and Hans Speiers came to a similar conclusion about Nazi radio: that simplification and
repetition were essential to radio propaganda. Adorno thought: “…totalitarian radio was
assigned to the task…of providing good entertainment and diversion…”
He was surprised that American radio served the same function: to distract listeners from
political reality.
Adorno thought about American radio differently from his colleagues at the
Princeton Radio Project. “Music…serves in America today as an advertisement for
commodities which one must acquire in order to be able to hear the music.”
He saw
how popular songs on the Hit Parade were mysteriously transformed into fetishized
by the process of “climax and repetition.”
“They all obey the absurd
slogan… ‘Especially for You.’”
Since by definition, mass art is mass produced, the
listener is deceived into thinking the beautiful woman is singing “Especially for You”
when she’s singing to everyone in the anonymous mass. “Recognition of the familiar was
the essence of mass listening, serving more as an end in itself....Once a formula was
successful, the industry plugged the same thing over and over again. The result was to
make music into a kind of social cement operating through distraction,displaced wish-
fulfillment, and the intensification of passivity.”
Adorno’s analysis of “plugging”
songs into the radio hits of the forties prophesied what would happen to American
commercial television, film, Broadway theatre and book publishing in the twentieth
century: endless repetition of successful formulas, sequels.
Jingles (music + ads) produced an emotional response in what Adorno called “the
victim, ” like the sound of dropping dog food in a bowl, the dog comes running. Adorno
thought commercial radio used “standardized” pop music to turn individuals into Pavlov’s
consumer dogs! No longer able to recognize real music, listeners accepted what was given
to them, a watered down plastic-muzak.
Adorno’s three studies for the Princeton Radio Project were not exactly what
Lazarsfeld had in mind! He was under government pressure to produce useful information
about radio listening for the war effort. Adorno’s Marxist critique of American radio went
beyond what governmental consulting allowed.
Adorno was not invited back to do
Convention