Adorno 2 - Kanye West, Life of Pablo

Adorno, in the first chapter of Prisms, says that in jazz music, "nothing is permitted to remain what it intrinsically is. Everything must be fixed up, must bear the traces of a preparation which brings it closer to the sphere of the well known, thus rendering it more easily comprehensible... the process of preparation indicates to the listener that the music is made for him."

This passage reminds me of Kanye's release of The Life of Pablo, an album that Kanye continued to change even after it had been released. The confusion of his audience, the media, and music fans was everywhere. Many thought Kanye's indecision was ridiculous, a publicity stunt, a result of insecurity, and so on. Why release something if it wasn't finished?

I don't think Kanye makes music for his listeners, nor do I think he wants to make his music more comprehensible. (I think he does whatever he wants, regardless of what people think.) Where I see the connection between Adorno and Kanye is that the release of The Life of Pablo brought attention to the process of preparation. It reminded us that music is produced (to "perfection") and that music is changed during this process. As listeners, we typically just see and listen to finished products, oblivious to the processes behind it. In this case we did get exposed to the process, and it frustrated us. A lot. We don't want to see imperfection or uncertainty. We want finished products that are clean, fixed up, and bear no direct evidence of the artistic work behind it. (This is assuming that Kanye's indecision is a mark of artistry.)

While I'm posting, I also want to direct some attention to the poem by Keats that Adorno includes before the Schoenberg chapter in Prisms. I think it summarizes how impossible Adorno's taste is, in a way only poetry can.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.

(This post is late, it's intended for Thurs 4/21.)

Christina Aguilera - Adorno - Cusick

Adorno – Christina Aguilera’s “Come On Over (All I Want Is You)” was an instant hit,
pop song in its time, late 1990s, and it still largely resonates with its
intended audience as a song full of deep, nostalgic connections and memories.
The song is a perfect example of a hit because of the easy to identify
repeating patterns of identification, which is a technique purposefully used to
train audiences to be able to easily recognize the song and relate to the
characters discussed in the song’s content (if they cannot relate, they are
filled with longing of being able to relate). Repeating lines orient the
listeners to the song, as I have before said, it is “drummed into the listeners’
ears until they cannot help but recognize it and hence… will love it.” The
pseudo-individualization of pop music, makes listeners feel as if a song has
been specially created to relate to that specific person and their specific,
current life situation. In actuality, the lyrics are made just generic enough
to fit to almost any person dealing with almost any personal problem. On the
rare occasion that an audience member does not directly relate to a song, that
person still gets fulfillment in joining a subcultural group of fandom for the
singer, song, and general genre of music. In this song, the issues being addressed
range from (but are not limited to) domestic violence, a long distance love affair,
a song of seduction, a break-up song, a reconciliation song, a song of worship,
a song of faith, and lastly, to a love song All aspects considered, this is the
exact product of a hit pop song for our America, western culture.

Cusick - This is a frequently used song to torture for all of the reasons you have just mentioned, Adorno. There is standardization, multiple meanings that can be understood, and most importantly, repetition of many forms. Not only could this tune drive a person mad while being played at extremely high tempos, or with a Long Range Acoustic Device; but also, just at normal volumes, this song is known to
greatly upset and disturb a large portion of our American population, fueling
hate, violence, and extremely mild degrees of mental instability. What is
happening to detainees of war, and has been going on for decades now, is being
stuck in a “black room” chained in a stress position, with deafeningly loud
music being blasted. What scares me is that I have found conversations on the
public Internet, through blogs, either boasting about what might be the perfect
playlist – this song and artist in general being frequently suggested – or
refusing to believe that songs like these could be seen as tortuous in any way.
These people are, disturbingly, being gleefully delighted by the idea that
prisoners of war are being subjected to “the same” experiences they have had to
endure as citizens in our society. Others, cannot understand how physically and
mentally destructive the ”black room” scenario can be, and comment on how
sexually arousing it would be to experience such “no touch torture” techniques.
It says something serious about our culture when these are the two responses to pop music being used as torture, Adorno.

Adorno/Matana Roberts

I wanted to find an example of jazz that's so atypically experimental that it might counter Adorno's critique's of different forms of jazz as pseudo-individualization revolving around standardization. Besides dynamic development and some repetition of motifs, I'm not sure that there's much in this song that can be targeted by his critiques. Plus the song is incredibly expressive with its spoken word and distressing instrumentals, and focuses a good amount of energy towards making the listener feel uncomfortable, particularly towards the beginning.

Gypsy Music

"The more totally the culture industry roots out all deviations, thus cutting off the medium from its intrinsic possibilities of development, the more the whole blaring dynamic business approaches a standstill." ... "no single measure follows from the logic of the musical progression--so the perennial fashion becomes the likeness of a planned congealed society" pg. 124-125, On Jazz



What about gypsy music? Yes, it lacks the atonality of Adorno's beloved avant garde but it also lacks the severe structural censorship of culturally popular music. Yes, it pertains to a culture (gypsy culture) but that particular culture is one that deviates, that contrasts its counterpart, which comes with music for the masses. This is not music for the charts, nor for profit. This music is for the story of a people, an expression not guided by an an agenda.


This particular woman sings about having children, about the happiness that would come with that and the strength it would give her. A table full of children and a full heart, and the woe that comes with not being able to have children. (Language is Romanian)

This is not the kind of message/topic you'd ever hear on the radio, and this is not the kind of music the profit-driven would push for.

Social Life in Social Death: Adorno, Blackness, and the Misapprehension of Slavery in Alienation

“The image of the technical world possesses an ahistorical aspect that enables it to sere as a mythical mirage of eternity. Planned production seems to purge the life-process of all that is uncontrollable, unpredictable, incalculable in advance and thus to deprive it of what is genuinely new, without which history is hardly conceivable…” (Adorno, Perennial, 125)

"And this, in turn, leads to the question of the relation between castration and alienation, between castration, on the one hand, and disavowal and fetishization, on the other hand, in the Freudian and Marxian registers. Here we can begin to examine how a particular line of psychoanalytically influenced inquiry—say, from Adorno to Silverman— operates against the backdrop of these racial-historical determinations of language and the background of a reduction of the phonic substance of language that bends their analytics of aurality in the direction of an overwhelming ocularcentrism. For Adorno, black aural culture is defined by its fetish character in a way similar to the definition of female body/voice that Silverman sees in classic cinema. After all, according to Adorno, “[p]sychologically, the primal structure of jazz may most closely suggest the spontaneous singing of servant girls . . . [,] the domesticated body in bondage.”16 But I’m interested, here, in the insight Adorno’s deafness carries: for what is borne in work of the black radical aesthetic tradition—and not only at the site of its recitations of terror and violation but also in the critical and metacritical discourse it produces on its own productions—is nothing other than the cries of a servant girl, the material-phonic substance that is transferable but not interpretable from either inside or outside the circle, the aural content that infuses and transforms (our dominant understandings of ) primality, extremity, or extension out from inside or outside. Here I want to establish black aurality as the site of an improvisation through the structures both Silverman and Adorno talk about. Ultimately, I want to show how Baldwin’s baraka, his blessing, moves in the tradition of the servant girl and in the encounter with psychoanalysis and in light not just of castration but of augmentation, of a beneficent and song-producing prosthesis—the augmentation of vision with the sound that it has excluded, the augmentation of reason with the ecstasy it has dismissed—that improvises through the determinations of lack and alienation, not via some direct adequation between word and object, but through the object’s transferential reproduction in and as the (re)production of sound and of an ensemblic, dynamic totality. What I’m trying to talk about is another address of Lacan’s “question of a horn,” about which more in a minute. That address takes into account those transferences of the servant girl’s scream in the black musical and literary traditions, the “afro-horn[s],” say, of Henry Dumas or of Albert Ayler, phallic instruments infused and reconfigured by the materiality (content-substance-objectivity) of the maternal and by the knowledge of freedom the experience of bondage affords...
In Gaye’s work after What’s Going On, the contrapuntal is constructed not only by way of such polyrhythmic and extraharmonic intervention (a kind of irregularity or nonstandardization of pulse-to-hummm-or-buzzzzzz to whose differentiating force Adorno was unattuned), but as the disruption of the disciplinary hegemony of another powerful technic, namely, the rhetoric of the love song, a generic technicality that produces its own large set of problems. Here subordination to the technical apparatus of the love song is again cut by manipulation of, by technical in/subordination to, the recording apparatus. The lyric subject of the love song is disrupted by Gaye’s own other voices. The rhetoric of a most instrumental rationality is cut by the rhetorician’s own rapture. Listen to the song and think about how the theoretical image of the city might be held in and might emerge from the interconnection of the knowledge/discipline of labor and sexuality that this particular aesthetic space-time contains." - Fred Moten, "Visible Music," In The Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, pp. 179-180, 228

Adorno believes that the reproduction of certain sensations that are common between pop and jazz have produced a lack and a need for reproduced, external stimulus. This deprivation, as he calls it, is the castration at the heart of Fred Moten's deconstruction of the psychoanalytic foundations of Adorno's theory. Moten characterizes the production of Marvin Gaye's "Since I Had You" as transcending this by producing a prosthetic for the cries of slavery inherent to the black "aural" (cultural?) tradition. The music goes beyond castration and produces a sense of social life typically denied to the slave girl. This seductive capacity inherent to black music like Gaye's is the reflection of these cries, which Adorno arrogantly writes off as "feminine" and "female" at various points. Adorno misunderstands black music as a reflection of the paradigm of slavery their history has produced. He has excluded that as the essential history that determines the political ontology of social life within social death, where the music finds itself. It should also be of note that Adorno begins his discussion of the history of jazz with minstrel folk songs, which were also a part of this political ontology of antiblackness that jazz finds itself. He ignores the true impact on the political economy of American culture by ignoring the way minstrel music sustained slavery, and thus ignores a fundamental limit that is required in order to properly trace the psychoanalytic structure of music as a fetish, because these minstrel songs supported blackness as the fetish object.

Edit: After class, I find it necessary to clear up a couple things. Foremost, we cannot equate black people and blackness. Black people are black, but there is no "the black." Assuming an authentic "black person's experience" exists in black cultural forms like jazz would be susceptible to any basic critique of the Enlightenment's universal category of the subject. This is not what we are after. What we are after is blackness as a metaphysical category in the Western political ontology. Although there is no authentic category of "the black," there is the problematic of blackness that alters such phenomenal realities. (Moten has some great quotations on how the black aural tradition is fertile soil for discussing the history of philosophy (of music), and if anyone would like, I have a free electronic copy available.) Thus tracing jazz, soul, and other myriad black cultural forms as authentically black isn't the point. What we must do first is understand the political ontology in which these forms materially participate. Adorno has identified several problems with certain - I would argue  petit-bourgeois - audiences, but has overlooked the fetization of  blackness at root in early jazz (minstrel) performance. As such, his attention has been drawn away from the way jazz operates within the paradigm of social death necessitated by slavery. Instead, he argues is merely a palliative against universal social death under capitalism. Slavery breaks the usual subject/object divide which assumes itself in the ontological category of the human at work in this universal social death. Slaves were objects that spoke, commodities that spoke in breaking with Marx's critical analysis of the commodity. (Moten, In The Break, p. 6) As such, they attained social death beyond the industrial worker or the postmodern consumer. To that end, their material and cultural resistance in refining the cries of the slave girl "into music" is not a fetish project but a necessary instrumentation of the black aural tradition. This focus on instrumentation of such a tradition, which is the tradition of the object who speaks, means that sex and labor change into genuine and loving categories because they exist not as a palliative but as survival of social life in social death.

Conducted Improvisation

Adorno's critique of Jazz leads us to believe that even improvisation is derivative and predictable because of the social standard for "good improvisation" that sticks to chord progressions and musical maneuvers that are pleasing to the ear and musically coherent.

Admittedly tooting my own horn here, I taught a DeCal last year that aimed to teach musicians to improvise in a large group. At varying skill levels, the performance required some direction, so I conducted, also improvising.The music itself was not necessarily typical, but as spontaneous and strange as it was, the music moves made by each player were taught, codified, and easily reproducible.

Here's a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av6WGPpOHrE&list=PLoKM6QT3EquNh3cvwQFltd_idPZBTHgKR&index=4

Improvised Recital

Adorno Blog Post (4/21/16): Is it really possible to have an impromptu art form?

Adorno's texts really got me thinking. An ideal form of music would be one that lacks structure, practically so it can be of outside of any influence, more specifically capitalist/consumer interest. His dislike of Jazz for example is because of it's pseudo importu-ness and infatuation with the exotic (how jazz is targeted as a afro-american musical style).

It is difficult to find any sort of music that fits his "requirements". From birth, it seems we are all indoctrinated into some form of culture. And it is difficult to escape those cultural influences that have become an inherent part of our individuality. Even our own notion of randomness may not be all that random. For example, during my community college years I was on the school debate team. I participated in the extemporaneous and impormptu speaking contests. And although the speeches were supposed to be "impromptu", they weren't actually. Many of the times our speeches followed a specific formula or structure that we had practiced prior to the competition. This style of pre-prepared "impromptu-ness" isn't what Adorno has in mind.

Taking a look at other art forms such as impromptu comedy, freestyle rap or battle rapping, we can see that there is this pre-prepared impromptu-ness to the performance. Many of the times the participants of these events give a fresh performance, however the material they use had to have already have been preconceived. Having a mental safe of material one can use is essential as an impromptu performer. So in the example of my community college debate team. The coach told us that the best way to be a impromptu competitor was to have a "shit you know list", a mental consciousness of the things we already know throughly, so when asked to improvise we can always refer back to that memory of topics we are comfortable with.

My point with all of this is that I do not see any way one can truly be random. We are all influenced by outside factors with or without our knowledge. So art forms that claim to be random may actually not be.

  

Jazz Prodigy

"It is characteristic for jazz as a form of interference, however, that one can easily dispense with its more differentiated elements without eliminating it, or even preventing it from being recognizable as jazz. It is pseudo-democratic in the sense that characterizes the consciousness of the time: its attitude of immediacy, definable through a rigid system of tricks, hides class differences. In the ideological realm, as in the current political one, such democracy is closely accompanied by reaction. The deeper jazz strays in society, the more reactionary traits it assumes; the more completely it is enslaved by the banal; the less it tolerates freedom and outbursts of the imagination; until finally, as the musical accompaniment to the modern collective, it simply glorifies oppression itself. The more democratic jazz is, the worse it becomes." - On Jazz, Adorno, Page 128

While Adorno proposes in this quote that jazz "glorifies oppression itself" due to its "pseudo-democratic"ness, the case of young jazz musician Joey Alexander, who arguably earned his international recognition through his jazz piano playing, may suggest that jazz has the ability to be both democratic and good. Alexander grew up in Indonesia and before his early teens had already performed at the Newport Jazz Festival among other notable jazz festivals and concert halls around the world. Alexander's improvisation and embellishment to music shows jazz isn't definable through a "rigid system of tricks" but rather a musical purity and creativity unlike many other genres. I included a suggested read/musical critique from the New York Times about/of Alexander, "An 11-Year Old Jazz Sensation Who Hardly Clears the Piano’s Sightlines." The author of this piece, Nate Chinen, suggests a different take on jazz than Adorno: "Jazz prodigies rarely have full command of their artistry. They tend to exhibit a superabundance of technique and core knowledge but a more deficient supply of the intangibles — what jazz partisans mean when they praise with the word “maturity.” And even the most virtuoso interpretation of composed material is of limited use in jazz, at least when it comes to a solo career. For a jazz pianist, the mastery entails a staggering breadth of knowledge about harmony, rhythm and orchestration, all converging in an eloquent synthesis." (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/arts/music/joey-alexander-an-11-year-old-jazz-sensation-who-hardly-clears-the-pianos-sightlines.html?_r=0) Adorno seems to leave out this notion of "the intangibles" in his analysis of jazz, focusing on the musical structure but not necessarily the "maturity" required for improvisation and the synthesizing vision of musical understanding (harmony/rhythm/orchestration) that Chinen mentions. While Chinen agrees that Alexander doesn't have the maturity he needs to be a success on his own in the jazz world, Alexander still serves as a model for near-mastery of a style (jazz) that isn't merely "interference" or capitalistic but a form of expression and passion. Here are a few videos of Joey Alexander: 

Chicago - Nowadays (Finale)

Let me start by saying: What is Adorno's issue with Jazz, and the evolution of Jazz?! I really hated the use of the word "Negro" throughout his Prisms, but I agreed with his point that Blues and Jazz music originated in the cotton fields with the African American slaves throughout the country.

"Jazz is music which fuses the most rudimentary melodic, harmonic, metric and formal structure with the ostensibly disruptive principle of syncopation, yet without ever really disturbing the crude unity of the basic rhythm, the identically sustained meter, and the quarter-note." 121

"Contrariness has changed into second-degree 'smoothness' and the jazz-form of reaction has become so entrenched that an entire generation of youth hears only it and the basic meter. Yet none if this alters the fact that jazz has in its essence remained static, nor does it explain the resulting enigma that millions of people seem never to tire of its monotonous attraction" 121

I strongly disagree with Adorno's views on Jazz! Maybe he was light-weight music tortured with Jazz as a child, but to me - a person from the youth generation in comparison to Adorno - Jazz is timeless and very far from "static". I believe Jazz has many faces and subgenres, I like to think of Chicago's "Nowadays" as a daisy0duke type of jazz, as opposed to the blues/soulful type of jazz that also exists. While Jazz does follow an entirely different structure than most music, it is specifically planned (as Adorno later admits) out and structured in it's own way. I love thinking of the new ways Jazz has been reinterpreted, like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA6kXUgZ7lE DIMMI's "Promesses" attached. In this new-age style of Jazz, there are many other genres of music mixed in with the Jazz, but the classical Jazz horn sound allows youth to identify the Jazz genre and begin learning more about the history of the genre as well.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/remembering-prince

Music Outside Adorno's Critique

One of the reasons that Adorno dislikes jazz music is because jazz music, regardless of its improvisation, is always formulaic. If we consider the the ordinary sounds happening around us as music, then perhaps music of daily life, as a process, could be considered music that remains outside Adorno's critique. The class silence that makes Professor Naddaff feel uncomfortable and the sounds of papers being passed around in class are not subject to a formulated pattern that appeals to emotion. We do not ask or desire for the natural sounds/music that occurs around us. These sounds/music come in different patterns that make us feel uncomfortable because no pattern is ever predictable and act as a force that helps us realize how to be. Moreover, music as a natural process is similar to air. Both are distributed freely and are not able to be packaged, sold and perpetuated onto others--they are nature itself.

Adornono

Whatever my enigmatic feelings about Adorno may be, his analysis of jazz music through a sort of Freudian lens made me think about that weirdly sexual scene in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. You know, the one with Jessica Rabbit singing in the night club. Anywho, it's not the same uptempo jazz Adorno's whining about on pages 151-2, but I think it's really relevant in a weird way.

Presentation: Adorno On Jazz

Today for the presentation, Melissa Justin and Keaton will ask why Adorno hates Jazz? We will focus primarily on "On Jazz" beginning with how Adorno hears jazz, what jazz claims to do, how jazz became a commodity, and whether or not our identifying with jazz is a mere illusion.

In my section I will talk about jazz itself and what Adorno says he hears in jazz. The topics will include: syncopation, improvisation, the rigorous metre, harmonic/melodic structure, and the break.

Please consider the following parts of On Jazz: pg 119-120, pg 155 on the hot parts, pg's 132-33 where he talks about ideology of jazz, pg 147.

Questions to consider: What is the relationship between the subjective and objective elements of jazz? How legitimate does Adorno think the improvisation is, as self expression? What elements of jazz might Adorno overlook? How is jazz considered a commodity? Because it is a commodity, and even if we agree overall with Adorno's arguments about jazz's relationship to capitalism, can we still find value in listening to jazz beyond bourgeois pleasure?

Adorno #2

"The more totally the culture industry roots out all deviations, thus cutting off the medium from its intrinsic possibilities of development, the more the whole blaring dynamic business approaches a standstill. Just as no piece of jazz can, in a musical sense, be said to have a history, just as all its components can be moved about at will, just as no single measure follows from the logic of the musical progression--so the perennial fashion becomes the likeness of a planned congealed society"(124-125, Perennial Fashion--Jazz)

I think that this conception Adorno has of jazz and the way in which it is really but the victim of the culture industry and its economic forces can be applied to most edm music. Taking Adorno's perspective, both edm and jazz have no creative agency or autonomy, rooted not in expression and the dynamism of that, but rather of the economic forces of the culture industry which has found a formula and anchors every sound to that formula so as to satisfy the expectations of the public, who have become accustomed to such sounds, while in effect stagnating any possibility for deviation and musical development. Edm, in my opinion, also lacks this musical history Adorno refers to because the entire creation seems to be rooted in a marketable industry and serves thus only the purpose of numbing the listeners into a dazed whole.

                  "Sandstorm" by Darude

Let's Dance the Last Dance - Paper #2

This is the song I used to put Levitin and Sacks in conversation with one another for my 2nd paper.

Carly Rae Jepsen and E*MO*TION in "Popular Music"

Carly Rae Jepsen graduated last year, so to speak, from a culturally impactful one-hit-wonder into a mature and relevant pop musician with lasting appeal through the release of E*MO*TION. The title of the album says a lot, or very little, if you're Adorno. It is a good pop album, and "Run Away With Me" is maybe its most important single, and it is a good pop single. When scrutinizing Adorno, I think it is important to begin not with bad pop, but with good pop (even if the video is bad.) The focus of the song, lyrically, is feeling - specifically the throws of passion and the blind beauty in new love. This is seen in the refrain of the song. It contains all the essential elements of Adorno's pop: a catchy chorus, a bridge to change up the doldrum, an emphasis on youth and newness, etc. When discussing the move from operetta to musical, Adorno maligns the failure "to meet the most primitive standards of originality and and inventiveness." ("Popular Music," 22) This occurs because the social function of the pop song, writes Adorno, is identification, specifically an "appeal to a "lonely crowd" of the atomized; they reckon 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...Socially the hits either channel emotions - thus recognizing them - or vicariously fulfill the longing..." ("Popular Music," 26-27) This CRJ song certainly meets that social function. It requires little to enjoy except an affinity for 80's pop and new wave, seamlessly merging synths of the era with interesting instrumentation and emotion-laden vocals. Thus, it offers an opportunity for vicarious love, spiritedness, and pleasure. The light nature of the instrumental and the tone of the song ensure this.
Now, I ask a simple question - doesn't it seem like Adorno has some ressentiment? Why are we weak to love light music, why are we necessarily crippled and insufficient on our own? Why does self expression and enjoyment of other expressions appear mutually exclusive?

After reading Adorno, the pursuit of writing music that is both transgressive and popular seems impossible. Pop and other established genres constantly reiterate the normative approach to music that has dominated the music industry for decades and deviations from the norms tend to make people uncomfortable. The two goals seem to contradict each other in his opinion. After hearing his music however, which was chaotic and deliberately dissonant and jarring,  I thought he might be taking himself too literally. Transgressive music can still be pleasant to listen to, while also disorienting listeners. Modern artists like the Books, the Dirty Projectors, and Paul Lansky are frequently reintroducing us to sounds as music and are even gaining popularity because of their innovation and not because of promotions.

Here's a collaboration the Dirty Projectors did with Bjork- another boundary-breaking artist who cares less about how pleasant sound is and more about what can be accomplished musically with sounds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OquMlYFtnEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OquMlYFtnE

(Adorno) Somebody Else by The 1975

Adorno says that Jazz was a way for people to step away from the conformity of other music and from society. However, in trying to be so different from everything else, there became a standardized way of creating this "nonconformity." There was a structure to something which was supposed to be new and  not governed by the rules of the old standards. In the words of Adorno, "individual features which do not conform to the norm are nevertheless shaped by it, and become marks of mutilation" (126). The song "Somebody Else" by The 1975 because although the rhythm and the sounds of the song are deviating from what a standard popular song sounds like, the lyrics are still conforming to the typical topic about a loved one. He is singing about how he wants the woman to belong only to him although he broke it off with her. He doesn't want anyone else to have her if he can't. 

Adorno Overview Response

I am unsure what Adorno would think about "We are the World". The song utilizes music celebrities as star texts to sell the song as a commodity, going as far to profile individual celebrity star texts solo shots. However, the song directly addresses a social issue that Adorno might think would stimulate higher level of thinking. Perhaps, the social message within "We are the World"  is actually another way to sell music as a commodity. If music artists as celebrity star texts are known to sing for a socially productive cause, then artists may gather new and stronger fans to buy more music as commodities. 

Adorno, Rockin' in The "Free World"

I chose "Rockin' in The Free World" by Neil Young for this week's reading because of its explicit social and political implications. Adorno discusses two types of music, one that shapes our social consciousness, thus posing an obligation to allow for social progress and develop human consciousness, and the other that panders to mass taste, thus numbing consciousness and contributing to our regression. Young's song exemplifies music as a form of subversive critique of institutions of power and suggests a type of music contrary to Adorno's philosophy that music must always fall victim to capitalism's corrupting forces. Similar to Pussy Riot in Russia, but probably considered by most to be less extreme, Young has used his music, both lyrics and style, to question social problems of contemporary American life and the political elite in control. Might Young's songs with especially pointed lyrics be examples of "progressive music," rather than regressive music?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMuNChLztyE&spfreload=5

[Hook]

I'm in love with the coco
I'm in love with the coco
I got it for the low, low
I'm in love with the coco
I'm in love with the coco
I'm in love with the coco
I got it for the low, low
I'm in love with the coco

[Verse 1]

Hit my plug, that's my cholo (mi amigo)
Cause he got it for the low, low

If you snitchin' I go loco (go crazy)
Hit you with that treinta ocho

N**** thinkin' that I'm solo
 Fifty deep, they like, "oh, no"

Heard the feds takin' photos
I know nothin', fuck the popo

Bakin' soda, I got bakin' soda
Bakin' soda, I got bakin' soda
Whip it through the glass, N****
I'm blowin' money fast, N****

[Hook]

I'm in love with the coco
I'm in love with the coco
I got it for the low, low
I'm in love with the coco
I'm in love with the coco
I'm in love with the coco
I got it for the low, low
I'm in love with the coco

[Verse 2]

Thirty six, that's a kilo (aqui)
Need a brick, miss my free throw (they white)

I'm in love, just like Ne-Yo

Bustin' shots, now he Neo (Matrix)

Free my homies, fuck the C.O (puto)

Fuck the judge, fuck my P.O (puto)

All this coke, like I'm Nino

Water whip, like I'm Nemo

I'm in love with the coco
I'm in love with the coco
I got it for the low, low
I'm in love with the coco
I'm in love with the coco
I'm in love with the coco
I got it for the low, low
I'm in love with the coco

________________________________________________________________________

“A sort of musical children’s language is prepared for them; it differs from the real thing in that its vocabulary consists exclusively of fragments and distortions of the artistic language of music.” (51)

“Even mechanical control of the music is no longer expected.” (37)

            In “On the Fetish Character on Music and the Regression of Listening”, Adorno uses terms throughout, such as “childish”, “child-like”, “elementary”, and “retarded.” These terms seem to be aligned with music that is underdeveloped and undeveloped. Underdeveloped or undeveloped music must rely on another source for success—technology.

            The second quote reminds me of modern technology such as synthesizers, lip-synching, voice enhancement devices, etc. Secondly, music is now compartmentalized into several different roles: songwriter, producer, guitar player, and singer—where at one time, just one individual executed these tasks. Most mainstream and popular music such as pop and hip-hop artists rarely write or perform the music themselves. Yet, this is the music that the masses follow. Most contain catchy tunes that easily get stuck in the listener’s head whether or not one is concentrating on it or even listening to it.  Also, most “artists” are easily forgotten and are popular for a very short period of time maybe producing one or two “successful” albums. This type of non-creative and non-artistic (in my opinion) seemed to proliferate in a larger scale once technology became more innovative. In a sense, technology replaced the musician and this leads to degradation of quality in music. Conclusively, deterioration in music quality subsumes regressive listening.