Page 244 - Cultural Theory

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••• Popular Music •••

‘part-interchangeability’ is little different to the production processes found in other
mass consumer goods. For instance, the mass-produced car has been used to describe
Adorno’s point ‘as virtually any mechanical part from any 1956 Cadillac Eldorado
(e.g. a carburettor) can be substituted for any other 1956 Eldorado without disturb-
ing the functional unity of the overall mechanism’ (Gendron, 1986: 20). Adorno
(1941: 306) goes on to argue that once a successful formula is hit upon, it is exploited
to commercial exhaustion, culminating in ‘the crystallization of standards’ and
stunting innovation. In order to disguise standardization, the music industry makes
claims to originality and product variation through what Adorno terms ‘pseudo-
individualization’, by which he means the ways that cultural objects of mass produc-
tion are endowed ‘with the halo of free choice’. The second target of his critique is
that popular music induces passive listening in order to maintain a ‘hold on the
masses’ (ibid.: 309). In certain key respects his argument is a polemic against Walter
Benjamin’s (1936) optimistic reading of the emerging media technologies in his
essay, ‘The work of art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Benjamin’s position
is that the technology of the mass media had changed the relationship of the masses
to art and opened up exciting new and more democratic possibilities, as creation had
now become a collective rather than an individual process. For instance, while tradi-
tional art required appreciation through an almost fierce concentration of effort on
the ‘aura’, the new media forms are consumed in a distracted manner, which has the
potential to challenge traditional, conservative forms of authority. In contrast,
Adorno’s (1941: 310) more despairing view is that listeners ‘are distracted from the
demands of reality by entertainment which does not demand attention’. The ‘strain
and boredom’ of work ‘lead[s] to avoidance of effort’ in leisure time and the ‘impos-
sibility of escape causes the widespread attitude of inattention toward popular music’
(ibid.: 311). The debate between Adorno and Benjamin continues to be important in
studies of popular music. For instance, it has been argued that from Adorno ‘come
analyses of the economics of entertainment’, while it is further claimed that
Benjamin laid the ground for analyses of how youth subcultures ‘create cultures in
their acts of consumption’ (Frith, 1983: 57, emphasis in original). 2
The third critical point is that popular music is a form of ‘social cement’ that binds
listeners into subordination through inducing two different forms of ‘psychical
adjustment’: ‘the ‘rhythmically obedient’ type and the ‘emotional’ type’ (Adorno,
1941: 311–12). This distinction is developed from arguments initially made in a 1938
essay, ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’ (in Adorno,
1991), where he claims that popular music audiences regress to a submissive state
and can be manipulated just as easily by fascist dictators as capitalist corporations.
The first type is the person who blindly dances along with the crowd to the rhythm
of their own oppression. As he disdainfully puts it, dancers ‘affirm and mock their
loss of individuality’ (Adorno, [1938] 1991: 53). The second type is an alienated and
obsessive individual who sentimentally wallows in music ‘in order to be allowed to
weep’ (Adorno, 1941: 313).
Adorno’s thinking, as the reader might by now have suspected, is not without its prob-
lems. Although there is something unsettling about these derisory characterizations,

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