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That Fleeing Year Through The Lens Of Theodor Adorno

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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 …show more content…

This essay will start from the analysis of the song in terms of standardization, during which the process of “plugging” is explained, and then focus on the lyrics of the song, the composition mechanism of which manifests pseudo-individualization, yet on the other hand, the content of which suggests a defect in Adorno’s characterization of popular music. As the theme song of the movie Back In Time, That Fleeing Year expresses yearning of a past love when “we were young and innocent”. The song drew a wide appeal because of the partnership between Xi Lin, honored as “the sage of lyrics”, and Faye Wong, Diva of Chinese popular music. Nevertheless, this song is standardized in terms of theme, structure, melody and lyrics. To be specific, That Fleeing Year invokes a reminiscence of Wong’s another song, To Youth, which is the theme song of the film So Young. The two films both center on romance and struggle of the youth. As a matter of fact, in recent years Chinese entertainment market has been flooded with cultural products on the theme of youth, of which common elements include friendship, love, betrayal, …show more content…

In fact, this paragraph addresses, rather than the composition mechanism, the actual content of the lyrics, that is, a compromised yet still individual sphere of word choices and sentence arrangements under standardized stipulations. Despite that some elements are supposedly required to appear in specific places by the producer, the language and rhetoric is far from being simple and repetitive, as what Adorno terms “baby talk”, which is the adoption of children’s expressions in the lyrics to make commercial hits (“On Popular”, 30). The use of “baby talk” aims at “relieving the strain of their (the listeners) adult responsibilities” and gaining trust from the listeners in a child-like attitude (30). However, no such thing as incorrect grammar or “unabating repetition of some particular musical formula” (30) exists in That Fleeing Year. Indeed, the lyrics are poetic in terms of the relations between sentences and elaborate language. Under an inquiry about the quality of the music on Zhihu (a Chinese question-and-answer website), a number of answers include exhaustive analyses of the lyrics. Internet user Mingjing Ren comments that the first sentence of the chorus is almost beyond comprehension without reading it in the context of the whole song. Other comments and analyses generally concur on the idea

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