‘Or any art at all?’: Frank Zappa meets critical theory

Popular Music ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-222
Author(s):  
DAVID WRAGG

Back in 1982, Max Paddison suggested that Frank Zappa's 1960s' Mothers of Invention recordings deserved to be read in the context of Adorno's views on mass culture. Based on a ‘critical, self-reflective attitude’ (Paddison 1982, p. 216) towards their musical processes, as anticipated in Adorno's essay, ‘Music and technique’ of 1959, these records could be seen to mount an incisive critique of the ‘culture industry’. The title of a series of essays in Telos (Spring 1991), ‘Special Section on Musicology: popular music from Adorno to Zappa’, locates Zappa in a debate about Adorno's continuing relevance where theories of popular music are concerned. More recently, Ben Watson's Frank Zappa, The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play (1994) uses a theoretical admixture of Marx and Freud in which Adorno looms large. (The dust jacket photograph of Watson mirrors the photograph of Adorno at Oxford in December 1935 which now adorns the 1997 paperback edition of Paddison's Adorno's Aesthetics of Music.) The influence of Adorno remains in Watson's later essay in The Frank Zappa Companion (1997), which takes Dada as a crucial point of reference. Central to all this remains the question of Zappa's identity and status as an avant-gardist, and it is this issue which concerns me here. I agree that the Mothers' albums, together with later work, can be made to represent a radical popular music. It's the word ‘represent’ that causes the problem.

Author(s):  
Tamara Vázquez-Barrio ◽  
Teresa Torrecillas-Lacave ◽  
Rebeca Suárez-Álvarez

Traditional television coexists with formats that originated on the internet, as well as on-demand consumption, paid television, and other audio-visual content distribution platforms. Audience data reveal a steady decline in television viewership, and digital technologies now allow any citizen to produce audio-visual content and distribute it for mass consumption through the internet. Given this new audio-visual ecosystem, the aim of this research is to ascertain whether there are any signs of a crisis regarding the dominance of television as a means of disseminating the products of the culture industry. Disinterest or indifference toward conventional programming by users would reveal a danger to the broadcast industry. In contrast, the consumption of television products through other channels would imply the retention of television audiences through the internet. This study analyzes perceptions regarding television through five online discussion groups. Three conclusions can be drawn: Firstly, television holds a prominent place in the daily lives of those who use it, including the youngest participants, despite the fact that audiences have declined in recent years. The second conclusion states that the perception of television is positive and associated with disengagement, relaxation, and family gatherings, which can be combined with individual consumption at other times of the day. As a third conclusion, this study reveals the high degree of compatibility between the internet and television screens, as new forms of consumption are emerging, yet there is still a predominant interest in content on television and from the mass culture industry. Resumen La televisión tradicional convive con formatos originados en internet, con el consumo bajo demanda, con la televisión de pago y con otras plataformas de distribución de contenido audiovisual. Los datos de audiencias muestran un descenso continuado de telespectadores y las tecnologías digitales permiten a cualquier ciudadano producir contenidos audiovisuales y distribuirlos para el consumo masivo a través de la Red. Ante este nuevo ecosistema audiovisual, el objetivo de esta investigación es comprobar si se pueden advertir signos de una crisis de la supremacía del televisor como medio de difusión de industria cultural. El desapego o indiferencia de los usuarios hacia la programación convencional evidenciaría un peligro para la televisión. Al contrario, el consumo de productos televisivos a través de otras pantallas implicaría el mantenimiento de las audiencias televisivas a través de internet. La investigación analiza las percepciones sobre la televisión mediante cinco grupos de discusión online. Se extraen tres conclusiones. La primera, que la televisión ocupa una posición relevante en la cotidianeidad de los participantes, incluidos los más jóvenes, a pesar de que las audiencias han descendido en los últimos años. La segunda, que la percepción sobre la televisión es positiva y se asocia a la desconexión, el relax y a un momento de reunión familiar compaginable con consumos individualizados en otros momentos del día. Tercera, el estudio demuestra el alto grado de compatibilidad entre internet y la pantalla del televisor porque surgen nuevas formas de consumo, pero se mantiene un interés predominante por los contenidos televisivos y de la gran industria cultural.


2016 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-Peter Krüger

AbstractThis article compares Max Horkheimer’s and Theodor W. Adorno’s foundation of the Frankfurt Critical Theory with Helmuth Plessner’s foundation of Philosophical Anthropology. While Horkheimer’s and Plessner’s paradigms are mutually incompatible, Adorno’s „negative dialectics“ and Plessner’s „negative anthropology“ (G. Gamm) can be seen as complementing one another. Jürgen Habermas at one point sketched a complementary relationship between his own publicly communicative theory of modern society and Plessner’s philosophy of nature and human expressivity, and though he then came to doubt this, he later reaffirmed it. Faced with the „life power“ in „high capitalism“ (Plessner), the ambitions for a public democracy in a pluralistic society have to be broadened from an argumentative focus (Habermas) to include the human condition and the expressive modes of our experience as essentially embodied persons. The article discusses some possible aspects of this complementarity under the title of a „critical anthropology“ (H. Schnädelbach).


Muzikologija ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 117-125
Author(s):  
Adam Ignacz

In this paper I demonstrate the changes in Janos Marothy?s aesthetic and political attitudes towards popular music. Being an internationally acknowledged Marxist musicologist, Marothy found employment in many important musical institutions, in the framework of which he not only had an overview of the events of Hungarian popular music, but with his presentations and articles, in the 1950s and early 1960s he also exerted a considerable influence on them. Using archival data and media coverage, I examine Marothy?s key texts which demanded a revision in the matter of ?socialist realism? and which announced a growing attention and tolerance towards the musical products of Western ?mass culture?: jazz and pop-rock. His work shows how popular music became a part of academic research in Socialist Hungary.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Urszula Kizelbach

The Shakespearean stage productions after 1989 reflected social, political and economic changes in the rapidly transforming Polish reality, which gave rise to a modern type of audience whose sensitivity was shaped by popular music, cinema, digital media and the mass culture. Contemporary Polish directors (Jan Klata, Maja Kleczewska, Grzegorz Jarzyna, Krzysztof Warlikowski) recognized that modernity and tradition can (and should) be combined onstage and that canonical texts can express new meanings in new forms. The new approach to the audience and the canon led to the development of the new aesthetics representing the ‘postdramatic theatre’. The new aesthetics gave new rights to the directors; for example, Maja Kleczewska set her Macbeth in a criminal underworld of the Polish mafia in the 1990s, imbuing her production with kitschy costumes and pop culture symbols. For the same reason, Jan Klata located his H. in the Gdansk shipyard, the birthplace of ‘Solidarity’, infusing his adaptation with the music of The Doors, Metallica and U2. In my analysis of the Polish Shakespearean stage in the post-transformational era, I offer a short overview of some key trends in dramaturgical aesthetics and the directors’ approaches to the adaptation of Shakespeare’s drama to the stage in the 1990s and 2000s. Next, I discuss in more detail the ‘postdramatic’ aesthetics of the modern Shakespeare adaptations based on the examples of two chosen artists, Maja Kleczewska and Jan Klata.


Author(s):  
Stephen Eric Bronner

The end of the nineteenth century witnessed the birth of an international avant-garde that focused upon alienation, standardization, and the liberation of the individual from constrictive social norms. Impressionists, Cubists, Expressionists, Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists, and representatives from many other styles provided a blizzard of philosophical–aesthetic manifestos that blended political with cultural resistance to mass society. The Frankfurt School’s inner circle was sympathetic from the start; modernism provided a response to the ontology of false conditions and, indeed, an avant-garde opposition to mass culture provided inspiration and cohesion. ‘Critical theory and modernism’ explains how the unflinching support of modernism and experimental art by the Frankfurt School confirmed both its cultural radicalism and contempt for totalitarianism.


Popular Music ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 235-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Middleton

Repetition, as a component of musical structure in popular songs, has long played an important part in ‘popular common-sense’ definitions, and criticisms, of the music. ‘It's monotonous’; ‘it's all the same’; ‘it's predictable’: such reactions have probably filtered down from the discussions of mass culture theorists. From this point of view, repetition (within a song) can be assimilated to the same category as what Adorno termed standardisation (as between songs). Of course, the significance of the role played by such techniques in the operations of the music industry – their efficacy in helping to define and hold markets, to channel types of consumption, to pre-form response and to make listening easy – can hardly be denied; it is, however, equally difficult to reduce the function of repetition simply to an analysis of the ‘political economy’ of popular music production and its ideological effects. Despite Adorno's critical assault (see Adorno 1941), despite later twists to the theory by, for instance, Fredric Jameson (1981), who argues that rather than being a negative quality of mass culture, repetition is simply a fundamental characteristic of all cultural production under contemporary capitalism, the question of repetition refuses to go away. Why do listeners find interest and pleasure in hearing the same thing over again? To be able to answer this question, which has troubled not only mass cultural theory but also traditional philosophical aesthetics, as well as more recent approaches such as psychoanalysis and information theory, would tell us more about the nature of popular music, and hence, mutatis mutandis, about music in general, than almost anything else. We must start by locating repetition within an overall theory of musical syntax.


Author(s):  
Lucienne Dornelles

RESUMOO artigo parte do pressuposto de que mesmo que as pessoas estejam saturadas do discurso publicitário e da propaganda e ainda que enxerguem que são manipuladas pelo mercado, mesmo assim elas não reagem a isso, pelo contrário, tendem a buscar afirmação e realização na satisfação do consumo. Diante disso, levanta-se a questão: De onde vem o encantamento do discurso capitalista que promete felicidade plena por meio do consumo? As respostas são buscadas por meio de uma análise da subjetividade contemporânea na sociedade do consumo, usando como objeto de pesquisa um clássico do cinema, O Tesouro de Sierra Madre. O estudo é embasado nos conceitos marxistas e da Teoria Crítica acerca do fetiche da mercadoria. O objetivo é sugerir que esse discurso funciona porque há, não só uma determinação externa exercida pelas forças econômicas, culturais e sociais, mediadas pela indústria cultural, mas há também uma determinação interna; ou seja uma dupla determinação. E nesse contexto, a educação tem importante papel na constituição do sujeito crítico e esclarecido.Palavras-chave: Subjetividade. Fetiche da mercadoria. Consumo. Educação. The fetishism of the merchandise, the Subjectivity analysis of the movie “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and Education:ABSTRACTThe article starts from the presupposition that even if the people are so saturated with the advertising discourse and even they can see that they are handled by the market, even so they do not react to it, on the contrary, they tend to seek affirmation and achievement in the satisfaction of consuming. Before that, one makes the question: where does the enchantment of capitalist discourse that promises full happiness by the consumption come from? The answers are sought by an analysis of the contemporary subjectivity in the consumer society. having as research objet a classic movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The study is based on the Marxist and Critical Theory conceptsabout commodity fetish. The purpose is to suggest that this discourse works because there is not only an external determination exercised by the economic, cultural and social forces, mediated by the culture industry, but there is also an internal determination; there is a double determination. In this context, the education has an important function in the formation of the critical and clarified subject.Keywords: Subjectivity. Commodity fetish. Consumption. Education. El fetichismo de la mercancía, Educación y Subjetividad: La análisis de la película “El tesoro de Sierra Madre”RESUMENEl artículo parte del presupuesto de que las personas están saturadas del discurso publicitario y de la propaganda, aún que entrevean que son manejados por el mercado, todavía no reaccionan a ella, por el contrario, tienden a buscar la afirmación y plenitud en la satisfacción del consumo . Por lo tanto, surge la pregunta: ¿De dónde viene el hechizo del discurso capitalista que promete la felicidad a través del consumo? Las respuestas se buscan a través de un análisis de la subjetividad contemporánea en la sociedad de consumo, utilizando como sujeto de investigación un clásico del cine, El tesoro de la Sierra Madre. El estudio se basa en los conceptos marxistas y teoría crítica sobre el fetichismo de la mercancía. El objetivo es sugerir que este discurso funciona porque no hay sólo una determinación externa ejercida por las fuerzas económicas, culturales y sociales, mediadas por la industria de la cultura, pero también hay una determinación interna; es decir, dos determinaciones. Y en este contexto, la educación tiene un papel importante en la formación del sujeto crítico y aclarado.Palabras clave: Subjetividad. Fetichismo de la mercancía. Consumo. Educación.


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