Against popular music and kitsch

(Originally written April 17, 2007 in Book 16)

Adorno's Case Against Popular Music

Adorno underpins his evaluation of music with historical analysis and a general critical theory of culture.

Exchange Value - human productions that have lost touch with their original value due to capitalism.

Capitalism aims at making everything including the arts a marketable commodity.

Art must hold out agains the socioeconomic forces of our lives.

Simplicity and standardization are what Adorno believes pop music is based on.

Adorno sees the omnipresent beat of pop music (traceable to marching bands) as hypnotic and drug like.

Subject matter of pop music is also standardized.

Pop music is infantilism at its worst.

Standardization and individualization are at odds with one another. Pop music creates the facade of individualization with the hook.

Pseudo-Individualization sounds like genuinely personal expression, but it's not.

Pop music is a "musical dictatorship". The industry trains us to enjoy it and feeds us more of the same.

The problem with Adorno's theory:

1) Adorno lumps all pop music together. What do Britney Spears and George Gershwin have in common?

2) Adorno gauges/judges pop music with the standards of classical music.

3) Adorno illustrates his point with the best Classical music and the worst pop music.

4) Maybe no genuinely good music can survive consistent constant air play without becoming uncool.

5) Classical music too has been subject to socioeconomic pressure: The Three Theory, Yani, Yo-Yo Ma.

Kitsch - Robert Solomon

Kitsch is a term of the 19th century. In German it meant "smear" or "playing with mud". Karsten Harries states, "Kitsch has always been considered immoral" (408).

Kitsch and sentimentality provoke excessive or immature expressions of emotions.

Kitsch is calculated to evoke emotions.

Kitsch and sentimentality manipulate our emotions.

But the accusation of manipulating emotions only comes clear when an unwanted emotion is stirred.

"Irony and skepticism are the marks of the educated; sentimentality is the mark of the uneducated" (410).

Milan Kundera argues that kitsch and sentimentality are self-indulgent.

Kitsch (as well as emotions and sentimentality) distort our rationality.

Kitsch, emotion and sentimentality are self-deceiving qualities.

Class Notes

Shusterman: Form & Funk

Pop Art is nonetheless art.

Argument against Pop Art

1) Pop art is in principal illegitimate in nature.

2) Passivity Argument
- Popular Art involves no aesthetic challenge
- It induces passivity in the viewer/hearer
- It does not take any effort
Response: It may not take aesthetic or intellectual effort but it demands effort of other types (somatic effort)

3) Formal Complexity Argument
- High Art has formal complexity that Pop Art lacks
- High Art values form rather than merely content
Response: This sets form and content as enemies, but there needn't be opposition

4) Argument from Aesthetic Autonomy
- genius art should operate against commodization

Brown on Adorno

Pop Music is standardized and does not speak without unique voices.

Adorno has a pure contempt for all pop music.

Adorno refuses to hear non-classical music on its own terms. He is utterly chauvinistic.

Kitsch: Robert Solomon

1) The problem with kitsch is that it evokes excessive and immature emotions
-Problem: All art is intended to elicit emotion, why is kitsch faulted for that?

2) The problem with Kitsch is that it manipulates our emotion
-Problem: Manipulation of emotion is merely bringing some emotion out and we do this in every area of life.

3) The problem with kitsch is that it invokes "cheap" emotion
-Problem: Cheap is ethically relative. This is socially biased.

4) The problem with kitsch is that it evokes self-absorbing emotion
-Problem: There is nothing wrong with enjoying one's objection.

5) The sentimentality of kitsch distorts our ability to think right.
- Problem: all emotions distort our perception to some degree.