Tuesday, 4 January 2011

Task 2

In all it's 3 volumes 'On popular Music' is an intellectual rant on popular culture and it's music. He begins by devaluing popular music by comparing it to 'serious music' presumably the classical music that he finds tasteful and worthy of enjoyment. He goes on to detail the structure of popular music, "the chorus consists of thirty two bars and that the range is limited to one octave and one note" and that popular music is manufactured for the masses, even how you dance is pre-determined, "The general types of hits are also standardized: not only the dance types, the rigidity of whose pattern is understood".

Adorno's ideology also focuses on the predictability of popular music, stating that it is "pre-digested" and that free-thinking is absent and that the consumer may think that they are choosing to listen to the music and buy the record by their choice it is fact been chosen for them, "keeps them in line by making them forget that what they listen to is already listened to for them"

For a song to be familiarized enough with the masses it needs to become recognized,"Mass listening habits today gravitate about recognition. Popular music and its plugging are focused on this habituation. The basic principle behind it is that one need only repeat something until it is recognized in order to make it accepted".
Duck Sauce's song Barbra Streisand is a strong example of Adorno's theology, it is repetitive and after several second the rest of the song is predictable and pre-digested. The song is so predictable and recognizable that the artists were able to produce a website that imitated their own song and allowed the public to enter their name or other words into the song to replace 'barbra streisand'






http://gobarbra.com/

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