Adorno's Critique Of Popular Music And Capitalism Analysis

Millions of people in the world listen to music for all different reasons. Most people all over the world listen to different genres of music in order to relax, but not too many people pay attention to the actual lyrics of a song. If you listen to the lyrics of a song you will realize that many songs have important messages or themes to them. An example of this is the lyrics of the song “Changes” by Tupac Shakur. If you listen to this song, you will realize that Tupac raps about not only the problems that African Americans face from society, but also the struggles that poor people in society have to endure and overcome. Many

On average, 1 person commits suicide every 16.2 minutes(Do Something). The song 1-800 by Logic sets a scene of a boy who goes through life and struggles with being gay, bullied, and suicidal thoughts. Which leads to a call to the 1-800 suicide hotline. The video takes a turn and ends happily with the main actor being married and surrounded by family and friends. The main point that this song displays is that suicide is a real problem and it portrays that through stressing the importance of accepting everyone. My main points in this paper are the content of the video, the sound and pace, how this piece affects today’s society, what modes of persuasion are used.

Has it ever occurred to you that this generation tries to search for the next best thing? Is it like a business man try to look for the next best thing that everyone is buying? I mean if other people do it and there perfectly fine doing it we assume that we could do it and we think we will be just fine as well. Take those examples and try to use it with music. Do you think that what we listen to can affect us in any way or not? Maybe and maybe not, but some of us tend to get influenced by what they put into their heads. Not everything that we see or do can import negative thought or feelings, but listening is a part of that category as well. Therefore, what these artists are trying to do is trying to use a rhetorical device to tell us that

The prosperity of In Paris railway station, two strangers sat down on the same piano bench and performed a remixed masterpiece, which attracted a bunch of people and brought a great joy for them. Such various positive role that music plays exists everywhere and everytime in human beings’ life. Meanwhile, music emits its perfume as an incredible intermingling, as such, it does not only give people miscellaneous emotions but also endows us both microcosmic and macroscopic insight to observe the diverse world we live in. It is worth noting that Moises Velasquez Manoff currently states his own perspective, “The Meaning of Despacito in the Age of Trump”, of the New York Times. Mr Manoff published his opinion based on how the song “Despacito” approaches the most streamed song in history when issues of nativism and panic from both residences and non-residences are skyrocketed. More significantly, Mr Manoff notably highlights the virtue of the song, such as the song itself “binds us as a global community”, considered “Despacito” contains different races, classes even national cultures. In a nutshell, music is able to make the world better and better, insteading of barely making America white again through its capability to strengthen cohesion, ease tension, encourage spirit and build foundation of education for living creature.

The music video of “This is America”, a political hip-hop song by Donald Glover, criticizes the US’ media’s reactions to African-American tragedies. The music video of ‘This is America’ conforms to rap culture by including distracting visuals, but it deviates from rap culture when it showcases atrocious events caused by black gun violence; Glover both alludes to and deviates from political hip-hop conventions to argue that rap entertainment distracts Americans from current African-American tragedies. It is essential to understand what the conventions of a particular genre are before one can identify whether or not a song conforms to or deviates from the conventions of that genre. In general, hip-hop can be categorized as either political or

In the song “1-800” by Logic the narrator uses metaphors to explain some of the depression that people in this world have. Also he uses loved ones to explain some of the hard times they could give you if you don’t make the right choices. This song has a dark and an important message because it talks about people having so much depression they are think about suicide. This song can make a big change in someone's live that is going in depression. It can also change the perspective of how people look at life even if they aren’t going through depression.

Theodor Adorno was an important member of the Frankfurt School, which developed ideas of critical theory and cultural Marxism. Adorno adopted a Marxists approach in his work, especially among his work as a musicologist, seeing propaganda within popular music. He saw music as thought provoking and believed that it prevented its listeners from having real thought, he wanted people to challenge the way they listened to popular music. In his article On Popular Music, which he had written in 1941, Adorno speaks about how he believed there were two spheres of music, popular and serious music. About the standardisation in popular music, in which it followed certain patterns which created pseudo-individualism. Also on how popular music affects its listeners in different ways compared to serious music. As a Marxist philosopher, Adorno was an idealist for the idea of capitalism, also as a Marxist sociologist he had an understanding of society and the idea of there being two different classes in all aspects of culture and society.

Throughout the 20th century the medium of music has allowed for artists to convey their thoughts and feelings on important political topic facing the nation at the time. The power from these songs derives itself from its ability to create a relationship between the listener and the artist and allow for the message to transcend social barriers. A more recent instance of an artist using his music to connect important social issues with a wider audience, is rapper Frank Ocean. Ocean revealed to his fans and the world that he was a homosexual. This admission sent shockwaves throughout the rap community, one that has been marred with constant criticism of perpetuating homophobia and extreme male ego. His groundbreaking 2012 album, Channel Orange, allowed for many people to no longer be afraid of their sexuality and it is something that should be embraced. Frank’s impact will never fully be realized, but he undoubtedly has made an impact on society and a stereotype breaker in the rap community. This paper discusses the article by Gerald Rosenberg, “The Hollow Hope” which describes the effect of political mobilization being sparked from litigation and how the courts have become an avenue for social change. The article specifically looks at the rise of the LGBT movement after landmark Supreme Court cases and whether this sudden mobilization in support, brought an even more fervent opposition. Furthermore, this paper also examines Jeffery Segal and Harold Spaeth’s article, “The

In defence of music and music industry Rosen says, “It’s true that the most controversial lyrics in popular music reflect the violence and despair in an artist’s imagination or in society. But they reflect it—they don’t create it” (82). Therefore, music does not cause violence. In fact, it gives chance to parents to understand their children through lyrics of music, and provide children with proper guidance, if they are going on wrong path. Moreover, “Recording company executives constantly make choices not to put out certain songs or albums because they don’t meet the test of artistic credibility or they believe something is sensationalist but empty of meaning. But for record companies to deny opportunity to an artist with a difficult

With means to express oneself, helps one overcome the difficulties of life. This approach represents the entire nature of the hip hop culture, especially when dealing with social justice issues. Today, hip hop culture’s association revolves around raps (lyrics) and the rappers which reflect how consumers receive messages about social justice issues. Unlike breaking and graffiti, the music/lyrics penetrate society more. However, for this analysis, the focus will rely on a visual element with a connection to hip hop music. Even though a music video would make sense as a visual means of expression, this analysis has more interest in a hip hop album’s cover art. Also, this focus will lead to the question of how important is art to send messages

A major part of popular music has always involved pushing the boundaries of artistic expression. In the music industry today, artists are pushing the limits of what is acceptable. Who benefits from the use of explicit lyrics in music? One can argue that it is an attempt to drive record sales through sparking controversy, but maybe it is just how the artist fully expresses themself. This fine line that divides vulgarity from artistic expression is an issue that has plagued society. No matter what the motive behind the explicitness of popular music, there are social implications. Many psychological studies have been performed to test how explicit music affects the brain, in particular aggressive behavior. Government

The fact that replicating a seventeen-years-old song can still become a hit in 2017, demonstrates that there is a pre-designed pattern for popular music in which changing a few characteristics to make a new songs sound “unique” can still result in success. For this reason, Adorno argues that the music industry produces music in an “industrial” way--popular music is centralized in its pattern and modifies some characteristics to seem “individualistic.” Though Shape of You and No Scrubs contain different keys, tempo, and of course, lyrics, they both rely on a chord progression of i-ic-VI-VII in a common time (MusicNotes, 1 & FindSongTempo, 1). Shape of you takes advantage that the audience is accustomed to listening to the same pattern and it is modified to fit the current era and thus, result in a significant monetary income.

Pop music has been long criticized for producing songs that sound exactly the same. Turn on the radio and there is a different type of musician. However, in the background of the pop song there are the same four chords. This is what Adorno calls the standardization of music in which the listener perceives the song played as unique. However this notion is often misinterpreted since the music has an interchangeable structure. Nowadays it is very hard to find a band or an artist that does not fall in the manufactured trend of popular music. What song doesn’t have lyrics about money, sex and violence?

Case Study: Analysis of That Fleeing Year Through the Lens of Theodor Adorno The main critique of Frankfurt School, represented by Theodor Adorno, on popular music is that monopolized companies constantly feed standardized cultural commodities to the public in order to establish a sustainable consumer market. Adorno concerns that centralized entertainment industry has a compulsory effect on the recipients, which deprives them of the chance and ability to appreciate “serious music” (“Social Critique”, 211). In On Popular Music, Adorno identifies several characteristics of popular music. This essay will apply some of these concepts to a particular Chinese popular song, That Fleeing Year, in order to examine the applicability of Adorno’s theory

In the Article, “Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music,” Simon Frith proposes a new way to look at the value of popular music. He argues that people listen to music to create a sense of identity, express feelings, and have a sense of time. Therefore the aesthetic of popular music is how well the music performs those specific tasks. He then went on to break down how the proposed aethstetic could be measured using the music itself, voice, and the sense of truth.