Basic Assumptions & Background
Perhaps some justification is needed for an examination of popular music. So I will preface it in this article with a brief exposition and discussion of the most intelligent and thoroughgoing critique of popular music available—T. W. Adorno’s ‘On Popular Music’.footnote1
Adorno makes an overt comparison between popular and ‘serious’ music and postulates standardization of form, detail and character as the essential characteristic of the former. In popular music, there is never a dialectical relationship between form and detail. The form remains aloof, a mere container in which the details are mechanically concatenated; it gives no ulterior logic to the details, and, in turn, is not actualized in them. Form exerts a repressive influence on detail. The detail is never allowed to develop and so becomes ‘a caricature of its own potentialities’; it is presented only so that its relationship to the rigid schema is clear at all times, so that it leads one back inevitably to the predictable. Papular music can never surprise, and can never be revolutionary. Already, we can discern the crux of Adorno’s thesis—that popular music is mere ‘social cement’.