Theodor W. Adorno

On Popular Music

With the assistance and collaboration of George Simpson


The Musical Material


The Two Spheres of Music

[1] Popular music, which produces the stimuli we are here investigating, is 
usually characterized by its difference from serious music. This difference is 
generally taken for granted and is looked upon as a difference of levels 
considered so well defined that most people regard the values within them as 
totally independent of one another. We deem it necessary, however, first of all 
to translate these so-called levels into more precise terms, musical as well as 
social, which not only delimit them unequivocally but throw light upon the whole 
setting of the two musical spheres as well.

[2] One possible method of achieving this clarification would be a historical 
analysis of the division as it occurred in music production and of the roots of 
the two main spheres. Since, however, the present study is concerned with the 
actual function of popular music in its present status, it is more advisable to 
follow the line of characterization of the phenomenon itself as it is given 
today than to trace it back to its origins. This is the more justified as the 
division into the two spheres of music took place in Europe long before American 
popular music arose. American music from its inception accepted the division as 
something pre-given, and therefore the historical background of the division 
applies to it only indirectly. Hence we seek, first of all, an insight into the 
fundamental characteristics of popular music in the broadest sense.

[3] A clear judgment concerning the relation of serious music to popular music 
can be arrived at only by strict attention to the fundamental characteristic of 
popular music: standardization.<1> The whole structure of popular music is 
standardized, even where the attempt is made to circumvent standardization. 
Standardization extends from the most general features to the most specific 
ones. 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. 
Most important of all, the harmonic cornerstones of each hit--the beginning and 
the end of each part--must beat out the standard scheme. This scheme emphasizes 
the most primitive harmonic facts no matter what has harmonically intervened. 
Complications have no consequences. 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.

[4] The details themselves are standardized no less than the form, and a whole 
terminology exists for them such as break, blue chords, dirty notes. Their 
standardization, however, is somewhat different from that of the framework. It 
is not overt like the latter but hidden behind a veneer of individual "effects" 
whose prescriptions are handled as the experts' secret, however open this secret 
may be to musicians generally. This contrasting character of the standardization 
of the whole and part provides a rough, preliminary setting for the effect upon 
the listener.

[5] The primary effect of this relation between the framework and the detail is 
that the listener becomes prone to evince stronger reactions to the part than to 
the whole. His grasp of the whole does not lie in the living experience of this 
one concrete piece of music he has followed. The whole is pre-given and pre-
accepted, even before the actual experience of the music starts: therefore, it 
is not likely to influence, to any great extent, the reaction to the details, 
except to give them varying degrees of emphasis. Details which occupy musically 
strategic positions in the framework--the beginning of the chorus or its 
reentrance after the bridge--have a better chance for recognition and favorable 
reception than details not so situated, for instance, middle bars of the bridge. 
But this situational nexus never interferes with the scheme itself. To this 
limited situational extent the detail depends upon the whole. But no stress is 
ever placed upon the whole as a musical event, nor does the structure of the 
whole ever depend upon the details.

[6] Serious music, for comparative purposes, may be thus characterized: Every 
detail derives its musical sense from the concrete totality of the piece which, 
in turn, consists of the life relationship of the details and never of a mere 
enforcement of a musical scheme. For example, in the introduction of the first 
movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony the second theme (in C-major) gets its 
true meaning only from the context. Only through the whole does it acquire its 
particular Iyrical and expressive quality--that is, a whole built up of its very 
contrast with the cant us hrmus-like character of the first theme. Taken in 
isolation the second theme would be disrobed to insignihcance. Another example 
may be found in the beginning of the recapitulation over the pedal point of the 
first movement of Beethoven's "Appassionata." By following the preceding 
outburst it achieves the utmost dramatic momentum. By omitting the exposition 
and development and starting with this repetition, all is lost.

[7] Nothing corresponding to this can happen in popular music. It would not 
affect the musical sense if any detail were taken out of the context; the 
listener can supply the "framework" automatically, since it is a mere musical 
automatism itself. The beginning of the chorus is replaceable by the beginning 
of innumerable other choruses. The interrelationship among the elements or the 
relationship of the elements to the whole would be unaffected. In Beethoven, 
position is important only in a living relation between a concrete totality and 
its concrete parts. In popular music, position is absolute. Every detail is 
substitutable; it serves its function only as a cog in a machine.

[8] The mere establishment of this difference is not yet suffcient. It is 
possible to object that the far-reaching standard schemes and types of popular 
music are bound up with dance, and therefore are also applicable to dance 
derivatives in serious music, for example, the minuet to and scherzo of the 
classical Viennese School. It may be maintained either that this part of serious 
music is also to be comprehended in terms of detail rather than of whole, or 
that if the whole still is perceivable in the dance types in serious music 
despite recurrence of the types, there is no reason why it should not be 
perceivable in modern popular music.

[9] The following consideration provides an answer to both objections by showing 
the radical differences even where serious music employs dance types. According 
to current formalistic views the scherzo of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony can be 
regarded as a highly stylized minuet to. What Beethoven takes from the 
traditional minuet to scheme in this scherzo is the Idea of outspoken contrast 
between a minor minuet to, a major trio, and repetition of the minor minuet to; 
and also certain other characteristics such as the emphatic three-fourths rhythm 
often accentuated on the first fourth and, by and large, dance like symmetry in 
the sequence of bars and periods. But the specific form-idea of this movement as 
a concrete totality transvaluates the devices borrowed from the minuet to 
scheme. The whole movement is conceived as an introduction to the hnale in order 
to createtremendous tension, not only by its threatening, foreboding expression 
but even more by the very way in which its formal development is handled.

[10] The classical minuet to scheme required first the appearance of the main 
theme, then the introduction of a second part which may lead to more distant 
tonal regions--formalistically similar, to be sure, to the "bridge" of today's 
popular music--and finally the recurrence of the original part. All this occurs 
in Beethoven. He takes up the idea of thematic dualism within the scherzo part. 
But he forces what was, in the conventional minuet to, a mute and meaningless 
game rule to speak with meaning. He achieves complete consistency between the 
formal structure and its specific content, that is to say, the elaboration of 
its themes. The whole scherzo part of this scherzo (that is to say, what occurs 
before the entrance of the deep strings in C-major that marks the beginning of 
the trio), consists of the dualism of two themes, the creeping figure in the 
strings and the "objective," stone like answer of the wind instruments. This 
dualism is not developed in a schematic way so that first the phrase of the 
strings is elaborated, then the answer of the winds, and then the string theme 
is mechanically repeated. After the first occurrence of the second theme in the 
horns, the two essential elements are alternately interconnected in the manner 
of a dialogue, and the end of the scherzo part is actually marked, not by the 
first but by the second theme, which has overwhelmed the first musical phrase.

[11] Furthermore, the repetition of the scherzo after the trio is scored so 
differently that it sounds like a mere shadow of the scherzo and assumes that 
haunting character which vanishes only with the afffirmative entry of the Finale 
theme. The whole device has been made dynamic. Not only the themes, but the 
musical form itself have been subjected to tension: the same tension which is 
already manifcst within the twofold structure of the first theme that consists, 
as it were, of question and reply, and then even more manifest within the 
context between the two main themes. The whole scheme has become sub ject to the 
inherent demands of this particular movement. 

[12] To sum up the difference: in Beethoven and in good serious music in 
general--we are not concerned here with bad serious music which may be as rigid 
and mechanical as popular music--the detail virtually contains the whole and 
leads to the exposition of the whole, while, at the same time, it is produced 
out of the conception of the whole. In popular music the relationship is 
fortuitous. The detail has no bearing on a wholes, which appears as an 
extraneous framework. Thus, the whole is never altered by the individual event 
and therefore remains, as it were, aloof, imperturbable, and unnoticed 
throughout the piece. At the same time, the detail is mutilated by a device 
which it can never influence and alter, so that the detail remains 
inconsequential. A musical detail which is not permitted to develop becomes a 
caricature of its own potentialities. 


Standardization

[13] The previous discussion shows that the difference between popular and 
serious music can be grasped in more precise terms than those referring to 
musical levels such as "lowbrow and highbrow," "simple and complex," "naive and 
sophisticated." For example, the difference between the spheres cannot be 
adequately expressed in terms of complexity and simplicity. All works of the 
earlier Viennese classicism are, without exception, rhythmically simpler than 
stock arrangements of jazz. Melodically, the wide intervals of a good many hits 
such as "Deep Purple" or "Sunrise Serenade" are more diffficult to follow per se 
than most melodies of, for example, Haydn, which consist mainly of 
circumscriptions of tonic triads and second steps. Harmonically, the supply of 
chords of the so-called classics is invariably more limited than that of any 
current Tin Pan Alley composer who draws from Debussy, Ravel, and even later 
sources. Standardization and non standardization are the key contrasting terms 
for the difference.

[14] Structural Standardization Aims at Standard Reactions. Listening to popular 
music is manipulated not only by its promoters but, as it were by the inherent 
nature of this music itself, into a system of response mechanisms wholly 
antagonistic to the ideal of individuality in a free, liberal society. This has 
nothing to do with simplicity and complexity. In serious music, each musical 
element, even the simplest one, is "itself," and the more highly organized the 
work is, the less possibility there is of substitution among the details. In hit 
music, however, the structure underlying the piece is abstract, existing 
independent of the specific course of the music. This is basic to the illusion 
that certain complex harmonies are more easily understandable in popular music 
than the same harmonies in serious music. For the complicated in popular music 
never functions as "itself" but only as a disguise or embellishment behind which 
the scheme can always be perceived. In jazz the amateur listener is capable of 
replacing complicated rhythmical or harmonic formulas by the schematic ones 
which they represent and which they still suggest, however adventurous they 
appear. The ear deals with the diffficulties of hit music by achieving slight 
substitutions derived from the knowledge of the patterns. The listener, when 
faced with the complicated, actually hears only the simple which it represents 
and perceives the complicated only as a parodistic distortion of the simple.

[15] No such mechanical substitution by stereotyped patterns is possible in 
serious music. Here even the simplest event necessitates an effort to grasp it 
immediately instead of summarizing it vaguely according to institutionalized 
prescriptions capable of producing only institutionalized effects. Otherwise the 
music is not "understood." Popular music, however, is composed In such a way 
that the process of translation of the unique into the norm is already planned 
and, to a certain extent, achieved within the composition itself. [16] The 
composition hears for the listener. This is how popular music divests the 
listener of his spontaneity and promotes conditioned reflexes. Not only does it 
not require his effort to follow its concrete stream; it actually gives him 
models under which anything concrete still remaining may be subsumed. The 
schematic buildup dictates the way in which he must listen while, at the same 
time, it makes any effort in listening unnecessary. Popular music is "pre-
digested" in a way strongly resembling the fad of "digests" of prmted Material. 
It is this structure of contemporary popular music which in the last analysis, 
accounts for those changes of listening habits which we shall later discuss.

[17] So far standardization of popular music has been considered in structural 
terms--that is, as an inherent quality without explicit reference to the process 
of production or to the underlying causes for standardization. Though all 
industrial mass production necessarily eventuates in standardization, the 
production of popular music can be called "industrial" only in its promotion and 
distribution, whereas the act of producing a song-hit still remains in a 
handicraft stage. The production of popular music is highly centralized in its 
economic organization, but still "individualistic" in its social mode of 
production. The division of labor among the composer, harmonizer, and arranger 
is not industrial but rather pretends industrialization, in order to look more 
up-to-date, whereas it has actually adapted industrial methods for the technique 
of its promotion. It would not increase the costs of production if the various 
composers of hit tunes did not follow certain standard patterns. Therefore, we 
must look for other reasons for structural standardization--very different 
reasons from those which account for the standardization of motor cars and 
breakfast foods.

[18] Imitation offers a lead for coming to grips with the basic reasons for it. 
The musical standards of popular music were originally developed by a 
competitive process. As one particular song scored a great success, hundreds of 
others sprang up imitating the successful one. The most successful hits types, 
and "ratios" between elements were imitated, and the process culminated in the 
crystallization of standards. Under centralized conditions such as exist today 
these standards have become "frozen."<2> That is, they have been taken over by 
cartelized agencies, the final results of a competitive process, and rigidly 
enforced upon material to be promoted. Noncompliance with the rules of the game 
became the basis for exclusion. The original patterns that are now standardized 
evolved in a more or less competitve way. Large-scale economic concentration 
institutionalized the standardization, and made it imperative. As a result, 
innovations by rugged individualists have been outlawed. The standard patterns 
have become invested with the immunity of bigness--"the King can do no wrong." 
This also accounts for revivals in popular music. They do not have the outworn 
character of standardized products manufactured after a given pattern. The 
breath of free competition is still alive within them. On the other hand, the 
famous old hits which are revived set the patterns which have become 
standardized. They are the golden age of the game rules.

[19] This "freezing" of standards is socially enforced upon the agencies 
themselves. Popular music must simultaneously meet two demands. One is for 
stimuli that provoke the listener's attention. The other is for the material to 
fall within the category of what the musically untrained listener would call 
"natural" music: that is, the sum total of all the conventions and material 
formulas in music to which he is accustomed and which he regards as the 
inherent, simple language of music itself, no matter how late the development 
might be which produced this natural language. This natural language for the 
American listener stems from his earliest musical experiences, the nursery 
rhymes, the hymns he sings in Sunday school, the little tunes he whistles on his 
way home from school. All these are vastly more important in the formation of 
musical language than his ability to distinguish the beginning of Brahms's Third 
Symphony from that of his Second. Of ficial musical culture is, to a large 
extent, a mere superstructure of this underlying musical language, namely, the 
major and minor tonalities and all the tonal relationships they imply. But these 
tonal relationships of the primitive musical language set barriers to whatever 
does not conform to them. Extravagances are tolerated only insofar as they can 
be recast into this so-called natural language.

[20] In terms of consumer demand, the standardization of popular music is only 
the expression of this dual desideratum imposed upon it by the musical frame of 
mind of the public--that it be "stimulatory" by deviating in some way from the 
established "natural," and that it maintain the supremacy of the natural against 
such deviations. The attitude of the audiences toward the natural language is 
reinforced by standardized production, which institutionalizes desiderata which 
originally might have come from the public.


Pseudo-individualization

[21] The paradox in the desiderata--stimulatory and natural--accounts for the 
dual character of standardization itself. Stylization of the ever identical 
framework is only one aspect of standardization. Concentration and control in 
our culture hide themselves in their very manifestation. Unhidden they would 
provoke resistance. Therefore the illusion and, to a certain extent, even the 
reality of individual achievement must be maintained. The maintenance of it is 
grounded in material reality itself, for while administrative control over life 
processes is concentrated, ownership is still diffuse.

[22] In the sphere of luxury production, to which popular music belongs and in 
which no necessities of life are immediately involved, while, at the same time, 
the residues of individualism are most alive there in the form of ideological 
categories such as taste and free choice, it is imperative to hide 
standardization. The "backwardness" of musical mass production, the fact that it 
is still on a handicraft level and not literally an industrial one, conforms 
pcrfectly to that necessity which is essential from the viewpoint of cultural 
big business. If the individual handicraft elements of popular music were 
abolished altogether, a synthetic means of hiding standardization would have to 
be evolved. Its elements are even now in existence.

[23] The necessary correlate of musical standardization is pseudo-
individualization. By pseudo-individualization we mean endowing cultural mass 
production with the halo of free choice or open market on the basis of 
standardization itself. Standardization of song hits keeps the customers in line 
by doing their listening for them, as it were. Pseudo-individualization, for its 
part, keeps them in line by making them forget that what they listen to is 
already listened to for them, or "pre-digested."

[24] The most drastic example of standardization of presumably individualized 
features is to be found in so-called improvisations. Even though jazz musicians 
still improvise in practice, their improvisations have become so "normalized" as 
to enable a whole terminology to be developed to express the standard devices of 
individualization: a terminology which in turn is ballyhooed by jazz publicity 
agents to foster the myth of pioneer artisanship and at the same time flatter 
the fans by apparently allowing them to peep behind the curtain and get the 
inside story. This pseudo-individualization is prescribed by the standardization 
of the framework. The latter is so rigid that the freedom it allows for any sort 
of improvisation is severely delimited. Improvisations--passages where 
spontaneous action of individuals is permitted ("Swing it boys")--are confined 
within the walls of the harmonic and metric schcmc-. In a great many cases, such 
as the "break" of pre-swing jazz, the musical function of the improvised detail 
is determined completely by the scheme: the break can be nothing other than a 
disguised cadence. Here, very few possibilities for actual improvisation remain, 
due to the necessity of merely melodically circumscribing the same underlying 
harmonic functions. Sincc thc-se possibilities were very quickly exhausted, 
stereotyping of improvisatory details speedily occurred. Thus, standardization 
of the norm enhances in a purely technical way standardization of its own 
deviation--pseudo-individualization.

[25] This subservience of improvisation to standardization explains two main 
socio-psychological qualities of popular music. One is the fact that the detail 
remains openly connected with the underlying scheme so that the listener always 
feels on safe ground. The choice in individual alterations is so small that the 
perpetual recurrence of the same variations is a reassuring signpost of the 
identical behind them. The other is the function of "substitution"--the 
improvisatory features forbid their being grasped as musical events 
inthemselves. They can be received only as embellishments. It is a well-known 
fact that in daring jazz arrangements worried notes, dirty notes, in other 
words, false notes, play a conspicuous role. They are apperceived as exciting 
stimuli only because they are corrected by the ear to the right note. This, 
however, is only an extreme instance of what happens less conspicuously in all 
individualization in popular music. Any harmonic boldness, any chord which does 
not fall strictly within the simplest harmonic scheme demands being apperceived 
as "false," that is, as a stimulus which carries with it the unambiguous 
prescription to substitute for it the right detail, or rather the naked scheme. 
Understanding popular music means obeying such commands for listening. Popular 
music commands its own listening habits.

[26] There is another type of individualization claimed in terms of kinds of 
popular music and differences in name bands. The types of popular music are 
carefully differentiated in production. The listener is presumed to be able to 
choose between them. The most widely recognized differentiations are those 
between swing and sweet and such name bands as Benny Goodman and Guy Lombardo. 
The listener is quickly able to distinguish the types of music and even the 
performing band, this in spite of the fundamental identity of the material and 
the great similarity of the presentations apart from their emphasized 
distinguishing trademarks. This labeling technique, as regards type of music and 
band, is pseudo-individualization, but of a sociological kind outside the realm 
of strict musical technology. It provides trademarks of identification for 
differentiating between the actually undifferentiated.

[27] Popular music becomes a multiple-choice questionnaire. There are two main 
types and their derivatives from which to choose. The listener is encouraged by 
the inexorable presence of these types psychologically to cross out what he 
dislikes and check what he likes. The limitation inherent in this choice and the 
clear-cut alternative it entails provoke like-dislike patterns of behavior. This 
mechanical dichotomy breaks down indifference it is imperative to fdvor sweet or 
swing if one wishes to continue to listen to popular music. 


THEORY ABOUT THE LISTENER

Popular Music and "Leisure Time"

[28] In order to understand why this whole type of music (i.e., popular music in 
general) maintains its hold on the masses, some considerations of a general kind 
may be appropriate.

[29] The frame of mind to which popular music originally appealed, on which it 
feeds, and which it perpetually reinforces, is simultaneously one of distraction 
and inattention. Listeners are distracted from the demands of reality by 
entertainment which does not demand attention either.

[30] The notion of distraction can be properly understood only within its social 
setting and not in self-subsistent terms of individual psychology. Distraction 
is bound to the present mode of production, to the rationalized and mechanized 
process of labor to which, directly or indirectly, masses are subject. This mode 
of production, which engenders fears and anxiety about unemployment, loss of 
income, war, has its "nonproductive" correlate in entertainment; that is, 
relaxation which does not involve the effort of concentration at all. People 
want to have fun. A fully concentrated and conscious experience of art is 
possible only to those whose lives do not put such a strain on them that in 
their spare time they want relief from both boredom and effort simultaneously. 
The whole sphere of cheap commercial entertainment reflects this dual desire. It 
induces relaxation because it is patterned and pre-digested. Its being patterned 
and pre-digested serves within the psychological household of the masses to 
spare them the effort of that participation (even in listening or observation) 
without which there can be no receptivity to art. On the other hand, the stimuli 
they provide permit an escape from the boredom of mechanized labor.

[31] The promoters of commercialized entertainment exonerate themselves by 
referring to the fact that they are giving the masses what they want. This is an 
ideology appropriate to commercial purposes: the less the mass discriminates, 
the greater the possibility of selling cultural commodities indiscriminately. 
Yet this ideology of vested interest cannot be dismissed so easily. It is not 
possible completely to deny that mass consciousness can be molded by the 
operative agencies only because the masses "want this stuff."

[32] But why do they want this stuff? In our present society the masses 
themselves are kneaded by the same mode of production as the arti-craft material 
foisted upon them. The customers of musical entertainment are themselves objects 
or, indeed, products of the same mechanisms which determine the production of 
popular music. Their spare time serves only to reproduce their working capacity. 
It is a means instead of an end. The power of the process of production extends 
over the time intervals which on the surface appear to be "free." They want 
standardized goods and pseudo-individualization, because their leisure is an 
escape from work and at the same time is molded after those psychological 
attitudes to which their workaday world exclusively habituates them. Popular 
music is for the masses a perpetual bus man's holiday. Thus, there is 
justihcation for speaking of a preestablished harmony today between production 
and consumption of popular music. The people clamor for what they are going to 
get anyhow.

[33] To escape boredom and avoid effort are incompatible--hence the reproduction 
of the very attitude from which escape is sought. To be sure, the way in which 
they must work on the assembly line, in the factory, or at office machines 
denies people any novelty. They seek novelty, but the strain and boredom 
associated with actual work leads to avoidance of effort in that leisure time 
which offers the only chance for really new experience. As a substitute, they 
crave a stimulant. Popular music comes to offer it. Its stimulations are met 
with the inability to vest effort in the ever-identical. This means boredom 
again. It is a circle which makes escape impossible. The impossibility of escape 
causes the widespread attitude of inattention toward popular music. The moment 
of recognition is that of effortless sensation. The sudden attention attached to 
this moment burns itself out instanter and relegates the listener to a realm of 
inattention and distraction. On the one hand, the domain of production and 
plugging presupposes distraction and, on the other, produces it.

[34] In this situation the industry faces an insoluble problem. It must arouse 
attention by means of ever-new products, but this attention spells their doom. 
If no attention is given to the song, it cannot be sold; if attention is paid to 
it, there is always the possibility that people will no longer accept it, 
because they know it too well. This partly accounts for the constantly renewed 
effort to sweep the market with new products, to hound them to their graves; 
then to repeat the infanticidal maneuver again and again.

[35] On the other hand, distraction is not only a presupposition but also a 
product of popular music. The tunes themselves lull the listener to inattention. 
They tell him not to worry for he will not miss anything.<3>


The Social Cement

[36] It is safe to assume that music listened to with a general inattention 
which is only interrupted by sudden flashes of recognition is not followed as a 
sequence of experiences that have a clear-cut meaning of their own, grasped in 
each instant and related to all the precedent and subsequent moments. One may go 
so far as to suggest that most listeners of popular music do not understand 
music as a language in itself. If they did it would be vastly difficult to 
explain how they could tolerate the incessant supply of largely undifferentiated 
material. What, then, does music mean to them? The answer is that the language 
that is music is transformed by objective processes into a language which they 
think is their own--into a language which serves as a receptacle for their 
institutionalized wants. The less music is a language sz~i ge~eris to them, the 
more does it become established as such a receptacle. The autonomy of music is 
replaced by a mere socio-psychological function. Music today is largely a social 
cement. And the meaning listeners attribute to a material, the inherent logic of 
which is inaccessible to them, is above all a means by which they achieve some 
psychical adjustment to the mechanisms of present-day life. This "adjustment" 
materializes in two different ways, corresponding to two major socio-
psychological types of mass behavior toward music in general and popular music 
in particular, the "rhythmically obedient" type and the "emotional" type.

[37] Individuals of the rhythmically obedient type are mainly found among the 
youth--the so-called radio generation. They are most susceptible to a process of 
masochistic adjustment to authoritarian collectivism. The type is not restricted 
to any one political attitude. The adjustment to anthropophagous collectivism is 
found as often among left-wing political groups as among right-wing groups. 
Indeed, both overlap: repression and crowd mindedness overtake the followers of 
both trends. The psychologies tend to meet despite the surface distinctions in 
political attitudes.

[38] This comes to the fore in popular music which appears to be aloof from 
political partisanship. It may be noted that a moderate leftist theater 
production such as Pins and Needles uses ordinary jazz as its musical medium, 
and that a communist youth organization adapted the melody of "Alexander's 
Ragtime Band" to its own lyrics. Those who ask for a song of social significance 
ask for it through a medium which deprives it of social significance. The uses 
of inexorable popular musical media is repressive per se. Such inconsistencies 
indicate that political conviction and socio-psychological structure by no means 
coincide.

[39] This obedient type is the rhythmical type, the word "rhythmical" being used 
in its everyday sense. Any musical experience of this type is based upon the 
underlying, unabating time unit of the music--its "beat." To play rhythmically 
means, to these people, to play in such a way that even if pseudo-
individualizations--counter-accents and other "differentiations"-occur, the 
relation to the ground meter is preserved. To be musical means to them to be 
capable of following given rhythmical patterns without being disturbed by 
"individualizing" aberrations, and to fit even the syncopations into the basic 
time units. This is the way in which their response to music immediately 
expresses their desire to obey. However, as the standardized meter of dance 
music and of marching suggests the coordinated battalions of a mechanical 
collectivity, obedience to this rhythm by overcoming the responding individuals 
leads them to conceive of themselves as agglutinized with the untold millions of 
the meek who must be similarly overcome. Thus do the obedient inherit the earth.

[40] Yet, if one looks at the serious compositions which correspond to this 
category of mass listening, one finds one very characteristic feature: that of 
disillusion. All these composers, among them Stravinsky and Hindemith, have 
expressed an "anti romantic" feeling. They aimed at musical adaptation to 
reality--a reality understood by them in terms of the "machine age." The 
renunciation of dreaming by these composers is an index that listeners are ready 
to replace dreaming by adjustment to raw reality, that they reap new pleasure 
from their acceptance of the unpleasant. They are disillusioned about any 
possibility of realizing their own dreams in the world in which they live, and 
consequently adapt themselves to this world. They take what is called a 
realistic attitude and attempt to harvest consolation by identifying themselves 
with the external social forces which they think constitute the "machine age." 
Yet the very disillusion upon which their coordination is based is there to mar 
their pleasure. The cult of the machine which is represented by unabating jazz 
beats involves a self-renunciation that cannot but take root in the form of a 
fluctuating uneasiness somewhere in the personality of the obedient. For the 
machine is an end in itself only under given social conditions--where men are 
appendages of the machines on which they work. The adaptation to machine music 
necessarily implies a renunciation of one's own human feelings and at the same 
time a fetishism of the machine such that its instrumental character becomes 
obscured thereby.

[41] As to the other, the "emotional" type, there is some justification for 
linking it with a type of movie spectator. The kinship is with the poor shop 
girl who derives gratification by identification with Ginger Rogers, who with 
her beautiful legs and unsullied character, marries the boss. Wish fulfillment 
IS Considered the guiding principle in the social psychology of moving Pictures 
and similarly in the pleasure obtained from emotional erotic music. This 
explanation, however, is only superficially appropriate.

[42] Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley may be dream factories. But they do not merely 
supply categorical wish fulfillment for the girl behind the counter. She does 
not immediately identify herself with Ginger Rogers marrying. What does occur 
may be expressed as follows: when the audience at a sentimental film or 
sentimental music become aware of the overwhelming possibility of happiness, 
they dare to confess to themselves what the whole order of contemporary life 
ordinarily forbids them to admit, namely, that they actually have no part in 
happiness. What is supposed to be wish fulfillment is only the scant liberation 
that occurs with the realization that at last one need not deny oneself the 
happiness of knowing that one is unhappy and that one could be happy. The 
experience of the shop girl is related to that of the old woman who weeps at the 
wedding services of others, blissfully becoming aware of the wretchedness of her 
own life. Not even the most gullible individuals believe that eventually 
everyone will win the sweepstakes. The actual function of sentimental music lies 
rather in the temporary release given to the awareness that one has missed 
fulfillment.

[43] The emotional listener listens to everything in terms of late romanticism 
and of the musical commodities derived from it which are already fashioned to 
fit the needs of emotional listening. They consume music in order to be allowed 
to weep. They are taken in by the musical expression of frustration rather than 
by that of happiness. The influence of the standard Slavic melancholy typified 
by Tchaikowsky and Dvorak is by far greater than that of the most "fulfilled" 
moments of Mozart or of the young Beethoven. The so-called releasing element of 
music is simply the opportunity to feel something. But the actual content of 
this emotion can only be frustration. Emotional music has become the image of 
the mother who says, "Come and weep, my child." It is catharsis for the masses, 
but catharsis which keeps them all the more firmly in line. One who weeps does 
not resist any more than one who marches. Music that permits its listeners the 
confession of their unhappiness reconciles them, by means of this "release," to 
their social dependence.


NOTES

<1> The basic importance of standardization has not altogether escaped the 
attention of current literature on popular music. "The chief difference between 
a popular song and a standard, or serious, song like 'Mandalay,' 'Sylvia,' or 
'Trees,' is that the melody and the Iyric of a popular number are constructed 
within a definite pattern or structural form, whereas the poem, or Iyric, of a 
standard number has no structural confinements, and the music is free to 
interpret ~he meaning and feeling of the words without following a set pattern 
or form. Putting it another way, the popular song is 'custom built,' while the 
standard song allows the composer freer play of imagination and interpretation." 
Abner Silver and Robert Bruce, How to Wvite and Sel/ a Song Hit (New York, 
1939), p.2. The authors fail, however, to realize the externally superimposed, 
commercial character of those patterns which aims at canalized reactions or, in 
the language of the regular announcement of one particular radio program, at 
"easy listening." They confuse the mechanical patterns with highly organized, 
strict art forms: "Certainly there are few more stringent verse forms in poetry 
than the sonnet, and yet the greatest poets of all time have woven undying 
beauty within its small and limited frame. A composer has just as much 
opportunity for exhibiting his talent and genius in popular songs as in more 
serious music" (pp. 2-3). Thus the standard pattern of popular music appears to 
them virtually on the same level as the law of a fugue. It is this contamination 
which makes the insight into the basic standardization of popular music sterile. 
It ought to be added that what Silver and Bruce call a "standard song" is just 
the opposite of what we mean by a standardized popular song.

<2> See Max Horkheimer, Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung 8 ( 1939), p. 115.

<3> The attitude of distraction is not a completely universal one. Particularly 
youngsters who invest popular music with their own feelings are not yet 
completely blunted to all its effects. The whole problem of age levels with 
regard to popular music, however, is beyond the scope of the present study. 
Demographic problems, too, must remain out of consideration.