Adorno's View On The Nature Of Popular Music

Additionally, Calvin Harris attracts his listeners by creating a fun vibe, making his audience want to dance as soon as they hear the intro come on. Over a summery steel drum beat, Harris opens the track with his own sung verse about having done it "my way”. The song includes his own vocals along with a mellow bass line, a breezy percussion, group background vocals, and steel drums, transforming the individual into vacation mode. The fast tempo throughout the song’s structure, that invites the listener to get up and dance, transports them to a summer dance party. Accordingly, people use music as a stimulant in order to be able to enjoy themselves, which is exactly what the song accomplishes through its chill summer vibe beat. With this, the
However, certain aspects of his theory do not cover the complexity of today’s popular culture, and what he is fails to grasp is the subjectivity of art. Even though Adorno believed that, “Listening to popular music is manipulated by its promoters”(21), many times the promoters, or in this case the artists, simply create their songs as a way to express themselves. With this, music is another form of emotional expression for the artist. And many times, popular music today is produced to bring awareness to important issues that require attention. The music with this attempts to portray a bigger meaning to it, in that each artists expresses themselves through their music and add their personal message into it as well. In his song, “My Way”, Calvin Harris expresses his desire to escape a situation in order to prosper and grow, stating in an interview with iHeartRadio, ”(The) song's kind of about breaking out of a situation that you thought was a good thing," he said. "Then, you're way more comfortable out of it.” The musical formula he uses to express himself may be standardized, however, there is extreme difficulty in breaking into an industry that has a specific formula for success. According to Adorno, the aim of this music is to
Ultimately, Adorno’s fundamental critique of popular music concerns what he identifies as ‘musical products’ and how popular music fosters passivity in the listener, especially in the sense of how people listen to mass-produced, popular cultural hits without ‘actually listening to them at all’. Adorno’s point here is that people already know through habit of listening to the standardized and mechanical beats what’s going to happen or transpire in the musical composition. With “My Way”, this is no different. Calvin Harris’ song seems nearly identical not just to his other hits, but with any other pop song present in the charts today due to the exuberant repetition and the songs’ structure. With this, listeners of this type of industrialized popular music are caught up in a standardized and routinized set of responses, and in this sense, pop music is a part of the everyday background of contemporary social life. The art of music with this offers the audience relief from both boredom as well as effort. Calvin Harris created a killer combo of its basic structure and overly repetitive lyrics in “My Way”, which ensures that the song will be played on in the listeners head long after they stopped listening. He follows the basic structural patterns of the ever-identical pop music that