerous pull towards truth for a post-truth chimera.
Do we preserve the saccharine façade or should we ask for more?
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