Saturday, January 27, 2007
(4:16 PM) | Dave Belcher:
Pop
[I posted a version of this on my site, but just realized today that it would probably be better suited here].All of the following selections are taken from Theodor W. Adorno's "Popular Music" (Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1988), 21-38).
"To this day, pop music has scarcely participated in the evolution of material that has been going on in serious music for more than fifty years. Pop music does not balk at novelties, of course, but it deprives them of function and free unfoldment by using them--down to the seemingly haphazard dissonances of some jazz trends--as mere splotches of color, ornaments added to a strictly traditional tongue. They have no power over that tongue; they are not even properly integrated in it [....] What is incessantly boosted as exceptional grows dull, and the festivities to which light music permanently summons its adherents, under the name of feasts for the ears, are dismal everyday fare" (24-5).
Can pop music (which it seems, for Adorno, must today include nearly every style of music on the radio--except for the misnamed "classical" music) ever reach beyond this banality? What can we make of such "popular" bands as U2 (in their Pop period), or Radiohead, or Modest Mouse, or Coldplay? Or, what about OutKast, Cee-Lo Green, or Kanye West? Are they reduced to their market share?
"Standardization extends from the overall plan down to details. The basic rule in the American practice that governs production everywhere is that the refrain consists of 32 bars with a 'bridge,' a part initiating the repetition, in the middle [....] Nothing really new is allowed to intrude, nothing but calculated effects that add some spice to the ever-sameness without imperiling it. And these effects in turn take their bearing from schemata [....] The higher music's relation to its historical form is dialectical. It catches fire on those forms, melts them down, makes them vanish and return in vanishing. Popular music, on the other hand, uses the types as empty cans into which the material is pressed without interacting with the forms. Unrelated to the forms, the substance withers and at the same time belies the forms, which no longer serve for compositional organization.
"The effect of song hits--more precisely put, perhaps: their social role--might be circumscribed as that of patterns of identification. It is comparable to the effect of movie stars, of magazine cover girls, and of the beauties in hosiery and toothpaste ads. The hists not only appeal to a 'lonely crowd' of the atomized; they reckon with the immature, with those who cannot express their emotions and experiences, who either never had the power of expression or were crippled by cultural taboos [....] In an imaginary but psychologically emotion-lade domain, the listener who remembers a hit song will turn into the song's ideal subject, into the person for whom the song ideally speaks. At the same time, as one of many who identify with that fictitious subject, that musical I, he will feel his isolation ease as he himself feels integrated into the community of 'fans.' In whistling such a song he bows to a ritual of socialization, althogh beyond this unarticulated subjective stirring of the moment his isolation continues unchanged" (25-7).
No doubt there are many places where "standard" forms of music are challenged from within (even in the overly poppy music of someone like Gavin DeGraw where the chorus does not appear within the first minute...as in most radio pop), but would this constitute something new, for Adorno? Really, it seems we must look to the listener more than the production...to the "event of subjectivization," as Badiou might say.
"It is the banality of present-day popular music--a banality relentlessly controlled in order to make it salable--which brands that music with its crucial trait. That trait is vulgarity. We might almost suspect that this is the most avid concern of the audience, that the maxim of their musical mentality is indeed Brecht's line: 'But I dont want to be human!' Any musical reminder of themselves, of the doubtfulness and possible uplifting of their own existence, will embarass them. That they are really cut off from their potential is the very reason why it infuriates them to be reminded by art" (28).
We are reminded here of Adorno's negative dialectic, instilling a principle of non-identity into the "situation" (to borrow from Badiou again). The issue, it seems, with most pop music is that it is not (is not even possible to be?) subjectivized as an objective non-identity within the identity of the situation...it fails to take root as a motivation, of sorts, for the reconciliation of the non-identity in society at large.
"On the other hand [....] there is still some good bad music left today, along with all the bad good music. Under the pressures of the marketplace much genuine talent is absorbed by popular music and cannot be entirely crushed even there. Even in the thoroughly commercialized late phase primary ideas, beautifully arched melodies, pregnant rhythmic and harmonic turns will be encountered, particularly in America. But the spheres can only be defined from the extremes, not from the transitions, and besideds, even the most gifted escapades within popular music are marred by considerations paid to the appointed guardians of salability. Boneheadedness is shrewdly calculated and revved up by highly qualified musicians, and there are many more of those throughout the realm of pop music than the serious one's sense of superiority likes to admit" (32).
Not all are lost, it would at first appear...but the market is exceptionally good at co-opting even these and turning them to its own ends:
"Each single song hit is its own advertisement and a boost for its title [....] The whole entertainment music would scarcely have the scope and effect it has without the element Americans call 'plugging.' A song chosen for bestsellerdom will be drummed into the listeners' ears until they cannot help recognizing it and hence--as the psychologists of compositional advertising correctly figure--will love it" (34).
With this we remember U2's recent ad for iTunes...perhaps all are lost after all (and the ironies of the capital campaign of LiveAid, the "Red" campaign in cooperation with the Gap, etc. abound).
But, with that in mind, we have to ask about so-called "serious music" today as well. There is no doubt that people are not rushing to the stores to buy Philip Glass' recent choral recording, for instance (nor are "producers" merely catering to "salability," though of course this is not foreign to that "market"). Nevertheless, wouldn't a sociology of serious music be just as necessary...to discover the presence or absence of subjectivization? I haven't done that, so I have no real knowledge, but it seems like even serious music fails to be serious for us any longer...and does that mean that we have killed music--once our god, now replaced by "Empire"?
