Pop Music: the Most Insidious Form of Capitalist Brainwashing

Remember that the media have two basic functions. One is to indoctrinate the elites, to make sure they have the right ideas and know how to serve power. In fact, typically the elites are the most indoctrinated segment of a society, because they are the ones who are exposed to the most propaganda and actually take part in the decision-making process. For them you have the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, and so on.  

But there’s also a mass media, whose main function is just to get rid of the rest of the population—to marginalize and eliminate them, so they don’t interfere with decision-making. And the press that’s designed for that purpose isn’t the New York Times and the Washington Post, it’s sitcoms on television, and the National Enquirer, and sex and violence, and babies with three heads, and football, all that kind of stuff.    

But the approximately 85 percent of the population that is the main target of that media, they don’t have it in their genes that they’re not interested in the way the world works. And if they can escape from the effects of the de-education and indoctrination system, and the whole class system it’s a part of—it’s after all not just indoctrination that keeps people from getting involved in political life, by any means—if they can do that, then yeah, they’re a big audience for an alternative, and there’s some hope.

Noam Chomsky: Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, p121.

Although Chomsky never acknowledges him, long before him, Theodor Adorno had written:

The entire world is being steered by the filter of the culture industry.

Die ganze Welt wird durch das Filter der Kulturindistrie geleitet. 

My own translation from p146 of the volume of Adorno's complete works: Hockheimer & Adorno: Dialektik der Aufklärung. Kulturindustrie—Aufklärung als Massenbetrug. (The Dialectic of Enlightenment. The culture industry as mass deception). Suhrkamp Taschenbuch.

Further "stuff"—commodities—identified by Theodor Adorno as a one of the items peddled by the culture industry is that of pop music. This is arguably the most insidious of all forms of brainwashing, of dumbing down, and anaesthetising of the sensibilities of the populace. By pop music I mean a great deal of different pseudo-genres that masquerade under different names, but really are like different brand-names of soap.

The primary aim of the culture industry capitalist propaganda machine is to force people to conform to its dumbed down aesthetics, which are the aesthetics of the "cool". There is a constant attempt to make every form of violence, explosion of hatred, and insipid drug taking to appear "cool". When that seems passé, they are back to peddling good old fashioned kitsch again under the guise of it being a more virgin and wholesome commodity. They have even managed to brainwash the mass consumer into firmly believing that their product is somehow modern.

Adorno comments on a quotation from Tocqueville on the social ostracisation that befalls whoever fails to conform to the "cool aesthetics" as dictated by the culture industry:

"The ruler no longer says there: thou shalt think like me or die. He says: You are free not to think as I do, your life, your property, everything shall remains yours, but from this day on you are a stranger among us". Whoever fails to conform is struck with an economic impotence that goes on in the spirit of the maverick.

"Der Herrscher sagt dort nicht mehr: du sollst denken wie ich oder sterben. Er sagt: es steht dir frei, nicht zu denken wie ich, dein Leben, deine Güter, alles soll dir bleiben, aber von diesem Tage an bist du ein Fremdling unter uns". Was nicht konformiert, wird mit einer ökonomischen Ohnmacht geschlagen, die sich in der geistigen des Eigenbrötlers fortsetzt.   

My own translation from p155 of the volume of Adorno's complete works: Hockheimer & Adorno: Dialektik der Aufklärung. Kulturindustrie—Aufklärung als Massenbetrug. (The Dialectic of Enlightenment. The culture industry as mass deception). Suhrkamp Taschenbuch.

The first and most fundamental subconscious indoctrination involves teaching children at a young age that if they fail to listen to pop music they will be forever shunned by society. Once the spirit is broken by capitulation to the "cool aesthetic", other forms of culture industry capitalist indoctrination rapidly follow suit, where:

To be entertained is to have consented. It is possible in so far as it encompasses with it the totality of all social processes. It makes one stupid and from the beginning of even the most trivial work, the inescapable demand absurdly divulges itself: to reflect in the limitation of the whole thing. Pleasure is always: not to have to forget suffering, even where it is shown. Impotence lies at its very essence. It is indeed escape, but not, as it claims, escape from awful reality, but from the last contemplation of the resistance, which it has left behind.

Vergnügtsein heißt Einverstandensein. Es ist möglich nur, indem es sich gegenüber dem Ganzen des gesellschaftlichen Prozesses abdichtet, dumm macht und von Anbeginn den unentrinnbaren Anspruch jedes Werks, selbst des nichtigsten, widersinnig preisgibt: in seiner Beschränkung des Ganzes zu reflektieren. Vergnügen heißt allemal: nicht daran denken müssen, das Leiden vergessen, noch wo es gezeigt wird. Ohnmacht liegt ihm zu Grunde. Es ist in der Tat Flucht, aber nicht, wie es behauptet, Flucht vor der schlechten Realität, sondern vor dem letzten Gedanken an Widerstand, den jene noch übriggelassen hat.  

My own translation from p167 from the volume of Adorno's complete works: Hockheimer & Adorno: Dialektik der Aufklärung. Kulturindustrie—Aufklärung als Massenbetrug. (The Dialectic of Enlightenment. The culture industry as mass deception). Suhrkamp Taschenbuch.

Or to put it in the words of Noam Chomsky:

But entertainment has the merit not only of being better suited to helping sell goods; it is an effective vehicle for hidden ideological messages. Furthermore, in a system of high and growing inequality, entertainment is the contemporary equivalent of the Roman "games of the circus" that diverts the public from politics and generates a political apathy that is helpful to preservation of the status quo.  

Chomsky: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Location 266 Kindle edition 

It is a circus where in swooning over kitsch, there often springs to life a surreptitious, yet equally vast and oppressive kitsch onto-theology:

Especially for you the birds are singin'/ Especially for you the bells are ringin'. We are even told that the teleology of mass produced goods can explain the existence of sun, moon and stars: 'Especially for you that's what a moon's for/ Especially for that what a June's for.' The cynicism has a precise function. By telling the consumer that he cannot meddle with the product he is given over to the understanding that the producer takes no more cognisance of his needs than the moon takes of the dog that barks at it, he is meant to realise that he is being mocked...The sound of laughter we heard is familiar to us from the radio where the announcer not only laughs, but laughs at his own laughter defrauding the listener of the very deception which is being perpetuated against him. The customer knows full well that his wisest course is to affiliate with this institutional laughter. He realises that, whatever he does, he has no choice but to obey... 

My translation from Musikalische Warenanalysen (Analysis of Commodity Music) p285. Musikalische Schriften III complete works Suhrkamp Taschenbuch. Based partly on Rodney Livingstone's translation in Quasi una Fantasia. 

We are expected to have an unquestioning religious faith in this commodity-fetish, to become perfectly dumbed down, and unthinking sheepish followers of its capitalist doctrines with its oppressive metaphysic of the "cool", where the most successful commodity-people are accorded cosmological significance by being designated as "stars".

Post-Script

For those of you who have exploded with outrage at this post—too bad. If you have popped an aneurysm at reading this or any other post here, you came here at your own risk, and I take no responsibility for any convulsions that this or any other post may have induced. There are plenty of blogs out there presenting a constant stream of mild and inoffensive viewpoints to please and apease you. If you come here, expect to be provoked into thinking. In any case, I am not going to take heed of anyone who wishes to lecture me that I should immediately cease and desist from blaspheming against pop music and the capitalist culture industry. So don't even bother making any comments to that effect.

Further Reading:

Adorno on Popular Culture by Robert W. Witkin. A highly readable introduction to the subject matter.

Also available directly from Routledge.

For a more general introduction to Adorno's highly critical brand of post-Marxist (utterly heretical to classical Marxists) thought I suggest reading Gerhard Schweppenhäuser's book.

Noam Chomsky: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Chomsky is always an engaging and readable writer, whereas Adorno is well known for often being more complex and opaque.