Performing Arts Field Paper

Adorno’s Case Against Popular Music
Lee B. Brown

Adorno’s views about art in general—high and low—are nested within a complex analysis of the history and social function of art. This function, he believes, is subject to historical change. (Compare modern symphonic concert music with music in its earliest forms— when it was bound up with the fabric of human activities such as birth, death, war, marriage, and work.) Adorno also underpins his examination of the arts with a general critical theory of culture. With the rise of capitalism, he maintains, the things humans produce have lost touch with their original value for the sake of a secondary value, which Adorno calls exchange value. Put briefly, the capitalist system attempts to treat every effort of human productivity—including the arts—as a marketable commodity.
In response to this condition, art has been gradually forced to turn its back on the world and to cultivate a sphere unto itself. Corresponding with this impulse toward autonomy, art has cultivated the philosophical stance commonly labeled “purist” or “formalist.” By these means, art attempts to resist the invasive effects of commodification on all aspects of life, and to serve as a standard against which actual life can be measured. The downside is that in its isolated state, art can all too easily become a plaything of bourgeois culture. So compromised, it becomes a source of escapism, or a purveyor of easy, falsely reassuring views of our lives. The life of high art under capitalism is thus a precarious one. Although suffering from virtually contradictory pressures, genuine art must hold out against the socioeconomic forces that rule our lives.
By contrast, the popular arts—particularly those we nowadays term “mass” arts—thrive contentedly within the commodity system. Indeed, they are commodities par excellence.
Theodor Adorno’s views on popular music are expressed in many writings, but nowhere more accessibly than in his long essay, “On Popular Music” (1941). The examples Adorno uses there are obviously dated. (His reference to “the King” is not to Elvis but to Benny Goodman, the so-called “King of Swing.”) However, if Adorno were still alive, he would no doubt argue that in a hyper-mediatized twenty-first century environment, his position is even more relevant. The following discussion occasionally refers to more recent examples.
The basic concepts of Adorno’s analysis are the interrelated ones of simplicity and standardization. The tunes, rhythms, and harmonies of popular music, he asserts, are built out of simple, repeatable parts.
Consider, first, the hypnotic character of the well-known rhythmic pulse of most American popular music. Nowadays, most listeners to rock, jazz, disco, punk, techno, and country music are unaware of the historical source of this metronomic feature of their favored music. In fact, if one traces back through rock and rhythm ’n’ blues, to swing and jazz, and before that to ragtime, one comes to the ancestor of them all—the military marching band. What, Adorno, asks, is the point of a marching band—except to regiment people? The rigid beat of popular music has a similarly regimenting effect, he believes.
Adorno also analogizes the omnipresent beat of popular music with hypnosis. Alternatively, he sees the relentless beat—which must go on and on … and on—as drug- like. Consider the similarities, indeed the literal interaction, between many forms of popular music and drugs. At the same time, the mechanical character of the omnipresent beat of American popular music illustrates Adorno’s view of it as an industrial product, like things made on assembly lines, like ordinary appliances.
To understand Adorno’s view, we must bear in mind that most American popular music has been embedded in one of two typical forms.
A basic form for pop music—and the chief focus of Adorno’s discussion—is the thirty- two-measure show tune. Such a piece is distributed across four eight-bar segments, in which two tunes are organized according to the pattern AABA. This is the basic model for the composers of Broadway music, such as Irving Berlin and George Gershwin, as well as many rock era tunes by such groups as the Beatles. It is the model for thousands of pop standards such as “Body and Soul” and “Stormy Weather.”
Although he didn’t do so, Adorno could have further supported his case by citing the other fundamental pop music form—the blues. The blues is twelve measures long and moves predictably through a standard progression of chords. When set to words, the blues involves two lines, the first sung twice, the second once, as in the following: “I woke up this morning with an awful aching head/[Repeat]/Because my man had left me with nothin’ but an empty bed.” Much of jazz, rock, and, of course, “rhythm and blues” derive their musical patterns from the blues.
Because of the similarity of such forms, we can think of the creation of popular songs after the analogy of a “cookie cutter.” But Adorno’s favored analogy is an appliance, such as a washing machine or an automobile with their replaceable parts. If one part is broken or doesn’t work well, another can replace it. For example, when Broadway composers found that the B section of a song did not work, they often simply borrowed one from another song.
The subject matter of popular music is equally simplistic. The topics are the standard sentimental ones—fantasy narratives of love, in which all the real trials of life are magically resolved. Even the dark shadows in pop songs, Adorno would probably say, are formulaic. (The singer Lyle Lovett has wittily boiled down the love content of country music as “Boy meets girl, boy shoots girl.”)
It is no surprise, given the foregoing, that Adorno regards popular music—both in form and content—as appealing mainly to infantile impulses. He terms the desire for sheer repetition “regressive,” a psychoanalytic term connoting an infantile fixation. He regards such obsessive pleasures as masochistic ones—like biting your nails. The activity is partly painful, and you never get full satisfaction from it, but you can’t stop doing it. This infantilism is also registered in the music’s vocabulary. (Consider how often lovers are addressed as “baby,” “mama,” or “papa.”) No doubt, the music of early twenty-first century rock bands or hip-hop groups is grittier than the popular music Adorno heard. But he would be struck by the way late-century pop music still celebrates adolescent values and attitudes.
Because of its simplicity in form and content, popular music offers little challenge to the mind. Adorno likes to say that the music hears for the listener, by which he means that it leaves no mental work for us to do for ourselves. This fits his view that modern listeners are deficient in real musical literacy. (Consider the degree to which stereos have replaced pianos as the chief source of music in the home.) As a result, our relationship to music is nowadays more a matter of passive consumption than of music making.
To illustrate his overall argument, Adorno makes pointed comparisons between examples of “classical” and popular music. A work such as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony does not—like a piece of popular music—consist of a few simple parts revolving repetitiously for our passive reception. First, as a totality, it constitutes an elaborate design, within which its subsidiary parts—or “movements”—have complex and subtle relationships to each other. Second, each movement is an elaborate structure involving complex relationships between the parts. Third, the symphony effects elaborate transformations of its musical sources. For instance, the scherzo movement of the Fifth Symphony is a form derivative from a relatively simple dance form. But in Beethoven’s hands, the simple elements have been transformed almost beyond recognition. Instead of consisting of polite tunes repeated monotonously, Beethoven’s scherzo is wonderfully complex. Adorno takes pains to explain how it makes use of a powerful thematic duality, involving—in his words—a “creeping” theme in the strings, contrasted with a “stone-like” response in the woodwinds. As these interact, a tremendous sense of tension and foreboding is set up, which serves, in turn, as a dramatic introduction to the triumphant music of the last movement.
In such “serious” music, what would otherwise be simple is made complex, developmental, and dramatic. We are challenged to “track” what is happening. Further, we could not replace bits of the music of the Fifth with alternatives without ruining its overall sense. By contrast, the placement of the bits in a piece of popular music is fortuitous, devoid of a “logic” of musical progression.
Adorno takes it for granted that standardization and individualization are at odds. Popular music lacks a hallmark of genuine art, which always speaks with an individualized voice. Popular music, by contrast, does not speak with anyone’s voice, any more than a sewing machine does. Instead, popular music makes use of what Adorno calls pseudo- individualization. A good example is what is known in the industry as a “hook”—a simple but distinctive chordal pattern, beat, or theme, by means of which record producers try to grab our attention.
Through pseudo-individualism, the industry creates music that sounds like a genuinely personal expression, even though it really isn’t. (Compare the insincere formulae with which we pretend to express genuine feelings to each other in countless social situations.) Likewise, institutions such as “Top Forty” ratings and the “Grammies” only create a pretence that competing pop groups are highly individualized. Adorno believes the comparisons are largely bogus, and that the differences between various pop groups are really superficial. He characterizes these institutions as examples of “plugging the field.” In the narrow sense, song “plugging” on American radio and TV is simply the familiar process by which new recordings are marketed by being aired over and over again. By “plugging the field,” Adorno is talking about the way a complex system of practices, such as the Grammies, gives the products of the industry as a whole an undeserved sense of importance.
Some popular music—jazz, most notably—uses improvisation as a form of pseudo- individualism. Contrary to the idea that the jazz improviser is freely expressing himself, Adorno believes that the possibilities of anything really unique happening in such music are extremely limited. The music, he insists, is always framed within the context of a musical “prison,” the walls of which include the ongoing beat, the rigid forms, and the narrow confines of the music’s harmonic potentialities. The individualism is superficial.
We have been speaking of the standardization of the music itself. Going hand in hand with this, Adorno believes, is the process by which the audience’s reactions are standardized. Just as we are programmed to expect the standardized food at McDonald’s, we are programmed to expect the music we get. (Adorno would reject the widely repeated claim that the commodity industry “only gives people what they want.”)
In sum, by means of its network of strategies, e.g., the cheap pleasures and escapist fantasies of freedom and individuality with which the system provides us, the commodity industry realizes several cooperating goals:
1. 1  Because we become passive consumers of the product, our sales resistance is lowered. We the product, in short.
2. 2  Our acquired need for simplicity and repetition reduces demands on the industry for genuine creativity. Music producers need only make more of the very thing they have already trained us to want—a relatively simple project.
3. 3  The planned obsolescence of the products of the entertainment industry insures a continual need for more of the same.
4. 4  We learn to identify with the whole system that produces these commodities. We become “reconciled,” as Adorno puts it, to the capitalism in which we live, move, and have our being. (Consider, for instance, how we have learned to like going to shopping malls.) Adorno goes so far as to describe popular music as a means by which the system achieves “musical dictatorship” over the masses.
5. 5  The converse point is that popular music, unlike serious classical music, is not able to resist the system. Indeed, one of the functions of popular music is to assimilate consumers to the system. One might reply that popular music has often been a basis for protest. However, Adorno would likely point out, first, that the industry has a way of converting social protest into fashion, while leaving a merely superficial impression of resistance. (Consider the way the industry found it easy to turn the revolutionary images of Mao Tse-Tung and Che Guevara into fashion chic.) Idealizing views of jazz have often celebrated it as an expression of rebellion. Adorno claims, however, that the jazz musician lives in a hostile but basically “compliant” relationship to the system that promotes his music. He would not find it remarkable that the cult of pop stardom typically overtakes “underground” bands such as Nirvana. Commercial success is always the real agenda.
The kind of artistic resistance that Adorno takes seriously is exemplified by the modernist music of composers like Arnold Schönberg or Alban Berg. The almost painful abstractness of such music, he believes, is the truly serious means by which we can hold out against the superficial pleasures of popular culture.
6. 6  General advantages accrue to the commodity industry as a result of the way the foregoing factors interact with each other to insure the system’s success. The consumers keep consuming and the music factories keep humming.
In explaining how popular recordings work their way into the consciousness of listeners, Adorno provides a theory about the stages through which the listener passes as she is both figuratively and literally sold on the music:
1. Vague remembrance. A listener hears a record on the radio and says, at first, “I have heard something like this somewhere before.”
2. Actual identification. At a second stage, as Adorno puts it, a “light” of recognition goes on. The listener knows that this specific tune is one she’s heard before.
3. Subsumption by label. At this stage, she assigns a name to the tune, to the band playing it, the album title, or some of the lyrics.
4. Self-reflection on the act of identification. At this point, Adorno helps himself to a psychoanalytic idea. The listener now identifies with the tune. She has the feeling that it is becoming part of her. Amidst the chaotic whirl of cultural commodities, she knows her way with this item. In this connection, Adorno would have relished the modern disc jockey practice of playing records by request. When the DJ says, “This one goes out to Bob and Sally,” it is as if the airwaves themselves acknowledge Bob and Sally’s private connection with that song. Bob and Sally, of course, say, “They’re playing our song.” The song is made for them—or so it seems. Adorno might have added that, along with the identification with the tune, the listener is at the same time identifying with other listeners who are also bonding with that piece of music. This now sets her and her friends apart from the others who “haven’t a clue.” Adorno would probably take note, in this connection, of the way listeners at the same time identify with the pop stars who perform the music. Consider the extremes to which the cult of the pop star has been carried in our time.
5. Psychological transfer. Finally, the identification with the song becomes so tight that it amounts to a two-way relationship. At this point, the music has acquired an apparent glow of objective value. It is judged to be good in itself. Clearly, Adorno regards this as a kind of illusion.
Adorno does not take the process further, but it would be easy to do so, once we understand his general perspective. Consider two further steps he might appreciate:
6. Disillusionment. The shallowness of the music eventually becomes apparent. Listeners become sick of it, and the love affair is over. A listener and her peer group now begin to feel a growing contempt for people who haven’t moved beyond that piece of music. It is now “corny,” “uncool,” and so are those who still listen to it. But this further stage beautifully caps off the whole process, because it marks the fact that listeners are now ready to consume new music.
7. Recycling. After a sufficient amount of time has passed, a music recording can be recycled as a “golden oldie,” thus enabling the industry to sell it to consumers a second time around. The repackaging of the collected music of famous rock bands is just one example.
Adorno’s account is challenging, but subject to the following criticisms:
1. 1  First, Adorno throws all popular music into one bag. He puts the best music of Cole Porter and George Gershwin on the same level as the most cynical products of the music industry. He seems incapable of making the kinds of discriminations that are requisite for making informed aesthetic judgments about such music. There really are stylistic differences between the Rolling Stones and the Beatles—as anyone in the know can tell you.
In the same vein, it seems obvious that Adorno underestimates the degree to which popular music—like classical music—can transcend the pressures of the commodity industry and create music of enduring value. Who would deny, in all seriousness, that Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, or the Beatles did not do so?
2. 2  A reason for the foregoing mistake is that Adorno refuses—or is unable—to hear forms of nonclassical music in their own terms. He gauges popular music by the parameters of classical music. Consider the matter of tonality, for example. Much of African American music makes use of so-called “blue” notes that arise because certain notes of the standard European scale are, in the context of popular music, flatted or bent down in pitch. This practice gives much of our blues, jazz, and rock its distinctive sound. Adorno believes that when we listen to these “bent” notes, our ear struggles to correct them back to their “correct” pitch. In other words, we hear them as if they were mistakes in European scales. On this matter, one might charge Adorno with tonal chauvinism. (What, after all, constitutes “right” notes in a world in which European tonality is only one alternative among many?) The complaint can be generalized. Adorno does not reckon with the fact that much of the music of the world is not governed by the hierarchies taken for granted in European classical music. In such music, for instance, harmonic development is paramount, whereas in African music—and much of the American popular music that derives from it—specialized modes of rhythmic elaboration are paramount. Indeed, on Adorno’s own terms, one might flip the of musical priority around in to arrive at a conclusion opposite from his. Gauged by standards reflecting the practices of a Latin percussion ensemble, with its complicated polyrhythms, the music of Bach and Beethoven might seem simplistic. Adorno’s failure in this regard is ironic, for he would be the first to fault listeners who are not able or willing to make similarly refined discriminations within the sphere of classical music.
3. A connected error on Adorno’s part is that, in making his contrast between popular and classical music, Adorno unfairly picks the worst examples of the former while focusing on the best examples of the latter. Surely, tedious and banal examples of classical music abound. Operas that were popular in the seventeenth century may please no one today at all.
4. Classical music and popular music seem to be on all fours in still one further respect. Consider the possibility that not even Beethoven’s music can survive the endless replaying it receives on “good music” radio stations. Can even the finest music, by sheer repetition, not become a sophisticated form of Muzak? (How often do even dedicated listeners to “good music” stations actually sit down and listen?) Perhaps neither kind of music can survive the kind of replay that is made possible by contemporary communications technology.
5. Is Adorno right in claiming that popular music never resists the system? Contrary to his implicit judgment, “submissive” is hardly a label we would apply to the art of Charlie Mingus, Ornette Coleman, or John Coltrane. The tragic tone of the latter’s “Alabama” is surely as resistant as any music by Arnold Schönberg. To toss Coltrane’s music into a heap with the most cynical products of the Time-Warner music industry is laughable.
6. Although Adorno is right about the socioeconomic pressures that bear on popular music, he underestimates the fact that classical music, no less than pop, is subject to the pressures of the commodity industry. The popularity of trendy opera stars—such as the Three Tenors—no less than that of many rock stars, is the partial result of high- pressure advertising campaigns. The concert music industry, too, has ways of “plugging the field.” Indeed, it is arguable that the “serious” music system creates a standardized kind of listener no less than the pop industry.