Chapter 1.2: Adorno, Autonomy, and the Blues

This post is part of my series on Pop, Power & the Vocal-Subject

Over the course of this essay series, I’m attempting to develop a political theory of pop music (as well as a theory of ‘political music’, or ‘the political’ in pop music). In the previous chapter, I framed the pop song in terms of an opposition between ‘vocal-subject’ and ‘objective musical forces’; this chapter will begin to ask what kind of relationships these two discrete elements can have. Much of my focus will be on the distribution of power in these relationships: control vs. resistance, autonomy vs. domination, freedom vs. constraint, structure vs. agency, repression vs. revolution, etc. In approaching these relationships, I’ll draw on the work of the twentieth-century theorist who has done most to explore them, as they are realised within the sonic structures of musical pieces themselves: Theodor W. Adorno.

It is well known that Adorno hated pop music. In fact, for those who’ve heard of him as a music theorist rather than a philosopher, it is often one of the only things that is known. Attempts to defend jazz and pop from the spectre of Adorno have largely involved the cultivation of alternative perspectives and ways of understanding the music (as resistant/freely expressive) which show up Adorno’s critical outlook as narrow, inappropriate and culturally imperialist. My tactic is to engage with pop music as music on Adorno’s terms. This will largely involve applying his critical work on modern classical music (as the music of his historical moment) to pop music (as the music of our historical moment). To do this, I will adapt his notion of the part-whole relationship within musical structures as homologous to social structures, replacing it with my notion of the relationship between vocal-subject and objective musical forces as homologous to various different structures (including social structures). By doing this, I will retain some of his focus on dynamics of power and control, freedom and coercion, but attempt to find resistant and critical potential in the pop music that he would probably have roundly dismissed.