Adorno and Avant-Garde

While reading Adorno I was reminded of the reply Noam Chomsky gave when he was asked for his thoughts on Lacan, Zizek, and Derrida:

I’m not interested in posturing–using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever. So there’s no theory in any of this stuff, not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find in all of the work you mentioned some principles from which you can deduce conclusions, empirically testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old. See if you can find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can’t. (source)

 While I don't think this is the best way to overthrow continental linguistic theory, Chomsky's view has some relatable sentiment. With Adorno it often seems not merely speculative, but opinion-based. This aspect of Adorno's writing can be seen in his attempts to both posit that avant-garde music is the purest music and still be able to identify ways in which it fails.
In Adorno's "Musical Life" he writes the following:

Even the purest and most consistent efforts, those of the musical avant-garde, run the risk of merely playing to themselves. They are exposed to that peril, which they can do nothing about, by their necessary renunciation of society. Neutralization and a loss of tension on the radical moderns' part are not due to their asociality but have been socially forced upon them: ears balk when they hear what would concern them. (120)

In this passage Adorno describes the avant-garde as "the purest and most consistent efforts." He also describes the way in which, by virtue of their very purity, they risk being ignored or un-examined: "ears balk when they hear what would concern them." Now, it seems that this flaw is not a flaw of the music itself, but rather of human neophobia. I can follow Adorno through this line of thinking, but I believe there is a fundamental flaw inherent in this examination: Adorno seems to be able to draw a simple distinction between that music which is avant-garde and that which is pandering to popular sensibilities. I do not think this distinction can be made readily, if at all. Let us take, for example, a song from Kendrick Lamar's most recent musical project untitled unmastered.: 

Our question for this song is whether it is avant-garde or not, and how we can tell. We might begin with the title of the song: "untitled 07 | 2014-2016." The 'untitled' convention (used for all 8 tracks on the album) evokes the works of Pollock and Rothko, even Coltrane, which might be a point for this song's avant-garde-ness. However, it could just as easily be a point against its avant-garde-ness because it is evoking works that are decades old. Next, the content of the song can be analyzed in an equally ambiguous manner. The first part of the song consists of a format of repetition ("___ won't get you high..."). This format can be seen either as a typical pop-music convention, or, just as easily and with just as much evidence, it can be seen of the deconstruction of a pop-music convention. The latter position would argue that, because each repetition is altered, there is no truly predictable pattern that the listener can sink into and get comfortable with. This might be seen in the call and response section ("We don't want problems. We don't want problems") which deviates the response from the call immediately preceding it ("Me do want dollars. We don't want trick"). On the other hand, one might say that these deviations don't deviate enough to make a listener feel uncomfortable, thus negating the track's avant-garde status. Ultimately, it is pretty easy to argue for the avant-garde or non-avant-garde status of any given track, making this particular predicate a rather wishy washy place to build a value system in music off of.