"Sell Out with Me Tonight"

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

 > Is popular music as monolithic as he would have us believe? <

Of course it isn't. Actually Adorno literally refused to seriously 
listen to any popular music after 1941. It would perhaps have endangered 
the theory. And since he considered his theory to be somehow like art - 
the title of his last work, "Ästhetische Theorie", presents its double 
sense by intention -, this risk could of course not be taken ... As much 
as I recommend Adorno's thoughts on classical music, one shouldn't 
overestimate what he has to say on popular music. And TV-serials like 
"Mad Men", "Breaking Bad" or "The Wire" (at least the first three 
seasons are solid gold) can in their artistic complexity not be 
explained with the relative simple model of the Kulturindustrie, which 
was born in World War two and thus always emphasizes the relation of 
media output and political propaganda. That "the cultural industry 
strikes everything with similarity" might still be true nevertheless 
when we consider Facebook & Co to be the actual incarnations of the 
cultural industry today. So many selfies and they all look the same ...

Here's a piece of popular music I like a lot these days:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM3Hex4n-Ns

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 > Ibid., p. 438. Adorno, rather overstating the rigidity of the 
schematics, goes into specifics of standardization; ‘Best known is the 
rule that the chorus consists of thirty-two bars and that the range is 
limited to one octave and one note. The general types of hits are also 
standardized: not only the dance types, the rigidity of whose pattern is 
understood, but also the “characters” such as mother songs, home songs, 
nonsense or “novelty” songs, pseudo-nursery rhymes, laments for a lost 
girl.’ (Ibid., p. 438)

9 ‘There are a number of points to be made about Adorno’s analysis [in 
‘On Popular Music’]. First, we must acknowledge that he is writing in 
1941. Popular music has changed a great deal since then. However, having 
said that, Adorno never thought to change his analysis following the 
changes that occurred in popular music up until his death in 1969. Is 
popular music as monolithic as he would have us believe? For example, 
does pseudo-individualization really explain the advent of rock’n’roll 
in 1956, the emergence of the Beatles in 1962, the music of the 
counterculture in 1965?’ John Storey, /Cultural Theory and Popular 
Culture: An Introduction/ (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2012), p. 69.<


On 22.08.2014 21:32, Dave Monroe wrote:
> https://www.pynchon.net/owap/article/view/55 

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