Adorno’s attitude to popular music is quite condescending, and at times quite humorous. ‘This inexorable device guarantees that regardless of what aberrations occur, the hit will lead back to the same familiar experience, and nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced.’, here Adorno is referring to the standardisation of popular music, he writes, ‘…popular music is standardised, even where the attempt is made to circumvent standardisation’, a lot of today’s songs can advocate this, structurally the song is the same, but there may be a section in the middle which is completely different, before returning to the standard formula of the song.
Later on in the essay, he writes how this structural standardisation leads to a typical, pre-determined response from the listener, which is completely diverse to the ideal of existing in a free, liberal society. This suggests the listeners are completely docile, and in this state ‘…popular music divests the listener of his spontaneity and promotes conditioned reflexes.’ It is almost suggesting the music conditions and trains the listeners to react in a certain way, like soldiers in their training. Adorno states that the music is pre-digested, like the Reader’s Digest, a collection of condensed and sometimes re-written articles.
Another reason there is this standardisation, and similarity among the popular songs, is due to imitation. Adorno claims that when one song has been a huge success, many other songs, imitate the formula that song is based on in an attempt to create that same success.
The next key point in the essay is pseudo-individualisation, this is a false consciousness that popular music songs create as the listener believes they are being individual. It’s in this process that the docility of the listeners leads them to overlook that what they are listening to has been pre-digested.
Adorno then goes to explain how popular music has a hold on the masses, by stating that the listeners only use this music as a distraction from everyday life of the working class as it is a form of entertainment, and entertainment does not require attention, or concentration. The patterned and pre-digested formula the songs feature, can induce relaxation on a class of people fed up with fears and anxieties of life such as; war, unemployment and loss of income.
A video that I feel represents some of these points is Cheryl Cole's Fight For This Love... My 8 year old cousin claims to love this song... Does he just like the fact he can dance to it and nod his head like everyone else, because I am pretty sure he doesn't understand the meaning of the song.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMiy_UsrPDs&feature=channel
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