NP? review of Adorno book

[Doug Millison]

http://www.calendarlive.com/books/bookreview/cl-bk-adamkirsch25aug25.story?coll=cl%2Dbookreview


Thinking Hard, Listening Deeply 

 ESSAYS ON MUSIC, By Theodor W. Adorno, Edited by
Richard Leppert, Translated by Susan H. Gillespie and
others, University of California Press: 744 pp.,
$34.95

"Music is at bottom an expressive art, analogous to
language, though it does not speak in concepts or
specifics. Rather, in a semi-mystical sense, "music
tends toward pure naming, the absolute unity of object
and sign." But from Beethoven to Schoenberg, composers
increasingly felt that what they had to express--the
growing alienation of the individual in society--was
at odds with the musical language they inherited.
Tonality and traditional form became inadequate to the
mounting sense of crisis produced by capitalism." 

[...] "For Adorno, popular music is anti-music, a
product shoved down the throats of passive consumers
by a culture industry devoted to profit. It is not
just a substitute for good music but a drug, a poison:
"Regressive, too, is the role which contemporary mass
music plays in the psychological household of its
victims. They are not merely turned away from more
important music, but they are confirmed in their
neurotic stupidity.... "
Whereas art music is demanding and enlightening, pop
music is formulaic and soothingly familiar: "The
composition hears for the listener." At the heart of
this Marxist analysis is the idea that such music is
an opiate for the masses, encouraging a false and
unjustified pleasure in the midst of actual despair
and alienation. Enjoying jazz is a form of false
consciousness: "The illusion of a social preference
for light music as against serious is based on that
passivity of the masses which makes the consumption of
light music contradict the objective interest of those
who consume it." The passion of this critique leads
Adorno into penetrating, detailed analysis of the way
pop music is produced, sold and heard. Writing in the
1930s and 1940s, he comes up with an analysis of
"plugging"--the selling of hit songs--that uncannily
describes the Britney Spears phenomenon. He
convincingly explains the phenomenon of
"corniness"--the mockery of the trends of the recent
past, familiar to any watcher of "That '70s Show"--as
a form of self-hatred: "[L]ikes that have been
enforced upon listeners provoke revenge the moment the
pressure is relaxed. They compensate for their 'guilt'
in having condoned the worthless by making fun of it."
This analysis is bound to provoke resistance. Adorno
neglects the important category of irony, so central
to our dealings with mass culture, which allows us
simultaneously to use and reject the inferior products
that surround us. He also refuses to see any
gradations in popular culture--what appears to us as
the wit of the Gershwins, the liberating improvisation
of Louis Armstrong or the authentic testimony of
Billie Holiday vanishes for Adorno into a thick slab
of pablum. "




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