MUSIC INDUSTRY

Mass Culture and Music Industry: A Review of Adorno's Work

Mass Culture and Music Industry: A Review of Adorno's Work

Introduction

The report focuses on the evaluation of a statement, According to Frith (1981:4), Adorno's is the most systematic and the most searing analysis of mass culture and the most challenging for anyone claiming even a scrap of value for the products that come churning out of the music industry. The analysis based on the Adorno's theories and other works alo0ng with examples from the popular music industry.

Theodor W. Adorno

The young philosophy professor Theodore Wiesengrund Adorno counted before 1933 to a generation of German Jewish intellectuals, the theoretical insights of Marxism, but also about the psychoanalysis wanted to use for the critical analysis of contemporary society. Adorno was not a literary scholar. And if he is often characterized as representative of the sociology of literature, he has yet accrued at least by the empirical school sharply. His grades are individual to the literature - in the sense of his friend, Benjamin with the left hand written - studies on one of tradition and avant-garde literature lover trained. Apart from certain sections of the Dialectic of Enlightenment or the fragmentary remaining aesthetic theory especially an essayistic miniatures as have the location of the narrator in the modern novel or talk about poetry and society by striking and surprising formulations (then) new view opens to the literature

Standardisation

Popular culture may be welcomed by leftist critics for the release of energy, but it also condemned among conservatives, as they fear for the nihilistic influence on the tastes. Theodor Adorno also argued that the culture industry to manipulate the masses. Popular culture identified as the reason why people become passive, easy pleasure through consumption of popular culture make people docile and content, no matter how unpleasant their economic situation. It is culture industries that produce standardized cultural goods such as factories (Horkheimer & Adorno 121). There are differences between the cultural values that make them different, but they just variations on the same topic. C. Wright Mills wrote in 1950 of professional celebrity as a summary of progress of American capitalist society, competition and victory, as the crowning result of the stellar system in a society that makes a fetish of competition, the celebrity shows that awards with those who will benefit, regardless of content competition (Mills 296).

Pseudo-Individualization

Adorno calls this phenomenon pseudo-individualization. Adorno saw this mass-produced culture as a danger to the difficult high arts. Culture industries cultivate false needs, i.e. needs and satisfy by capitalism. True needs, on the contrary, freedom, creativity and true happiness.

These thinkers, saw celebrities like products cultural industry cultural apparatus of mass society; Hollywood stars serve as a distraction from the frustration created by industrial capitalism, and manipulate the 'masses' in the false promises of capitalism as an option (standardized, mass-produced celebrity apparently different physical person) and the comprehensive success (celebrities appear to demonstrate the rewards available to all).

Example 01

Determination celebrities as serial distractions, and their ideological role in the promotion of ...