[FRA:] Re: [washingtonphilosophycircle] Culture Industry Reconsidered

[Ralph Dumain]

One important typo: I am NOT a fan of Elvis Presley.  I don't have any 
special animosity towards him personally, as he himself was clueless, only 
a pawn in their game, really, but I learned to hate his music and 
everything he represents through hating his fans.  Long ago and far away, 
in my unfortunate blue collar days, I worked in a warehouse populated by 
thugs and criminals, mostly vicious, racist white trash, as well as a 
percentage of black hoodlums most of whom did not last there long.  The art 
of lumpenproletarian conversation declined precipitously, descending to a 
barrage of racial slurs eight hours a day.  But these white hooligans loved 
Elvis; they played Elvis records over the loudspeaker day and night, and I 
grew to loathe Elvis like nobody's business.

Of course, there's a whole other side to the story of popular music that 
Elvis is parasitic to.  There was, of course, a certain amount of tailoring 
that entered into the packaging of both white and black performers, but the 
emergence of the best of them could not be considered the byproduct of an 
industrially engineered process.  There are always holes in the system, but 
it seems that most have them have since been plugged.  As Frank Zappa 
noted, the suits used to be completely out of it, mostly paying little 
attention to the product but putting out whatever might turn a buck.  But 
with a generational change, with the suits brought up in a media culture to 
which they are more attuned than their forbears, they think they know 
something about music and interfere much more than they did in the past, 
infringing on the scope for artistic autonomy previously tolerated.  With 
the generational turnover in the 1980s, popular response is now 
programmable from the cradle, as is the manufacture of new 'talent'.

At 01:12 PM 4/28/2006 -0400, Ralph Dumain wrote:
>The discovery of a huge youth market
>for new forms of popular music in the 1950s changed everything, but even
>here, innovation as well as standardization sold.  The need for an Elvis
>Presley could be foreseen and even fostered, but an Elvis (I'm a fan) could
>not be artificially manufactured, nor could Bob Dylan, the Beatles, or
>other pop music icons-to-be (not all of them, at any rate).  The situation
>has changed dramatically, and since the late '70s with the dominance of
>disco and then the 1980s with the MTV generation and the permanent
>establishment of hiphop we see all of Adorno's prophecies fulfilled.