Music

Spesh, I thought you might be interested in this post.

In Adorno's "On the Fetish Character of Music," Adorno discusses how music is no longer produced for the sake of listening but is driven by capitalism. He talks about how there is now a market for everyone and that because of this you can never escape it.

Until this class I didn't understand what many of my self-proclaimed "anticonformist" friends who are musicians really talked about when they talked about "selling out" when you made it big. I think Adorno would say that the "man" they would be selling out to would be the culture industry. The culture industry (as discussed in The D of E) would then warp the music and make it conform to a certain sound or image until it sounded exactly like everything else....or repeatedly expose or overplay a song until whatever made it unique has deteriorated and it is part of the status quo.

I guess my question is, is the only alternative now to escape this to just create your own music and not sell it? I, personally, don't think he would agree with this because even the music you would create would undoubtedly be heavily influenced by the popular music you are surrounded by.

Also what exactly makes popular music now much different from popular songs repeatedly sung before the development of the culture industry? I think, to an extent, they were likely repeated and equally as popular as music today but there are now more people to consume it. The only difference I see now is that music can be sold as a commodity because of the technology. But really how different is this than people paid to sing a song before recording technology? Didn't that make music a commodity then too?