Why Pop Music Is Bad For Your Brain
Updated: Nov 28, 2019
"Music... serves in America today as an advertisement for commodities which one must acquire in order to be able to hear the music." Theodor Adorno, Fetish Character, p.38
A large portion of my twenties was spent either behind a drum set or with a guitar in my hands working as a professional musician. For a couple of years, we traveled throughout Western Canada as a somewhat successful three-piece classic rock band, playing everything from The Beatles to Garth Brooks. Eventually I grew tired of playing other peoples songs and moved to Vancouver to form my own band and try my hand at writing my own songs. Now, this is by no means anything unusual, if you were an aspiring musician in those days, this was simply the next step in your evolution as a musician and what is called 'paying your dues'. And it was far from glamorous. First you would learn your instrument by playing the music of artists you enjoyed, and once you had reached a certain level of competency on your instrument; and your band had mastered enough songs, you would eventually begin writing, playing and marketing your own songs. Now, I tell you this only because it is during this experience that I learned something invaluable - something that made me see the world of popular music in a completely different light. I learned that the process one uses when writing a 'radio friendly' pop song followed a very predetermined, standardized formula. A formula that relied on dependable song structure, cliche subject matter and a melodic familiarity. All of these criteria constrained within a set structure of acceptable boundaries of musical taste.
Fast forward to today. It's been fifteen years since my playing days; now I invest my time in endless research of both the case and historiographical study types - reading dry, technical books on things like the origins of the education system or U.S. foreign policy; or the beginnings of radio, television and music. My main intention being the acquisition of primary source material so as to better understand our history and therefore better understand our uncertain future. One day not too long ago, while researching the origins of pop music and I found myself reading Theodor Adorno's, Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences. This book proving particularly interesting in that within it's pages Adorno explains the very songwriting formula I had become familiar with years earlier. Adorno went into great detail as to why the formula exists and while I wasn't overly surprised, I was taken aback by the shear scientific exactness of it all. As it turns out, whether you are a fan of classic rock bands like The Beatles, or a fan of country legend Willie Nelson, or Tupac, Taylor Swift, Stevie Wonder, Dave Brubeck, Micheal Buble or Josh Groban; they all go by this exact same formula. All popular music follows this 'scheme' - as Adorno refers to it - of standardization meant to destroy the free-thinking 'rugged' individual.
The general types of hits are also standardized, the 'character' of songs limited to but a few, such as mother songs, home songs, nonsense songs or 'novelty songs', pseudo-nursery rhymes, laments for a lost girl. Most important of all, the harmonic cornerstones of each hit - the beginning and the end of each part - must beat out the standard scheme. This scheme emphasizes the most primitive harmonic facts no matter what had harmonically intervened. Complications have no consequences. This inexorable device guarantees that regardless of what aberrations occur, the hit will lead back to the same familiar experience, and nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced. Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, Theodor Adorno, 1941.
To Adorno there were two spheres of music, serious music and popular music. He determined serious music to be of a higher intellectual meaning - that of the great composers. Popular music was one of formulaic composition, one that inhibited the intellectual growth of the listener by offering segmented verse/chorus/verse/bridge/coda structures that are relatively identical in format and of extremely limited, elementary, even juvenile content. Hit songs rarely veer from this limited field of character. Songs that lament of lost love; home; or nonsense songs filled with sordid escapades of drinking, partying, and debauchery often fill the FM airwaves while anything with an important or positive or empowering message are relegated to the underground. But, to Adorno, the most important aspect was that the song take you nowhere. It was critical that the beginning of the parts were harmonically the same as the end of the parts, returning the listener back to the beginning without gaining incite or knowledge of anything new. A three to four minute carefully constructed waste of the listeners time that instills a disingenuous sense of empowerment. It is of utmost importance that, no matter how complicated its details, hit music - or popular music - cannot break outside this general system of standardization. There is a built in structure that restricts exploration or imagination. The song parts act independently of the entirety, each one easily replaced by another similar piece; whereas serious music, like classical music, cannot be manipulated as easily.
That which the consumer considers to be a natural definition of music is merely only that which has been formed in our minds by outward forces put upon us since we were children. The nursery rhymes we are taught; the songs we hear in children's cartoons and movies all form a synthetic musical environment that irrevocably works to constrain us from understanding music on a broader, deeper level. The pop music fan believes a great variation to exist between musical genres like country and western, rap or alternative music; however, this belief is merely an illusion built upon our limited context of what music represents in its entirety. Our knowledge of the possibilities are framed within the myopic context of radio, television and other forms of mass communication. Similar to how some naively believe that all of the world's news can fit into an hour long nightly news broadcast - or even a twenty four hour news channel. They don't understand that the sensational news stories the viewer actually consumes are a finite representation of what is actually available; while an infinite amount of legitimate, news-worthy events, are sacrificed to the god of commodity - we see only that which we are meant to see; and pop music is only that which we are meant to hear.
Popular music must simultaneously meet two demands. One is for stimuli that provoke the listener's attention. The other is for the material to fall within the category of what the musically untrained listener would call 'natural' music: that is, the sum total of all convention and material formulas in music to which he is accustomed and which he regards as the inherent, simple language of music itself, no matter how late the development might be which produced this natural language. This natural language for the American listener stems from his earliest musical experiences, the nursery rhymes, the hymns he sings in Sunday School, the little tunes he whistles on his way to school. All these are vastly more important in the formation of musical language than his ability to distinguish the beginning of Brahm's Third Symphony from that of his second. Official musical language is, namely, the major and minor tonalities and all the tonal relationships they imply. But these tonal relationships of the primitive musical language set barriers to whatever does not conform to them. Extravagances are tolerated only insofar as they can be recast into this so-called natural language. Study in Philosophy and Social Science. Theodor Adorno
In terms of consumer demand, this is how standardization is created. The 'desideratum', - as Adorno refers to it - of the public's need for the song to be both stimulating and natural simultaneously. It must vary from the 'natural' enough to invoke a sense in the listener that he/she are consuming something new and fresh but never deviate from the super-structure of what is deemed natural to the human ear. This can be seen in specific cases within the music industry. An act like Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention received substantial critical acclaim, but were never considered by the general public as nothing more than a weird eclectic band of weird gypsies. While Zappa's music did satisfy one criteria of the desideratum in that it was most definitely stimulating, it failed the other by venturing too far outside what the untrained ear would still consider natural.
A similar case would be that of Metallica. If you were a teenager during the emergence of the trash metal scene that originated out of San Francisco in the early eighties you fully understand just how different and unnatural the music of bands like Metallica, Slayer, Exodus and Testament were. Lengthy songs, dark lyrical content, frenzied beats and rhythms placed the trash metal scene far outside the constraints of natural standardization. And when the music industry plucked Metallica from the underground, signed them to a major label and partnered them with a producer who fit them nicely into the stratum of four to five minute, radio-friendly songs, they quickly became the most popular band in the world - largely to the disappointment of their original, hard-core fans. The Black Album was a mainstay on radio air waves throughout the entire decade of the nineties, and even today - nearly thirty years later - when you turn on the radio you're far more likely to hear Enter Sandman, Sad but True, or Nothing Else Matters before you would hear Kill Em' All, Master of Puppets or Battery. Interesting to note that it was only when Metallica reverted back to their roots twenty years later were they able to regain the trust of some of their original fans who famously abandoned the band as a result of this format change - accusing Metallica of being sellouts. Which they were. They sold out to the 'system', literally.
From this infallible system built on the two part desiratum, a pseudo-individualism is created. And the career of Metallica is a perfect example of what Adorno referred to as 'pseudo individualization'. The system hides its evil mechanisms behind a thin veil of individuality, or the imagination of each particular performer. The system maintains and perseveres through a slight-of-hand; shape shifting with each performers interpretation of the under lying system. Similar to when one considers the construction of a particular model of automobile. While the body type, color or specific amenities can vary drastically from model to model, the chassis that it is built upon changes little. The perceived variation within different pop music genres is an illusion.
Pseudo-individualization. The paradox in the desiderata - stimulatory and natural - accounts for the dual character of standardization itself. Stylization of the ever identical framework is only one aspect of standardization. Concentration and control in our culture hide themselves in their very manifestation. Unhidden they would provoke resistance. Therefore the illusion and, to a certain extent, even the reality of individual achievement must be maintained. The maintenance of it is grounded in material reality itself, for while administrative control over life processes is concentrated, ownership is still diffuse.
Study in Philosophy and Social Science, Adorno
Adorno even warns of the challenge to the system if the individual 'handiwork' element is removed from the process - meaning, if the imagination of the individual artist within the music industry is eliminated it will become harder and harder to hide the backwardness of the music industry. He seems to be warning the music industry of the inevitable threat formed by the introduction of computerized engineering; digital recording equipment; drum loops; voice quantizers; and keyboard synthesizers. We see overwhelming evidence of this repetitiveness in the music today, and if you feel like it has progressively gotten worse, you're right. The limited individuality or variations found within the song structure of popular music has almost entirely been removed from today's 'music'.
"Individualism [is] most alive...in the form of ideological categories such as taste and free choice, it is imperative to hide standardization. The 'backwardness' of musical mass production, the fact that it is still on a handicraft level and not literally an industrial one, conforms perfectly to that necessity which is essential from the viewpoint of cultural big business. If the individual handicraft elements of popular music were abolished altogether, a synthetic means of hiding standardization would have to be evolved. Its elements are even now in existence." Study in Philosophy and Social Science, Adorno.
And finally, on the subject of pseudo individualism. Within the system some might argue that there are two evidences of true individualism - improvisation and separate tonal qualities between artists. However I simply offer firstly on improvisation - like that found in jazz, is still contained within the limitations of harmony, tone and meter. It still does not transcend beyond the scheme of the structure offered by the music industry. And as far as tonal difference between artists being an indication of individualism, it is also merely an illusion that also helps to maintain the strength of the system. Tonal difference, as can be found between the guitar playing of Eric Clapton and Angus Young is obvious; yet they still form their songs into 'radio friendly' pieces of art that also fit naturally within the parameters of song length and tonal and harmonic structure. They satisfy the law of pseudo individualism. After all, they are both still constrained by the same list of power chords, scales and individual notes that are found within the framework of the six strings of an electric guitar. In fact, entertainers like these serve a dual purpose, they were popular artists used as tools to establish the rigidly adhered-to system of popular music we see today while also - along with bands like Led Zeppelin, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones - offering a variation to the contemporary artist, thus furthering the illusion of choice while helping to reinforce a sense of individuality within a highly perfected, highly effective, regimented, systematic model.
"The composition hears for the listener. This is how popular music divests the listener of his spontaneity and promotes conditioned reflexes. Not only does it not require his effort to follow its concrete stream; it actually gives him models under which anything concrete still remaining may be subsumed. The schematic buildup dictates the way in which we must listen while, at the same time, it makes any effort in listening unnecessary." Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, Adorno
Susan Cavin, a PhD. of Sociology Professor at New York University echoes Adorno's viewpoint on the standardization of the music industry and the harm it has caused to the individual citing George Ritzer's 1993 book, The McDonaldization of Society when she writes:
"His idea that one's hearing, if fed on a diet of the predictable, predigested material (musical cliche), would 'regress' in the same way that... taste and smell regress in the face of a diet of soda pop and soft-textured McFood. Music's commodification...made individuals vulnerable to capture... by whatever was 'served up' to them by their chefs (masters) - as long as it was laced with the appropriate seasoning...Whereas 'true' music taught its listener how to perceive illogic contradiction through it's challenge to critical faculties, 'false' music taught the listener how to relax and enjoy,...and how to take pleasure in reliability, in repetition of...fetished objects...they taught skill of how to adapt to (and enjoy) what was given."
This assault on what Adorno called the 'rugged individual' is not limited to the music industry either. This standardization of systems expands to include every facet of mass communication - with only six corporate media outlets consuming the entire music, television, radio, entertainment and movie industries it is nearly impossible to escape this assault on our individuality. Look for future submissions from this site in which we will further examine this phenomenon; we will further analyze in detail just how the majority of our life is contrived by these standardized formulas of mind control.
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