Let's enlighten ourselves, shall we? While studying the theories of one Theodor W. Adorno, the German musician and philosopher, certain issues relating to music and popular culture are raised. Adorno claims that pop-music is "predigested", that the message behind the music gets lost behind our habit of concentrating on certain "trademarks" of the song, such as the chorus. Could this be? Is popular music just a standardized product that we consume in a sort-of assembly line process - just taking what comes to us? Now, in Adorno's time he was critiquing artists like Billie Holiday, who is now seen as a tragic beauty in music history. I wonder what he'd think about the current state of popular music.
We are faced with so much mindless dribble on television, radio, the internet, and other forms of media that sometimes it all seems to fuse together into one big puddle of drool. Adorno might say that popular culture and music act as a "social cement" holding us tired peasants together after a long day of intense physical labor (I did mention Adorno was a Marxist thinker, right?) Now, I listen to a lot of music that I would consider far from mediocre and very far from mindless dribble, as well as I'm sure all my readers (all 4 of you, since this is required reading) do too. My musical tastes are at the very least "social asphalt". I'm not sure that the more popular music gets the poorer the quality becomes, but it is fair to say that the more popular music gets, the more it begins to resemble everything else at the top of the Hot 100. Take for example three of the top five songs on the Billboard Top 100: Soulja Boy's "Crank Dat", Kanye West's "Stronger", and T-Pain's "Bartender". Aside from obvious budget issues while filming the music videos for these songs, it seems that Adorno would not be able to differentiate much between the three (let's forget that he is from a different era and this music might actually make his head explode), and would classify them as standardized. Let's take a look for ourselves...
Soulja Boy - Crank Dat
Kanye West - Stronger
T-Pain feat. Akon - Bartender
Hmmm... At least two of these songs are using the vocoder pretty well. What really sets these songs apart from each other? Before I go on, I should say that one could take any three songs that are "popular" right now, and Adorno would dismiss them as standard and pre-packaged, so I'm not just picking on T-Pain and 'Ye, I just took three of the five "most" popular. I actually see these songs as being very different from each other even though they can be lumped into the same genre, but if I start thinking like Adorno, then basically anything I've ever listened to is meaningless, and I am a brain-dead, capitalist, consumer slug. I'm interested to know what my loyal reader, ahem...readers think of this idea. Is all popular music just a pre-digested product intended to make money, or is it more than that? Beethoven was pretty popular in his time, what would Adorno have thought of him, one of the great musical masters of all time? Total crap? What would happen if Beethoven was playing at your local mall right now? Would you go? I would. I also heard Ghengis Khan just totally ravaged Oshman's Sporting Goods.
I'm very far from being an authority on Adorno and his pop-culture theories, in fact, I really don't know what I'm talking about at all; I just heard of the guy for the first time today (so hopefully some of this makes sense), but I dug his ideas, and I think they are still relevant today. OK, this deadline is cutting close, I'm looking forward to your thoughts. Word.
Just for fun, here's Kanye's inspiration (one of mine as well)...
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4 comments:
Geoff...The Adorno biography is informative and deep. Since he is considered a radio pioneer, I'd like to link him to my radio blog, but I'm changing the direction of my subject matter. For the time being, I'm going to direct you to my irrevrent Inane Ducks blog. If you continue showing Led Zep clips, I'll keep coming back.
Never heard of Adorno. I'm on my fourth book about Wilhelm Reich, an Adorno contemporary, yet your blog is the first contact I've had with him. It shows how specialized the pursuit of knowledge becomes.
I love that song. The last one.
Taking Theory of Pop Culture, huh?
I always wondered if Adorno meant all music that people like, or just music that is the most popular, like what you posted. For instance, some of the music I like wouldn't get very far in the mainstream music world.
It's an interesting and hard thing to think about. On the one hand you don't want to think that everything you listen to is meaningless, but on the other, he's kind of right.
As a general rule, I take what theorists say with a grain of salt. I'll think what I want to think about things and leave it at that.
I'm not feeling particularly deep tonight...I do have my moments, just very rarely it seems. So, I think that music isn't meaningless if you can attach a feeling and emotion to it. Some music I can. Some music really inspires me and makes me feel very passionate about the song and understand what the artist was trying to express, other music falls flat and is just there...it just depends. You have to search it out. Just because it's number one on the charts doesn't mean it's meaningless. It just depends on the emotion a person attaches to it.
Also, I would go see Beethoven at the mall. I would also eat Bill & Ted's Excellent Cereal.
ヘ(^_^ヘ)(ノ^_^)ノ
Excellent post! I'm a Frankfurt School fan, so your Adorno discussion was very interesting to me. Did you encounter him in a BECA class?
You touched on quite a few of the key points within the Adorno/FS/Marxist critique model. The "social cement" idea is a really gritty one to get into, especially when you're talking about a "people's movement" in music, like rap and hip-hop. The question of whether those forms are still "from the people" as opposed to culture-industry products is pretty wide open, as you've evoked here in a very engaging, readable way. Nice work.
Just a few bugs to fix:
"Billie Holiday" (sp)
"capitalist, consumer, slug" (omit the last comma)
"OK" or "okay" ("Ok" looks like a word pronounced "ock")
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