Page 245 - Cultural Theory

Edwards-3516-Ch-12.qxd 5/9/2007 6:08 PM Page 234

••• Eamonn Carrabine •••

which I discuss below, it is important to recognize that at the time he was formulating
his ideas in the 1930s and 1940s, the sound of big band jazz filled the airwaves,
charts and dance halls where the flamboyant dance the jitterbug had replaced the
Charleston as the latest style attracting moral condemnation, while the Tin Pan Alley
songwriting system that had been dominant since the early 1900s was ‘characterised
by simple rhyming formulas and harmonies’ (Shuker, 2001: 19). However, up until
his death in 1969 Adorno continued to equate popular music with Tin Pan Alley
sounds and ignored, among other things, rock ‘n’ roll in the mid-1950s, Beatlemania
in the early 1960s and the counter-culture movement of the late 1960s. (Adorno,
1976). This lack of attention to his own historical and social location partly explains
Adorno’s difficulties in addressing cultural change in music making, ‘as he continued
to value a particular and very specific form of popular music’ (Longhurst, 1995: 13).
For many contemporary authors Adorno’s characterization of a monolithic culture
industry, elitist denial of the aesthetics of popular music, and his condescending
accounts of the uses of popular music have all been roundly and routinely criticized.
For instance, Jason Toynbee (2000: 6) largely accepts Adorno’s arguments against
standardization and pseudo-individualization, but goes on to state that the two
terms are actually key aesthetic attributes of popular music: deliberate repetition and
subtle variation. The problem is that Adorno cannot appreciate them. In other
words, ‘he can see funk but he can’t hear it’ (Toynbee, 2000: 6). The general response
to Adorno’s pessimism has been to broadly agree with his diagnosis of the organiza-
tion of mass cultural production, while ignoring the complexities of his aesthetic
theory of music and thoroughly rejecting his account of passive consumption (Frith,
1996: 13). The main failing is his inability to think through the relationships
between production and consumption as he reduces complex social processes down
to simple psychological responses. Adorno’s view is that how the music is produced
determines its meaning and significance for an undiscriminating mass audience. In
contrast, Benjamin’s more optimistic argument that meaning is derived through con-
sumption has proved to be the more influential account. Nevertheless, Adorno’s
point that modern capital is burdened by the problem of overproduction and works
to create false needs has left a lasting legacy and helped to academically legitimize
studies of popular music, which I now discuss.

Corporate control and artistic creativity

A particularly good example of this legacy is Steve Chapple and Reebee Garafalo’s
(1977) account of how capitalist corporations have turned popular music into a com-
modity (Harker, 1980; and Wallis and Malm, 1984; others include Eliot, 1989;
Goodman, 1997). While these authors share Adorno’s insistence on examining the
economic base of pop, they do not dismiss the music and are aware of its subversive
potential among youth movements. Nevertheless, Chapple and Garafalo (1977)
stress that throughout the twentieth century only a handful of companies have been
responsible for the majority of recorded music manufactured and distributed in the
United States. They estimate that between five and eight companies have made and
• 234 •