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Read the following excerpt on the nature and social character of popular music and discuss how Adorno’s concepts of standardization, identification, and pseudo- individualization are affirmed in The Merchants of Cool by Douglas Rushkoff: 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/view/


Do these ideas hold told true for all forms of popular music creativity and consumption?


Theodor Adorno, “Popular Music” from Introduction to the Sociology of Music, New York: Continuum Press, 1988; pp 25-27. 

In the advanced industrial countries pop music is defined by standardization: its prototype is the song hit. A popular American textbook on writing and selling such hits confessed that with disarming missionary zeal some thirty years ago. The main difference between a pop song and a serious or-in the beautifully paradoxical language of that manual a “standard" song is said to be that pop melodies and lyrics must stick to an unmercifully rigid pattern while the composer of serious songs is permitted free, autonomous creation. The textbook writers do not hesitate to call popular music "custom-built," a predicate usually reserved for automobiles. Standardization extends from the overall plan down to details. The basic rule in the American practice that governs production everywhere is that the refrain consists of 32 bars with a "bridge," a part initiating the repetition, in the middle. Also standardized are the various types of song-not only dances, whose standardization would be plausible and by no means new, but songs celebrating motherhood or the joys of domesticity, nonsense or novelty songs, pseudo-children's-songs or lamentations at the loss of a girlfriend. For the last, which may be the most widespread of all, a curious name has become customary in America: they are called "ballads." Above all, it is the metric and harmonic cornerstones of any pop song, the beginning and the end of its several parts that must follow the standard schema. It confirms the simplest fundamental structures, whatever deviations may occur in between. Complications remain without consequences: the pop song leads back to a few basic perceptive categories known ad nauseam. Nothing really new is allowed to intrude, nothing but calculated effects that add some spice to the ever-sameness without imperiling it. And these effects in turn take their bearings from schemata. 

The effect of song hits-more precisely put, perhaps: their social role-might be circumscribed as that of patterns of identification. It is comparable to the effect of movie stars, of magazine cover girls, and of the beauties in hosiery and toothpaste ads. The hits not only appeal to a "lonely crowd" of the atomized; they reckon with the immature, with those who cannot express their emotions and experiences, who either never had the power of expression or were crippled by cultural taboos. To people harnessed between their jobs and the reproduction of their working energies, the hits are purveyors of an ersatz for feelings which their contemporaneously revised ego ideal tells them they should have. Socially the hits either channel emotions-thus recognizing them-or vicariously fulfill the longing for emotions. The element of esthetic appearance, the distinction of art from empirical reality, is restored to that reality in song hits: in the actual psychological household, appearance substitutes for what the listeners are really denied. What makes a hit a hit, aside from the manipulative energy of the moment, is its power either to absorb or to feign widespread stirrings. Couching texts and titles, in particular, in a sort of advertising language plays a part; but according to American research results these carry less weight than the music.

To visualize this, let me recall related processes from other mass media in which words or representational images are used. The growing tendency to integrate all such media entitles us to draw conclusions on pop music. In an imaginary but psychologically emotion-laden domain, the listener who remembers a hit song will turn into the song's ideal subject, into the person for whom the song ideally speaks. At the same time, as one of many who identify with that fictitious subject, that musical I, he will feel his isolation ease as he himself feels integrated into the community of "fans." In whistling such a song he bows to a ritual of socialization, although beyond this unarticulated subjective stirring of the moment his isolation continues unchanged. 

The difficulty facing the producer of pop music is that he must void the contradiction. He must write something impressive enough to be remembered and at the same time well-known enough to be banal. What helps here is the old-fashioned individualistic moment which in the production process is voluntarily or involuntarily spared. It corresponds as much to the need to be abruptly striking as to the need to hide the all-governing standardization, the ready-made aspect of form and feeling, from a listener who should always feel treated as if the mass product were meant for him alone. The means to that end, one of the constituents of popular music, is pseudo-individualization. In the cultural mass product it is a reminder of glorious spontaneity-also of freedom to choose in the marketplace, as needed-despite its own compliance with standardization. Pseudo-individualization is what fools us about pre-digestion.