"On Popular Music" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adorno Theodor W)

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