Adorno on Popular Music - Summary

In his writing on Popular Music, Theodor Adorno critically analyses the culture industry and highlights the differences between ‘popular music’ and ‘serious music’. Adorno argues how popular music has become ‘standardised’ due to the rise in consumerism e.g., successful hits are imitated and reproduced so companies continue to make a profit. As listeners, he believed we are unaware of this process of standardisation and have a false sense of ‘free choice’, which is known as ‘pseudo individualism’. Throughout this critical review, we will delve deep into these concepts to gain a true understanding of his argument. Additionally, we will assess the strengths and weaknesses to his argument, its disciplinary impact, contemporary relevance, as well as linking to contextual factors and key sociologists to support these claims.

Adorno believed that popular music was a product of the capitalist culture industry and was designed to manipulate and control the masses. In this article, we will explore Adorno's view on popular music and culture.

Music and The Culture Industry

According to Adorno, the culture industry is a system that produces cultural products for mass consumption. This includes popular music, films, television shows, and other forms of entertainment. Adorno believed that the culture industry was controlled by a small group of elites who manipulated the masses through their cultural products.

Standardization of Popular Music

One of Adorno's main criticisms of popular music was its standardization. He believed that popular music was designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, with catchy melodies and simple lyrics. This standardization allowed the culture industry to produce music on a mass scale and to manipulate the masses through their cultural products.

False Consciousness and Popular Taste

Adorno also believed that popular music created a false consciousness among the masses. He argued that the lyrics and melodies of popular music were designed to distract people from the real issues in society and to prevent them from questioning the status quo. In this way, popular music was used as a tool of social control. Pop music, in other words, is there to distract you from what's really going on, while real music is there to get you to open your eyes.

See also:

Adorno and Horkheimer

Adorno on Auschwitz, Barbarism and Slaughterhouses

Aesthetic Theory by Theodor Adorno

Dialectic of Enlightenment

Adorno's Concept of Authoritarian Personality Explained

Adorno's Relationship with Technology

Adorno's "Education After Auschwitz" - Summary

Adorno's Theory of Aesthetics Explained

Adorno's Negative Dialectics Explained

Adorno, the Culture Industry and Art as Resistance

Top Books by Theodor Adorno - A Reading List

Simon Frith - The Aesthetics of Popular music

Simon Frith - "Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music" - summary

part 1 - 2 - 3

In the last part of "Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music" Simon Firth examines the reasons which allow popular culture to fulfill its social functions which were identified in the preceding parts of "Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music". He offers four points for future analysis.

Frith's first point concerns the manner in which 20^th century popular culture has absorbed musical conventions of African-American music. His second point is the predominant place voice has in modern popular music and the fact that we react to the singer's voice whether we understand the lyrics or not, and that says something of their narrative structure. Frith's third point is that popular music is open to genre analysis and classification of the different ways in which music uses narrative structure to produce patterns of self identification and to express different emotions. Frith suggest the classification of popular music genres through their ideological functions and in accordance to the manner to present themselves as art, community of emotion.

For Frith, popular music has been, for the past 50 years, an important way in which we learn to understand ourselves as historical, ethnic, gender and class subjects. Pop music has the ability of positioning us in society but also a capacity to subvert social structures. As Frith puts it "pop tastes do not just derive from our socially constructed identities; they also help to shape them". Additionally, pop for Frith has an individualizing effect – "what pop can do is put into play a sense of identity that may or may not fit the way we are placed by other social forces", and this is why, in the end, Frith wonders whether the value of popular music is that is has "some sort of collective, disruptive cultural effect". 

Simon Frith - "Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music" - summary

part 1 - 2 - 3

See also: Adorno on Popular Music

Simon Frith - The Social Functions of Music

Simon Frith - "Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music" - summary

part 1 - 2 - 3

In "Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music" Simon Frith offers four functions of popular music which account for the manner in which value judgments are made. The first function of popular music that Frith notes is that of self definition and of creating a place in society. The pleasure of popular music is the pleasure of identification "with the music we like, with the performers of that music, with the other people who like it". Being a "fan" is being a part of something which says something about you, and Frith describes the fan hate mail he used to receive after negative reviews he wrote as a rock critic.

The second function music has according to Frith is that it provides "a way of managing the relationship between our public and private emotional life". In this respect Frith notes the obvious fact the many pop songs are love songs, and this is because "people need them to give shape and voice to emotions that otherwise cannot be expressed without embarrassment or incoherence". Love songs are a way of allocating emotional intensiveness and even shape to intimate feeling in a way that seems richer and more convincing. "people do not idolize singers because they wish to be them but because these singers seem able, somehow, to make available their own feeling – it is as if we get to know ourselves via music".

The third function of music that Frith lists is the shaping of popular memory, and the organization of our sense of time. Music has a "stasis" quality which enables it to stop time. On the other hand, "music in itself provides out most vivid experience of time passing" which is why music, at least good music, always has something nostalgic about it.

The fourth and final function of popular music according to Frith is that "popular music is something possessed". People feel like the "own" their preferred music in a manner which is not (only) material. As Frith puts it "the intensity of this relationship between taste and self definition seems peculiar to popular music – it is 'possessable' in ways that other cultural forms (except, perhaps, sports teams) – are not". According to Frith, an aesthetic of popular music is one which explains value judgments in relation to these four functions of poplar music for "in pop, transcendence marks not music's freedom from social forces but its patterning by them".

See also a summary on the social functions of music

See also: Adorno on Popular Music

Simon Frith - "Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music" - summary

part 1 - 2 - 3

Simon Frith – "Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music" – summary and review

Simon Frith - "Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music" - summary

part 1 - 2 - 3

In "Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music" Simon Frith examines the question of value judgments of pop music and the function of these judgments in shaping the experience of listening to popular music. Frith rejects the widely held notion that "serious music matters because it transcends social forces; popular music is aesthetically worthless because it is determined by them". On the contrary, according to Frith it is this sociological constructivist approach which enables an aesthetic of popular music.

Frith is asking about the nature of the link between certain social groups or subcultures to certain types of music. To start answering this, Frith claims that pop music preferences are not only the product of out socially constructed taste – they also take part in the construction of this taste. Frith also argues against the notion of popular music as essentially a commercial function for "even if pop tastes are the effects of social  conditioning and commercial manipulation, people still explain them to themselves in terms of value judgment".

Frith holds that popular music is a kind of Althusserian ideological apparatus which tells people who they are, and it does so by defining "its own aesthetic standard". Popular music for Frith does not (only) reveal taste, it creates it. When relating to measures of popularity like pop charts Frith argues that "their use is always for the creation (rather than reflection) of taste communities… 'women's music… is interesting not as music which somehow expresses 'women', but as music which seeks to define them".

The pop music experience according to Frith is that of positioning. Popular music is more open to personal appropriation than other forms of culture. On the other hand, while being a function which allows the formation of a personal identity, popular music is still determined "out there" and creates an imagined community of affiliation around it with which people can identify through music. And as Frith concludes the first part of "Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music" – "other cultural forms… can articulate and show off shared values and pride, but only music can make you feel them".

Simon Frith - "Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music" - summary

part 1 - 2 - 3

See also: Adorno on Popular Music