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

This also accounts for revivals in popular music. They do not have the outworn
character of standardized products manufactured after a given pattern. The
breath of free competition is still alive within them. On the other hand, the
famous old hits which are revived set the patterns which have become
standardized. They are the golden age of the game rules.

[19] This "freezing" of standards is socially enforced upon the agencies
themselves. Popular music must simultaneously meet two demands. One is for
stimuli that provoke the listener's attention. The other is for the material to
fall within the category of what the musically untrained listener would call
"natural" music: that is, the sum total of all the conventions and material
formulas in music to which he is accustomed and which he regards as the
inherent, simple language of music itself, no matter how late the development
might be which produced this natural language. This natural language for the
American listener stems from his earliest musical experiences, the nursery
rhymes, the hymns he sings in Sunday school, the little tunes he whistles on his
way home from school. All these are vastly more important in the formation of
musical language than his ability to distinguish the beginning of Brahms's Third
Symphony from that of his Second. Of ficial musical culture is, to a large
extent, a mere superstructure of this underlying musical language, namely, the
major and minor tonalities and all the tonal relationships they imply. But these
tonal relationships of the primitive musical language set barriers to whatever
does not conform to them. Extravagances are tolerated only insofar as they can
be recast into this so-called natural language.

[20] In terms of consumer demand, the standardization of popular music is only
the expression of this dual desideratum imposed upon it by the musical frame of
mind of the public--that it be "stimulatory" by deviating in some way from the
established "natural," and that it maintain the supremacy of the natural against
such deviations. The attitude of the audiences toward the natural language is
reinforced by standardized production, which institutionalizes desiderata which
originally might have come from the public.


Pseudo-individualization

[21] The paradox in the desiderata--stimulatory and natural--accounts for the
dual character of standardization itself. Stylization of the ever identical
framework is only one aspect of standardization. Concentration and control in
our culture hide themselves in their very manifestation. Unhidden they would
provoke resistance. Therefore the illusion and, to a certain extent, even the
reality of individual achievement must be maintained. The maintenance of it is
grounded in material reality itself, for while administrative control over life
processes is concentrated, ownership is still diffuse.

[22] In the sphere of luxury production, to which popular music belongs and in
which no necessities of life are immediately involved, while, at the same time,
the residues of individualism are most alive there in the form of ideological
categories such as taste and free choice, it is imperative to hide
standardization. The "backwardness" of musical mass production, the fact that it