DIGITALLY ENHANCED: ADORNO FOR THE 21ST-CENTURY
DIGITALLY ENHANCED: ADORNO FOR THE 21ST-CENTURY
Theodor Adorno is an influential figure in cultural studies, philosophy, and musicology. However, a re-examination of Adorno’s framework in the context of contemporary media studies is necessary because audio production and distribution technologies have changed dramatically since Adorno’s time of writing. In this article, I apply Adorno’s critical framework to the electronic artist Owl City. In doing so, I enhance Adorno’s model of analysis in order to allow for both regressive and progressive interpretations of contemporary music culture. I argue that social media facilitate a more efficacious culture industry, and that digital media facilitate a progressive form of escaping from the culture industry’s oppression.
As a media scholar and a fellow musician, I inevitably crossed paths with the work of Theodor Adorno. While reading his essay, “On Popular Music,” I found that many of Adorno’s ideas resembled the ways in which I had grown to view my own world of music. I call myself a musician but, when that classification is broken down, I believe myself to be a drummer with an ear for music. I do not use a formal system of music theory or notation when I write music. I use a literacy that I have developed from a general understanding of rhythm and sound. I write by recording, and I edit by listening and altering those parts that sound “unfitting.” The act of listening has given me an understanding of how music should sound. For instance, consonant chords and eloquent transitions sound natural and familiar when I hear them, and an instrument’s “appropriate” position in a mix is pleasing to my ear.
However, Adorno suggests that sensing naturalness and familiarity when listening to and creating music is culturally regressive. To him, these characteristics are a byproduct of standardized structures and homogeneity within the music industry.[1] This suggestion is likely disconcerting to those contemporary artists who understand music through the musical literacy of listening and recording. For example, Adam Young, the creator of Owl City, is a self-taught audio producer, and writes and records his music entirely in the basement of his parent’s house.[2] Yet, he produces commercially popular music simply by utilizing the staples of contemporary production technology: a personal computer, audio software, and microphones. These technologies ultimately enable Young’s musical literacy to flourish in the current music industry. Nevertheless, Adorno condemns this literacy, and this condemnation alienates nearly an entire generation of contemporary musicians. This diminishes the value of Adorno’s theoretical framework, and in turn, specific elements of his framework are in need of revision and enhancement for compatibility with the ways in which musicians operate in the digital era. Since Adorno’s time of writing, few researchers have strived to connect his analog generation to the 21st-century digital generation. In response, I attempt to bridge these two generations of musicians in this article.
Theodor Adorno is a philosopher, a musicologist, and a composer. As such, his background in music performance and theory is profound. He was born in Germany in 1903, where his attention centered on aesthetic, political, and musical interests.[3] As his intellect developed, he affiliated himself with the Frankfurt School’s Institute for Social Research, and the school’s critical theory. In 1943, Adorno brought his critical frame of mind to the United States, where popular culture was in full swing.[4]
Adorno’s critical interpretation of popular music is a common entryway for those who are beginning to explore the topic intellectually. A tension between “serious” music and “popular” music provides the foundation for Adorno’s critique. To Adorno, popular music has a “standardized” structure of verses, choruses, and catchy hooks, and this standardization embodies the commercial processes that influence its production and consumption. Adorno introduces the concept of “pseudo-individualization” to explain the reasons why society can continuously consume this standardized material. Pseudo-individualization provides consumers with a sense of free choice when differentiating between standardized forms of music and other products.[5] If this freedom did not exist, then the culture industry’s insidious cycle of production and consumption would falter, and audiences would begin to observe popular music in the same manner that Adorno does: as the product of an industry rather than an individual.
In the contemporary music industry, there are parallels to Adorno’s notion that commercialization influences the production of popular music. An example of this is National Public Radio’s recent report on the ways in which major record labels’ utilize “writing camps” to produce hit songs. In these camps, major labels hire industry-leading songwriters to write and produce their artist’s music. NPR estimates that the cost of producing a hit song for the artist, Rihanna, was roughly $1,078,000.[6] The organization reached this estimate by combining $78,000 that the major label, Def Jam, paid writers to create and produce the actual song, and then adding an approximate $1,000,000 that the label spent for marketing, travel expenses, and campaigns dedicated to developing relationships with radio executives to ensure airplay. It is clear that artists without this economic support are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to getting airplay and selling music through mainstream channels, and in turn, Adorno’s notion that popular music is a product of the industry and its songwriters, rather than the artists themselves, is often true.
Serious music is crucial to Adorno’s framework because it exposes forms of social subjugation within the culture industry. To help understand Adorno’s conception of the serious artist, one might observe the work of Elliott Carter, a contemporary composer. “I regard my scores as scenarios, auditory scenarios, for the performers to act out with their instruments,” states Carter.[7] Carter designs his music to represent the complexities of modern life, and to do so, he conceives each instrument in his pieces as a unique person. In turn, these unique people interact freely within the construct of the music. This freedom of interaction ultimately enables individuals to express sociopolitical awareness and to expose social subjugation within the capitalist system. To Adorno, artwork that fails to reflect this awareness and subjugation is only commercial and culturally regressive.
Adorno’s critical interpretation of popular music has certainly been subject to criticism of its own. Robert Witkin argues that Adorno’s conception of art is idealistic and “ but from the commodity. Robertpre-modernist.”[8] His conception is pre-modernist because it leaves no possibility for a serious artwork to embrace the process of commodification. In turn, his idealistic conception may have predisposed him to overlook the potential for aesthetic value in newer forms of popular music. Yet, by dismissing Adorno because of this predisposition, media researchers also dismiss the potential for theoretical links and connections that Adorno’s framework and critical mindset could illuminate.
Adorno acknowledges that studying media is an important, but complex, endeavor. In his essay on the radio symphony, he argues that studying what the radio “does musically to a musical structure... would be a vast undertaking.”[9] Such inquiry would require interdisciplinary collaboration between musicians, social scientists, and radio engineers. Moreover, technology transforms at such rapid pace that the primary function of one medium can seamlessly shift to another. For example, satellite radio and radio with digital transmission are in the process of replacing the older radio’s technical function of broadcasting news and entertainment. These transformations also illustrate why scholars have a difficult time defining exactly what a “new medium” is. The term new media can mean social media, such as MySpace and Facebook, or it could mean the computer software used to program and create those social media. New media could also refer to a technology that is new to a specific group of people, but old to a different group of people. One scholar even references the term “new new media” to highlight the interactive nature that denote contemporary new media from older new media.[10] One can also argue that all media are, at one point, new media, and they will each inevitably lose their new quality with time.
Historically, discourses of idealization and criticism surround a new medium’s emergence. Marita Sturken and Douglas Thomas argue that “the pervasive sense that technologies transform us in irrevocable ways means that idealistic concepts of technology are always accompanied by the anxiety that they will also promote some kind of loss.”[11] The internet is a strong example of these two discourses. In an idealistic sense, the internet has the ability to facilitate meaningful connections between individuals and institutions on a global scale. It also has the capacity to spread information, such as texts, images, videos, and music files, and it can ultimately expose people to ideas and sounds from outside of the mainstream media. However, a critical conception of the internet, one of democratic loss and control, challenges this empowering and idealistic conception. For example, Lincoln Dahlberg references the corporate “domination of online attention,” and the development of “megaportals,” such as Yahoo and Google. These megaportals guide and control an internet user’s networked experience in a manner that is similar to the ways in which mass media systems traditionally operate.[12] Moreover, the internet facilitates the interaction between children and strangers, cases of cyber-bullying and cyber-stalking permeate public discourse, and cell phones with video technology instigate new forms of sexual experimentation in the nation’s youth.
Sturken and Thomas contend that overtly idealistic and critical preconceptions are prominent in contemporary popular discourse,[13] but preconceptions also shape the ways in which scholarly researchers approach and observe the media they choose to study. In actuality, when researchers observe media, they often see different forces at work. Joshua Meyrowitz illustrates this by tracing three “root narratives” that underlie the ways in which scholars from different “research camps” observe media. These narratives are the power and resistance narrative, the purposes and pleasures narrative, and the structures and patterns narrative. In effect, these narratives fragment the whole or complete picture of the ways in which media affect culture and society.[14]
Meyrowitz’s power narrative, characteristic of critical theorists like Adorno, is a strong tool for understanding the critical media discourse. The narrative focuses on media ownership and political economy, and includes the critical, yet logical, argument that conglomerates, which own and operate mainstream media channels, are unlikely to “encourage forms of news or entertainment that undermine their own profit-driven activities.”[15] Mark Andrejevic’s research on media surveillance technology further exemplifies the power narrative. In his research, Andrejevic strives to illuminate the misleading nature of interactive media, stating, “there’s no need for revolution if the technology is revolutionary.” According to Andrejevic, scholars and citizens should not take the optimistic promises of interactive technology at their word,[16] and a number of recent media scholars have heeded this suggestion in their analyses of the contemporary music industry.
Sherman Young and Steve Collins argue that major record labels “still wield significant market power” in the industry, and that the “alternative publicity, marketing, and distribution models are still in flux."[17] MySpace, Facebook, and other social media cannot guarantee viable connections between artists and audiences, so independent artists are relying on commercial services in order to bridge this gap. In her research of two college towns, Carey Sargent demonstrates the ways in which artists purchase professional services in order to better utilize the new media that ostensibly liberate them from the traditional industry’s commercial structure.[18] This research foreshadows a reliance on the pervasive tools and services that ostensibly provide liberation, but ultimately reinforce the top-down power structure of the traditional music industry.
The power narrative is an important piece of the media-research tool kit, but it often neglects a media consumer’s sense of agency. As a result, the narrative leaves no room for the structurally confined individual to express himself or herself socially and politically. Contrary to this, the purposes and pleasure narrative affords this possibility of individual agency. In this narrative, media systems “strive to please discriminating audiences” by providing tools and opportunities that those audiences actively seek out and pursue.[19]
Henry Jenkins exemplifies this narrative in Convergence Culture. Jenkins defines convergence culture as a site of cultural transformation marked by two “seemingly contradictory trends.”[20] First, media companies are now bigger than they have ever been; there is immense concentration in mainstream media ownership, with only a few conglomerates operating the majority of broadcasting, publishing, and production companies. Second, production technology is becoming more affordable, thus democratizing the field of cultural production. Because of these two trends, media companies are utilizing their resources to increase their products’ value, while simultaneously affording audiences new opportunities to interact with the media content they consume. Jenkins refers to the ways in which audiences build communities online dedicated to interacting with content, and he points to instances in which audiences have influenced the production of the very content they logged on to discuss.[21] This marks a shift in the traditional, unidirectional flow of information that characterizes older media. In turn, the idealistic notion of multidirectional communication and production opens doors to social and political change that would otherwise be impossible without new media facilitating the interaction.
The structures and patterns narrative, also known as “medium theory,” and closely related to the field of “media ecology,” is neither inherently critical nor idealistic. This narrative illuminates the ways in which communication systems are part of a “material and symbolic environment that creates certain possibilities and encourages certain forms of interaction while discouraging others.”[22] Marshall McLuhan illustrates this narrative with his well-known phrase, “the medium is the message.” The “message” of a specific medium is “the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”[23] Andrejevic and Jenkins each draw on this narrative as they observe the contemporary media environment. Andrejevic observes a closed system in which technology leads to user and consumer exploitation, but Jenkins observes the users and consumers potential ability to harness this technology for sociopolitical expression. In Jenkins’s perspective, new media is empowering; individuals can work within the system in order to break free from it. Andrejevic (and Adorno) would see Jenkins’s perspective as problematic, and argue that beneath the interactive opportunity is a realm of structural control. Yet, this control should not discount the significance of Jenkins’s analysis. Both critical and idealistic perspectives illuminate real implications as to the ways in which digital media affect change in human affairs.
Meyrowitz’s recommendation is not for researchers to combine the traditions of each research camp or narrative; rather, the goal is for researchers to recognize both the value and the limitations of each tradition. By doing so, each camp might begin to learn something from the other. In turn, I apply this recommendation to Adorno’s critical model of analysis in an attempt to envision the model in a new light. In the following two sections, I present both a critical and an idealistic interpretation of the ways in which digital media affect contemporary music culture. For my critical interpretation, I apply the concept of hegemony to the relationship between Owl City and Universal Republic Records. For the idealistic, I describe the process of artistic expression through music production, and I illustrate the concept of production as a form of progressively escaping from the culture industry’s oppression. In both of these interpretations, I draw on specific themes from Adorno’s theoretical framework in order to illustrate my enhanced model of analysis.
THE CULTURE INDUSTRY AND SOCIAL MEDIA
In 2008, Adam Young was an average twenty-two year old boy who spent his days loading and unloading trucks at a Coca-Cola warehouse.[24] However, his true passion emerged after nightfall in his parents’ basement. “After work I would race back home, not even eat or take a shower,” he told The New York Times, “and just go back to the computer for fear of losing whatever inspiration I had.”[25] Young’s passion was composing music, and during sleepless nights, he would retreat into his parents’ basement and spend countless hours creating his melodic and electronic pop songs. The songs became immensely popular when he uploaded them to MySpace. Young adopted the band name Owl City, and thousands of fans logged on to his page to immerse themselves in his music. He self-released two albums to great success and his songs averaged over two thousand digital sales each week.[26] Young became so popular on MySpace that he received interest from Universal Republic Records; he met with world-renowned manager, Steve Bursky, and soon signed a long-term contract with Universal Republic.[27] Young’s first single on Owl City’s major-label albumreached number one on the Billboard charts.[28] Since then, Young has toured the world, performing across the United States, Europe, China, and beyond.
I mention this brief synopsis in order to demonstrate how well Owl City’s story fits the image of a rags-to-riches tale. Owl City could inspire other musicians to work hard at their craft, build a strong foundation, and go for their goals because the possibility of great “success” within the music industry is real. More specifically, Owl City is the realization of the American dream in the digital era, and Theodor Adorno may have argued that this image of “success” is precisely what the culture industry needs in order to maintain its dominant hegemonic position. Recently, MySpace has appeared to afford musicians an opportunity to resist the culture industry’s hegemonic force by providing outlets for independent subcultures. However, despite MySpace’s ostensible affordance, Owl City chose to collaborate with the culture industry’s hegemony, rather than utilizing MySpace to manage an independent career. This choice suggests that MySpace is more than just a means to an end; I argue that MySpace has become a “hegemonic apparatus” that structurally facilitates and naturalizes the “music is business” ideology on the micro-level of independent music production. In turn, independent artists on MySpace participate in forms of commercialization prior to signing contractual agreements with major labels, thus making the hegemonic process by which Adorno’s culture industry operates more efficacious.
Antonio Gramsci suggests that hegemony is “characterized by the combination of force and consent,” and a balancing act between the two ensures that “force will appear based on the consent of the majority.”[29] Legal systems and military are examples of force, whereas ideology subconsciously nurtures and stabilizes consent. Elite social groups strive to maintain hegemony by containing subordinate groups within “ideological spaces” that do “not seem at all ideological.”[30] Adorno suggests that “movies and radio need no longer to pretend to be art,” because “the truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce.”[31] In contemporary society, trade books, textbooks, and magazines distribute this “just business” ideology across the globe. Colleges offer degrees and training in all of music’s industrial facets, from marketing and management to audio production, as artists attempt to find new ways to monetize their music on the internet through services such as iTunes and BandCamp. Music is entertainment, and entertainment is a booming business.
However, the status quo in society is never set in stone; with one social group’s dominance comes another group’s resistance. Dick Hebdige illuminates the ways in which subcultures challenge ideological dominance by “repossessing style.”[32] In his schema, dress, fashion, and taste are tools used by oppressed social groups to take back culture and transform its meaning. British DIY (do-it-yourself) punk exemplifies this repossession of style by creating an alternative to the mainstream, top-down power structure of the corporate industry.[33] These punks idealize creative integrity and they seize their own means of production free from the financial backing of major record labels. They do this because the financial aspects of recording contracts often result in forms of control.[34] A contemporary example of this control is the way in which Radiohead’s contract with EMI (Electric and Musical Industries Ltd.) failed to adapt its financial agreement to the digitization of the commercial environment. Specifically, the contract did not require royalty payments for Radiohead’s digital sales in the iTunes store.[35] In addition, EMI deducted packaging costs from the band on digital sales that required no packaging.[36] These examples demonstrate why many artists, such as Radiohead, eventually sought “independent” alternatives to major labels for their economic, promotional, and distributional services.
Social media appear to facilitate this DIY culture, but Owl City did not utilize social media to follow in the DIY tradition. To explain this phenomenon, one must observe the structure of MySpace, and analyze the ways in which the medium encourages commercial practices on the local level of music production. Recalling the concept of hegemony, Gramsci indentifies structures that facilitate and organize ideological consent as “hegemonic apparatuses.” Traditionally, hegemony and ideology are “united like bricks and mortar.” Institutional structures, such as universities, churches, and media channels, “build consent by establishing accepted practices.”[37] The physical structure of a university lecture hall, with its stadium seating surrounding a podium in front of whiteboards, normalizes the specific role of the professor and the specific role of the students. In this example, ideology manifests itself within the physical structure of the institution. However, ideology also manifests itself within digital structures, such as MySpace, and the artists who utilize these digital structures must do so within their unique structural characteristics. MySpace has at least three structural characteristics that foster a competitive environment and encourage a commercial mindset: the ability to create and manage identities, the ability to view play numbers, “friends,” and comments, and the interactive dynamic between artists and audiences.
In its basic form, MySpace is an online community in which artists and individuals create and design profile pages and socially interact with other artists and MySpace users. Members individualize their pages by creating online, digital representations of their identities. danah boyd contends that teenagers who use MySpace negotiate their digital identities in ways similar to the techniques they use in real life. To clarify, boyd references Erving Goffman’s theory of “impression management,”[38] in which individuals construct their identities by observing their surroundings and altering their presentations of self according to the ways in which they believe their audiences perceive them. Similarly, this process applies to the ways in which MySpace users, bands, and artists, construct their identities through photography and written text, and then negotiate their identities according to the online behavioral patterns of their audience.
Goffman contends that an individual’s behavior in a given social situation can be broken into two categories, “back region” and “front region.”[39] In this “dramaturgical” model, individuals who perform in the front region do so before an audience, and often strive to represent an “ideal conception” of their social role. In contrast, individuals who perform in the back region perform a more intimate and personal role.[40] For example, when a band is in the middle of a performance, the lead singer usually performs in accordance with his front region identity. The singer might move about the stage with extreme energy and confidence. He or she might make exaggerated gestures to the audience and his or her band mates, and dance along with the music. Yet, when the singer is offstage, his or her role shifts to the back region. In this region, the singer may no longer be energetic, but exhausted, and the band mates will see a side of the singer that the audience will never get to see.
Joshua Meyrowitz suggests that electronic media alter Goffman’s dramaturgical model by changing “patterns of access to information.”[41] Applying this logic to MySpace illuminates an artist’s ability to manipulate their front region and back region performances by controlling the quality of information that they present to their audiences. This ability enables artists to mislead their audiences and influence their perception. An example of this stems from MySpace’s affordance of multimedia identity construction; musicians upload original music, select appropriate background imagery, upload video footage, and write enticing biographies in order to construct a desirable image for their band. However, an artist could upload a home video of him or her playing a song, ostensibly giving the audience an intimate glimpse of the performer backstage, but produce the video’s audio so that it sounds clearer, more articulate, and louder. Artists could add more instruments to the mix, or add harmonies in order to strengthen the lead vocals subtly. The result of this process is an edited front region presentation designed to appear as if it were an intimate back region presentation.
In a manner similar to modern public relations, this studio magic affords the artist an independent or “handicraft” image, while simultaneously allowing the artist to benefit from production technologies that are negatively associated with commercialization. Adorno argues that this image is “essential from the viewpoint of cultural big business” because it helps ensure that audiences will accept the music as a product of the people and not of the industry itself.[42] The independent image marks an artist’s explicit separation from the culture industry and its culturally regressive qualities. It masks the industrial force behind popular music’s production, and artists with this image are especially attractive to the dominant social groups who can no longer hide their industrialization.
Owl City’s management team recognized that Young had an independent image, and the team took steps to maintain and exploit it. In an article from The New York Times, Young’s manager, Steve Burksy, references an explicit attempt to formulate a marketing campaign that retained this independent image by withholding a publicity announcement that would have alerted Young’s immediate fan-base, as well as potential listeners and supporters, to the contract signing.[43] Bursky stated that his “idea was to make sure every gatekeeper in the music business--every journalist, every music supervisor, every radio programmer--discovered Owl City the same way his fan base discovered him, as opposed to him being just another major-label priority shoved down people’s throats.”[44] Although Owl City had certainly become a “major label priority,” MySpace’s ostensible fusion of front and backstage perspectives affords the potential for artists and users to manage this reception. While some users consciously manipulate and control their image and presentation of self, MySpace, as a hegemonic apparatus, naturalizes this manipulation ideologically.
The number of an artist’s plays, friends, and the quality of comments on their profile offer tools for assessing an audience’s response to these specific presentations. When combined with the interactive dynamic between artists and audiences, these tools provide a clear view into an artist’s perceived popularity. In effect, these users are participating in forms of networked focus groups, and audiences are laboring by qualitatively assessing artists. The MySpace music page acts as a stage on which artists present themselves, and audiences function as “barometers of taste and preferences.”[45] Hiesun Suhr draws on research by Pierre Bourdieu in order to demonstrate the ways in which users consecrate the value of artwork on MySpace. Suhr argues that audiences embrace and accept the artwork by leaving positive feedback, or reject the work by avoiding it.[46] Listeners, or the sample audiences, qualitatively assess the value of artists by strengthening those elements that reflect an artist’s perceived popularity.
Consequently, companies can analyze this process in order to minimize the level of risk that is traditionally associated with the financial investment of signing and working with artists. Artists who exceed a certain threshold of popularity on MySpace (and other social media such as Facebook) are likely to sell more music and merchandise in an alternative, offline context. In turn, record labels may be more likely to approach those artists and strive to direct them back into the industry’s traditional structure. Owl City’s discovery on MySpace (and other artists on YouTube, such as Justin Bieber) illuminates the ways in which audiences, including A&R representatives, are in tune with some artists’ perception of popularity.
Moreover, other artists can also observe this feedback and imitate the popular and “successful” artists. In effect, one artist’s popularity may influence the ways in which other artists construct their identities and music. This process affords the possibility for artists to imitate each other’s identities, styles, and sounds. When one artist demonstrates popularity in a specific style or sound, other artists can imitate it. If there are enough artists imitating the same sound, then this hypothetically ensures one of those artists would consensually enter into the old, traditional structure of the music industry. If the most popular artists choose not to, then the industry would approach the artist next in line, and so on, until the culture industry found a representation of that specific sound.
This new dynamic of the A&R selection process could become an integral component to the major label’s contemporary role within the music industry. Artists who use MySpace or Facebook to create, promote, and distribute their music may appear to be resisting the dominant structure of the industry; yet, by resisting over these social media, they may actually be simplifying the process by which they are contained. MySpace’s interactive and competitive structure supports an ideology that influences the commercial practices of artists who utilize the site; in effect, major labels can seek out and co-opt artists more efficiently than ever before. This process paints the picture of an increasingly efficacious hegemonic apparatus in which the independent cultural producers who demonstrate economic viability are visible and more easily acquired by the pre-established structure of the culture industry.
Owl City is a strong example of such a process, but this analysis demonstrates much more. Not only are artists using new media to make a stand in a transformative industry, and not only are big players resilient in maintaining their hegemonic dominance, but the economic ideology continues to guide the music industry despite significant advancement in communication technology. With a recording contract, Universal granted Young access to immense resources, and put him in contact with management and marketing teams. Yet, in doing so, Universal became the primary owners of a pristine pop-cultural artifact. The environment fostered by MySpace allowed this artifact, band, or brand to demonstrate a tremendous capacity for independent success, and Universal’s decision to acquire it was logical, low risk, and a critical representation of industrial exploitation in contemporary music culture.
MUSIC PRODUCTION AS AN ESCAPE
In the previous section, I demonstrate the ways in which social media reinvigorate Adorno’s culture industry. In this section, I provide a framework for evaluating the ways in which digital media intensify the meaning of a musical text, and in turn, provide artists with a progressive ability to exhibit forms of sociopolitical awareness and expression through music. Two premises form the basis of this argument. First, Adorno claims that “standardized content aims at standardized reactions.”[47] I examine this claim by exploring new forms of standardization in digital music production. Second, digital media and synthetic sounds convey information to audiences in higher definition than the analog media characteristic of Adorno’s time. I apply the logic of high-definition sound to Owl City’s digital and synthetic music, and ultimately argue that digital production intensifies the meaning of a musical text by allowing for a virtually infinite arrangement of standardized form and structure.
Adorno elaborates on music as a form of escape in his critique of popular music. Escape is “bound to the present mode of production,” he states, and to the “mechanized process of labor to which, directly or indirectly, masses are subject.”[48] “Fordism” is a classic example of this mode of production. In an attempt to manufacture automobiles more efficiently, management teams streamline production systems by standardizing parts and labor. This eliminates any need for a worker’s sense of innovation or creative expression, and in turn, this diminishes the level of satisfaction that workers find within their position. Similar processes exist in contemporary society, as cubicles confine individuals as they sit at their computers performing repetitive office work, teachers have the daunting task of educating apathetic students on a dwindling budget, and many livelihoods are dependent on sales and commission. While some individuals do experience forms of satisfaction in their work, the mundane side of their job, often referred to as “the grind,” accompanies those aspects of work that may be rewarding.
In turn, individuals seek this satisfaction in entertainment, such as reading novels, watching films, and listening to popular music. However, Adorno contends that this form of satisfaction is illusory, and popular music’s standardized structure insidiously mirrors the meaninglessness of the listener’s function within the industrial system. To Adorno, popular music does not provide intellectual stimulation but a regressive distraction from anxiety and from larger, sociopolitical issues. Contemporary forms of Adorno’s distraction include a lack of public discourse on social and political issues, such as the growing gap between rich and poor, environmental exploitation and degradation, and the severity of global poverty.
Contemporary researchers problematize Adorno’s notion that popular music affects a universally regressive sense of escape within listeners. Some researchers suggest that audiences construct a unique form of satisfaction and meaning during their engagement with the media text. For example, Janice Radway acknowledges that romance novels provide an escape for readers, but she emphasizes the ways in which readers create their own meanings from the text based on their own unique cultural and social environments. “The analytic process must shift from the text itself,” Radway states, “to the complex social event of reading where a woman actively attributes sense to lexical signs in a silent process carried on in the context of her ordinary life.”[49] Similarly, other scholars argue that media texts are “completed only when taken up by people and inserted into their everyday culture.”[50] By engaging with music, listeners have the ability to construct their own sense of meanings that could potentially resolve the deficiencies that they develop from the industrial system in which they are bound.
This co-construction also highlights the ways in which artists cannot ensure that their artwork will influence audiences in any specific manner. Audiences have unique relationships with the media content that they consume, and their interpretations will vary according to their cultural environment. Yet, Adorno’s notion that “structural standardization aims at standard reactions,” and the primary effect of such standardization is for the listener to “evince stronger reactions to the part than the whole,”[51] is worthy of reinvestigation in the digital media environment. Digital media afford producers new ways to utilize standardized content, and these practices could strengthen an artist’s ability to convey their intended meaning through music.
To understand Adorno’s concept of standardization, one must again recall Adorno’s polarization of serious and popular music. In serious music, “every detail derives its musical sense from the concrete totality of the piece which, in turn, consists of the life relationship of the details and never a mere enforcement of a musical scheme.”[52] In this schema, the struggle and development of the piece’s individual voices constructs the serious work’s meaning.[53] Serious music is a dynamic negotiation between individual expression and social domination; for Adorno, only serious music, and more specifically “good” serious music, is capable of breaking through the social stricture and conveying this expression. Contrary to this, Adorno argues that popular music is composed of standardized structures and patterns, and that the meaning of popular music comes to its audiences “pre-digested” by the culture industry.
Adorno draws on the production line to symbolize the role of industrialization in the music production process. The production line is a systematic and mechanical process that produces identical artifacts in mass quantities. The elements that constitute the system, like the workers and materials, are interchangeable. The system deskills the workers for the purpose of simple replacement, and if a part or person malfunctions, then the system in its totality remains unaffected. However, this metaphor of the assembly line is not without criticism. Bernard Gendron claims that Adorno’s correlation of music production with the assembly line is flawed.[54] To explain, Gendron differentiates between functional artifacts, like the automobiles, and textual artifacts, like songs. “In functional artifacts, part interchangeability is largely a consequence of the technology of the assembly line,” he states, and “technology does not put the same constraints on the production of recorded musical sounds.”[55] Gendron argues that the technology in a recording studio actually allows for greater variation in the production process rather than increased standardization.[56] This is true, to an extent, but Gendron leaves room for critique in his claim that the modern recording studio is “at least as sophisticated as the assembly line.”[57] A closer examination of the modern recording studio further illustrates the ways in which digital media have simplified the recording studio and the recording process.
The term “recording studio” is very broad. It could mean a high-tech studio, or it could mean an old PC with one microphone. Adam Young contends that he has self-taught studio skills and recorded his hit album, Ocean Eyes, entirely on an old Dell with a Behringer microphone.[58] He has also admitted that he is not technically versed in “how the signal path works or the ways sound can be altered.” Yet, the simplicity of these digital tools and software have allowed him to experiment with his sounds and create a commercially viable album without the technical knowledge that is necessary to create specific sounds with analog production.[59]
This following passage from Owl City’s blog illuminates several aspects of the basic production process that took place in Young’s home studio:
Really excited about this record and it’s a hefty one! Most Pro Tools sessions weigh in at seventy tracks or more and some mixes have eight separate hi-hat tracks alone. There are often three or more different kick drum samples, each compressed and EQ’ed to glue together nicely like puzzle pieces. Four different lead synth lines play the same melody, all mixed and matched to form “one solitary” line. To me, mixing is the art of fine detail and compromise, though in my case, broad stokes is often the secret because it’s the micro-details that can kill you.[60]
Pro Tools, the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) he is referring to, is an audio production program. Musicians install DAWs on their computer and then use the program to record, edit, mix, and master sounds and songs. The prevalence of DAWs, in combination with a laptop and a microphone (though some laptops have basic microphones installed in the hardware), is a strong example of the general simplicity of the modern recording studio. In Nick Prior’s analysis of the laptop’s prevalence in music production, he contends that “software is no longer the domain of the sonic experimentalist but has become the staple of the industry.”[61] Most DAWs come stocked with software capable of performing the basic functions of production and editing, such as equalization and dynamics processing.
However, a paradox exists within this process; the studio’s simplification provides artists with incentives to insert and manipulate standardized content in their production process, while the ease and simplicity allows for the extreme variation of that standardized content. In turn, artists have a tremendous capability to edit and alter the standardized patterns in which Adorno argues that audiences identify. The technique of sampling is a strong example of this. In Young’s previous quotation, he states that each one of his songs can have “three or more different kick drum samples.” In a general definition, sampling is the act of taking a sound from one source and applying it to another. In Young’s case, he has likely taken his drum samples from a software database and applied them to his songs in order to construct the beats. Artists acquire these individual samples through commercial databases, but they can also capture samples themselves by recording the sound’s source (such as a person clapping, stomping their foot, etc), and storing it on a hard drive or memory card. Artists string samples together in “loops,” and sequence these loops to enter and exit the song at any programmed moment.
Digital production with loops and samples is a process in which science and math combine with artistic expression. Loops and samples are fragments that can be connected together, split apart, and intertwined. To create a song’s beat with samples, an artist might first conceptualize the whole piece and then mathematically orchestrate the beat or loop in order to form the song’s foundation. The artist then interchanges programmed samples into the piece and aurally decides which sounds fit his or her vision. The artist then lines the sounds up on a grid and layers the project’s additional elements on top. This process exemplifies one way in which digital production is becoming increasingly more rational. Just as the assembly line is a mechanism designed to simplify and standardize production, this digital software, characteristic of both amateur and professional studios, simplifies the production process into a cut-and-paste, quantifiable process. In turn, the technique in orchestrating a piece of digital music is akin to constructing a building, as the boundaries between artists and engineers, between aesthetics and practice, begin to blur.
In civil construction, the materials pre-exist the structure and this has implications on the structure’s conception and design. While each structure may undoubtedly be a different building, the underlying framework often remains constant: the building provides what its residents already expect it to provide. A similar expectancy occurs in music production. Specific styles of music call for specific structures, swings, and tempos, whereas specific sounds call for standard production techniques. Audio engineers reuse specific production techniques learned from others in order to emulate pre-existing sounds. For example, producers emulate the dynamics processing technique of “side-chain pumping,” first popularized by Eric Prydze’s song, “Call on Me.”[62] This technique ensures the punchy dynamic of a kick drum and synth that is now a standard in dance and techno music.
The quality of material also affects the final structure, and Owl City’s utilization of synthetic material especially warrants analysis. Young states that he has “four different lead synth lines play the same melody” in one of his songs, and the production technique of equalization illuminates the theoretical significance of synthetic sound. Equalization is a means of achieving clarity between the various sounds and instruments in a mix. The human ear, in peak physical condition, can hear frequencies ranging from 20Hz to 20 kHz,[63] and in equalization theory, each sound rests in a band of frequencies. Lower notes and sounds peak in lower frequencies and the higher the note, the higher the note’s frequency response. Proper equalization of the different sounds allows listeners to discern each individual instrument and voice in a mix. Computers have the ability to capture sound directly and eliminate the microphone as an intermediary. Because of this, synthetic instruments have more clearly defined bands of frequencies than acoustic instruments. In turn, fewer undesirable frequencies come through when recording the instrument. This minimizes (or eliminates) potential external noise which may be recorded along with the instrument or voice, such as the sound of the furnace which would come on and interrupt Young’s recording sessions in his parents’ basement.[64] In effect, synthetic sounds are more pure in sonic form and hold information that is more readable. The elimination of noise and intensification of readable information leads to a more clearly encoded and higher definition sound.
This concept of high-definition sound helps to illustrate the immersive capabilities of Owl City’s music. Because Owl City’s production process utilizes digital production tools and synthetic sounds, the resulting media text informs the aural senses of its listeners with greater definition, presenting a clearer message and leaving a smaller possibility of audience misinterpretation. This notion of a clearer message, combined with new forms of digital standardization, demonstrates the way in which Owl City’s high-definition sound might intensify the capacity for a musical work to evince standardized reactions and immerse its audiences in the listening experience. Many people experience this sense of immersion while reading a novel or watching a suspenseful film, and high-definition movies and the IMAX Theater intensify this experience. This sense of immersion is a significant reason as to why many people enjoy reading, watching movies, and listening to music.
Moreover, Owl City exemplifies the ways in which high-definition sounds might draw listeners in and maintain their interest. More specifically, Owl City attracts its listeners with aurally appealing, high definition sounds that enhance the song’s basic framework. Owl City’s song, “Vanilla Twilight,” demonstrates this point. Specifically, from 0:23 to 0:46, one can clearly hear the synthetic drum beat created with its kick drum, snare, and closed hi-hat cymbals, as a synth padding fills the lower to mid frequencies.[65] Slightly above, a synth lead line (perhaps with four different layered tracks, as noted in Young’s quotation above) carries the melody in perfect clarity to the mid to upper range of the frequency spectrum. Finally, synthetic bells and chimes ornament the very top of the mix, in great clarity, as they fade softly into the background beyond the emergence of a synthetic organ and vocals.
The presentation of attractive people in mainstream media is worth mentioning to clarify the immersive potential of Owl City’s attractive music. If one interchanges ear candy with eye candy, one realizes that these two concepts, though appealing to different senses, have similar effects on the audience. For example, many audiences find attractive women appealing. The advertising industry’s utilization of sex appeal in the marketing process illustrates this point. The logic is that beautiful and attractive men and women draw people in, and if a product is in an attractive environment, individuals will be more likely to perceive the specific product as attractive. If a composer or songwriter surrounds the framework of a song with attractive aural stimuli, the listener may be more likely to perceive the music as attractive. These attractive aural stimuli may be a superficial, outer-covering of bells, whistles, and glamour, but their purpose is to draw listeners into the rest of the material. Like the high-tech graphics in a Hollywood film, and the digital enhancements of model photography, aural stimuli have a practical function in production and musical processes.
The process of creating and listening, and of speaking and understanding, reflects a musical literacy that challenges Adorno’s regressive interpretation of music as an escape. When artists create through production, their unique representation of inner vision immerses listeners, and enables a musical escape that high-definition sound intensifies. This form of escape is progressive because it allows for the comprehension of the artists’ ideas, beliefs, and arguments. Moreover, this progressive escape immerses not only the listeners, but also the artists themselves. When artists produce music in the digital studio, they engage in a process of distraction through intense, intellectual stimulation and creation.
In turn, this process not only affords artists and audiences the ability to escape within musical content, but also the ability for artists to escape from the culture industry’s homogenizing and commercializing force by a means of individual expression. I am not arguing that Owl City exhibits a form of expression that Adorno would have praised; the meaning within music varies according to the ways in which artists write their music, and to the ways in which audiences participate in the meaning’s construction. However, when artists appropriately utilize these resources, their content effectively immerses both the audience and themselves, conveying meaning, and affording the ability to escape within each participant’s immersive experience. As David Sanjek notes, “the hands who turn the dials, run the tape, set the mics, and balance the mix are as much authors of sound as are songwriters and musicians.”[66] With the prevalence of the standardization and variation characteristic of software-based home recording and digital sounds, the recording process takes on new meanings of escape for the producers and their listeners.
In this article, I argue that the structure of MySpace facilitates a key component of Adorno’s traditional culture industry, the economic ideology, on the local level of music production. MySpace makes explicit the qualities that categorize “successful” artists, and in turn, artists willingly guide themselves into exploitation by participating in a competitive and hegemonic system that encourages commercialization. In the case of Owl City, this social dynamic led to a form of exploitation that is similar to the way in which the culture industry has traditionally operated in the past. However, by highlighting the differences between digital and analog production, I also demonstrate the capacity for audio technologies to allow forms of artistic expression that Adorno could not have foreseen. The nearly infinite level of variation within DAWs, and the ability to manipulate standardized musical material ensures a potential for artists to express meaningful forms of social and political commentary.
This potential for expression counters Adorno’s argument that popular music is only regressive and incapable of conveying such expression. In turn, Adorno’s vision of the culture industry as a universal entity that produces and distributes aesthetically bankrupt content is increasingly problematic; it cannot account for the ways in which new technologies empower consumers with these new expressional tools. As digital production technologies continue to progress, high-definition sounds and simplified functionalities will continue to empower more individuals with tools for cultural production and expression. The dynamic of producing and listening, of communicating and understanding, has a tremendous capacity to generate forms of political power that could ultimately affect social change.
In The Politics of Small Things, Jeffrey C. Goldfarb suggests that “when people freely meet and talk to each other as equals, reveal their differences, display their distinctions, and develop a capacity to act together, they create power.”[67] Musicians and audiences realize this power by communicating through music and sound. In ways similar to the roles that Facebook, Twitter, and older media, such as the newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm, played in Egypt’s recent revolution, new technologies facilitate this form of power on the micro-level.[68] People create music to convey intimate, emotional, or rational messages, and when more people have the ability to create and understand the music’s message, the political potential of music, and in turn digital production, intensifies.
Furthermore, the accessibility of digital production enables individuals to maintain their working-class livelihoods, while simultaneously facilitating an escape from the social structure in which they operate. Artists, audiences, hobbyists, and professionals with these production tools are each adequately equipped to reproduce their unique musical texts whenever their schedule permits. In essence, the capacity for middle-class individuals to communicate forms of sociopolitical awareness through music has never been greater. Yet, the artists and the individuals themselves will ultimately determine their action or inaction, and time will shed light on the ways in which musicians utilize this technology. Nevertheless, the potential for power through expression exists. In turn, I emphasize that recognizing both critical and idealistic interpretations of the ways in which digital media affect contemporary music culture is a valuable model for enhancing Adorno’s theoretical framework.
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[1] Theodor W. Adorno, “On Popular Music,” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2002), 438.
[2] Kristi Kates, “Going Underground: Adam Young Heads to the Basement to Craft His Owl City Debut,” Electronic Musician 25, no. 12 (December 2009), 18.
[3] Gerhard Schweppenhauser, Theodor W. Adorno: An Introduction, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), 2.
[5] Theodor W. Adorno, "On Popular Music," 445.
[6] Zoe Chace, “How Much Does it Cost to Make a Hit Song,” NPR.com, http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/05/137530847/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-hit-song (accessed July 13, 2011).
[7] Elliott Carter, as quoted in David Schiff, The Music of Elliott Carter, (New York: Cornell University Press, 1998), 26.
[8] Robert W. Witkin, Adorno on Music (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 190.
[9] Theodor Adorno, “The Radio Symphony,” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert(Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2002), 251.
[10] Paul Levinson, New New Media (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2009), 4.
[11] Marita Sturken and Douglas Thomas, “Introduction: Technological Visions and the Rhetoric of the New,” in Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technologies, ed. Marita Sturken, Douglas Thomas, and Sandra Ball-Rokeach(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 4.
[12] Lincoln Dahlberg, “The Corporate Colonization of Online Attention and the Marginalization of Critical Communication,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 29, no. 2 (April 2005): 163.
[13] Sturken and Thomas, 4.
[14] Joshua Meyrowitz, “Power, Pleasure, Patterns: Intersecting Narratives of Media Influence,” Journal of Communication 58(2008): 643.
[15] Meyrowitz, “Power, Pleasure, Patterns,” 647.
[16] Mark Andrejevic, iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2007), 16.
[17] Sherman Young and Steve Collins, “A View from the Trenches of Music 2.0,” Popular Music & Society 33, no. 3 (July 2010): 340.
[18] Carey Sargent, “Local Musicians Building Global Audiences,” Information, Communication & Society 12, no. 4 (July 2009): 482.
[19] Meyrowitz, “Power, Pleasure, Patterns,” 649.
[20] Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006), 17.
[21] Henry Jenkins, “The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 7, no. 1 (2004): 37.
[22] Meyrowitz, “Power, Pleasure, Patterns,” 652.
[23] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (California: Ginko Press 2003), 20.
[24] Nicole Frehsee, “Owl City’s Basement Tapes,” Rolling Stone no. 1098, February 18, 2010, 48-49.
[25] Ben Sisario, “Adam Young, aka Owl City, Finds Pop Success,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/arts/music/21owl.html?_r=1, (accessed January 24th, 2012).
[26] Cortney Harding, “6 Questions with Steve Bursky,” Billboard 121, no. 48, December 5, 2009, 8.
[28] Silvio Pietroluongo, “Owl City Banks First No. 1,” Billboard 121, no. 44, November 7, 2009, 70.
[29] Antonio Gramsci, “Hegemony, Intellectuals and the State,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. John Story (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 210.
[30] Dick Hebdige, Subcutlture: The Meaning of Style (London and New York: Methuen & Co., 2002), 16.
[31] Adorno and Horkheimer, 1.
[33] Pete Dale, “It Was Easy, It Was Cheap, So What?: Reconsidering the DIY Principle of Punk and Indie Music,” Popular Music History 3, no. 2 (August, 2008): 178.
[34] David Hesmondhalgh, “Indie: The Institutional Politics and Aesthetics of a Popular Music Genre,” Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (1999): 54.
[35] Guy Morrow, “Radiohead’s Managerial Creativity,” Convergence: The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 15, no. 2 (May 2009): 163.
[37] Lee Artz and Bren Ortega Murphy, Cultural Hegemony in the United States (Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2000), 40.
[38] danah michelle boyd, “Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2008), 119.
[39] Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 29.
[40] Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place, 29.
[41] Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place, 37.
[42] Adorno, “On Popular Music,” 445.
[43] Sisario, “Adam Young, aka Owl City, Finds Pop Success.”
[44] Harding, “6 Questions with Steve Bursky.”
[45] Hiesun Cecilia Suhr, “The Role of Intermediaries in the Consecration of Arts on Myspace.com,” International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics 4, no. 2 (2008): 261.
[47] Adorno, “On Popular Music,” 442.
[48] Adorno, “On Popular Music,” 458.
[49] Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 8.
[50] John Fiske, Reading the Popular (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 6.
[51] Adorno, “On Popular Music,” 439.
[52] Adorno, “On Popular Music,” 439.
[60] Adam Young, “The Eleventh Hour,” Owl City: The Official Blog, entry posted January 17, 2011 http://owlcityblog.com/2011/01/17/the-11th-hour/ (accessed January 24th, 2012).
[61] Nick Prior, “OK Computer: Mobility, Software, and the Laptop Musician,” Information, Communication and Society 11, no. 7, (October 2008): 922.
[62] Jay Hodgson, “A Field Guide to Equalization and Dynamics Processing on Rock and Electronica Records,” Popular Music 29, no. 2, (2010): 290.
[65] Adam Young, “Owl City - Vanilla Twilight,” YouTube, 3:53, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIz2K3ArrWk (accessed January 24th, 2004).
[66] David Sanjek, “Funkentelechy vs. the Stockholm Syndrome: The Place of Industrial Analysis in Popular Music Studies,” Popular Music and Society 21, no. 1 (1997): 87.
[67] Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, The Politics of Small Things: The Power of the Powerless in Dark Times (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 4.
[68] Romesh Ratnesar, “Not Just the Facebook Revolution,” Bloomberg Businessweek, June 6, 2011, 64.
