rhapsode

by Sha Frasier.the Continuing Education Project.New York.

Idea

The pop factory

The pop factory is the organization of popular music on industrial lines, in which songwriters, producers, session musicians and singers each do one part of the work, as in the songwriting offices of the Brill Building and, under one company’s central control, at Motown and Philadelphia International. The debate asks what that division of labor does to the music and to the people who make it. Theodor Adorno (1941) argued that popular music is standardized, though he held that hits were still written by hand and that the industrial side of popular music lay in how it was promoted and distributed. Bernard Gendron (1986) found the standardization Adorno described in doo-wop but argued that Adorno exaggerated it and explained it wrongly. Jason Toynbee (2000) proposes that popular music developed an institutional autonomy under which musicians control much of their own creative work. Suzanne E. Smith (1999) sets Motown’s factory in Black Detroit and judges that it fell short of the promise of Black capitalism. Ken Emerson (2005) quotes Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller on the salaried Drifters, and Ronnie Reese writes that John A. Jackson’s history of Philadelphia International (2004) tells of the label’s royalty disputes. Nelson George (1988) describes the major labels drawing Motown’s writers away.

Standardization and handicraft

Theodor Adorno’s “On Popular Music” (1941) finds standardization at every level of the popular song: “Standardization extends from the most general features to the most specific ones.”1 He held, though, that hits were still written by hand, and that the industrial side of popular music lay only in how it was promoted and distributed.1 “The production of popular music is highly centralized in its economic organization, but still ‘individualistic’ in its social mode of production,” Adorno writes, and the division of labor among composer, harmonizer and arranger “is not industrial but rather pretends industrialization, in order to look more up to date.”1 The standards themselves, in his account, came out of competition: successful hits were imitated until the process “culminated in the crystallization of standards,” which under centralized conditions became “frozen” and were “taken over by cartelized agencies.”1

The reply to Adorno

Bernard Gendron’s “Theodor Adorno Meets the Cadillacs” (1986) finds the standardization Adorno described in doo-wop, but writes that Adorno “greatly exaggerated its presence” and gave the wrong explanation for it.2 Adorno, Gendron writes, “was aware that assembly line technology has little to do with the industrial standardization of popular music,” and so located its source in “oligopolistic concentration and cartelization,” an explanation Gendron finds “altogether unsatisfactory.”2 In Gendron’s account a record is two products: a recorded performance, which he calls a universal, and the many discs that carry it.2 “One simply doesn’t mass produce universals,” he writes.2 The production of songs can still be “technically rationalized to maximize the power of management,” as in what Gendron calls the Brill Building’s “‘song-writing’ factory,” but in Gendron’s argument neither mass production nor the concentration of the industry explains why popular music is standardized.2

Jason Toynbee’s Making Popular Music (2000) writes that Adorno “inflicts a serious wound on the study of popular music even as he inaugurates the research tradition in this field.”3 Toynbee proposes that in popular music “a certain institutional autonomy” has developed “which enables musicians to exert a large degree of creative control,” an autonomy that, in his account, took shape in the 1930s.3

Motown and the promise of Black capitalism

Suzanne E. Smith’s Dancing in the Street (1999) places Berry Gordy’s company in Black Detroit. The city’s Black newspapers, churches, radio stations, nightclubs and recording studios formed, in her account, a cultural infrastructure, and Motown both grew out of it and acted within it.4 Smith ties Gordy’s decision to build a hit factory to the history of African Americans in the automobile industry: “Motown’s assembly-line production style imitated the auto industry, while its product, music, stood apart from the city’s larger economy.”4

Gordy had worked at Ford on the Lincoln-Mercury assembly line.4 In his memoir, To Be Loved (1994), he writes, “In order to ensure top product, I set up Quality Control, a system I had heard about at Lincoln-Mercury,” and he calls the Friday morning product evaluation meetings, where the company picked the records it would release, “the lifeblood of our operation.”5 The house band, the Funk Brothers, played on more number-one records, by Motown’s count, than Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones combined.6 Its members, Classic Motown writes, were “not publicly credited for their work until 1971,” when Marvin Gaye listed their names on the cover of What’s Going On.6

Smith’s verdict is that “Motown ultimately did not uphold the promise of black capitalism,” the promise that Black-owned success would serve the neighborhood it came from.4 Motown’s “controversial royalty practices, limited profit sharing with employees, and eventual decision to leave Detroit for Los Angeles,” she writes, showed that “black capitalism did not ensure equity or preserve community.”4 Smith gives the lawsuit over royalties between Motown and Holland-Dozier-Holland, the team that wrote twenty-five top-ten pop records for Motown from 1963 to 1967, as “one example of how the company’s business fortune benefited some more than others.”4, 7 The team had left Motown in 1968 in a dispute over royalties.7 Smith places Motown’s move to Los Angeles in 1972 in the same trend as the companies and white residents who left Detroit for the suburbs after what she calls “the devastation of 1967.” She writes that “the cultural loss to the black community was equally difficult.”4

Who the factory pays

Ken Emerson’s Always Magic in the Air (2005) quotes the producers of the Drifters, Leiber and Stoller, on how the group was paid.8 The group’s manager, George Treadwell, owned the Drifters’ name, and in Leiber’s words the group’s “personnel was constantly changing because the group was on a weekly salary.”8 “It was almost … slave labor,” Stoller added.8

Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff opened Philadelphia International in 1971 with an advance from Columbia Records.9 In Jim Morrison’s account for Smithsonian, they set up competing teams of writers as Gordy had at Motown, and a house studio band, MFSB, like the Funk Brothers.9 “Motown, in my view, was the greatest record company that ever existed,” Gamble said in 2010. “They were the blueprint for Philly International.”10 Reviewing John A. Jackson’s history of the label, A House on Fire (2004), Publishers Weekly wrote that, as a business, the Black-owned label “mirrored the almost dictatorial Motown machine” while seeking the “family feel” of the smaller Stax.11 Ronnie Reese, in Wax Poetics, wrote that stories of “dissent, questionable business practices, and unfair distribution of royalties” among those who worked for and with Gamble and Huff are “told in great detail” in Jackson’s book.12 In Reese’s account, Jackson writes that much has been made of how white record company owners treated Black artists, treats the question as “not so much an issue of race as it is of power,” and cites Gordy’s Motown as an example that Gamble, Huff and the producer Thom Bell “may have inexplicably followed.”12

Nelson George’s The Death of Rhythm and Blues (1988) writes that when Motown “signed with MCA for national distribution” in 1982, it was “ending an era in black music and in the industry.”13 From the 1960s through the 1970s, in George’s account, as the large record companies learned what Black music could sell, Motown became the prize they wanted, and when Gordy declined their bids for the catalog of Jobete, Motown’s music publishing company, George writes, “they seduced his writers and producers.”13, 4

Further reading

See also

Footnotes

  1. Theodor W. Adorno with George Simpson, “On Popular Music” (1941), as reprinted in John Storey, ed., Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 3rd ed. (Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006), read through Open Library’s search inside the Internet Archive’s copy (accessed October 22, 2026); verbatim. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. Bernard Gendron, “Theodor Adorno Meets the Cadillacs”, in Tania Modleski, ed., Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture (Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 24–28, read through Open Library’s search inside the Internet Archive’s copy (accessed October 22, 2026); verbatim. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  3. Jason Toynbee, Making Popular Music: Musicians, Creativity and Institutions (Arnold, 2000), read through Open Library’s search inside the Internet Archive’s copy (accessed October 22, 2026); verbatim. ↩ ↩2

  4. Suzanne E. Smith, Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit (Harvard University Press, 1999), read through Open Library’s search inside the Internet Archive’s copy (accessed October 22, 2026), including Jobete as Motown’s music publishing company; verbatim. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8

  5. Berry Gordy, To Be Loved: The Music, the Magic, the Memories of Motown (Warner Books, 1994), read through Open Library’s search inside the Internet Archive’s copy (accessed October 22, 2026); verbatim. ↩

  6. Classic Motown, “The Funk Brothers” (accessed October 22, 2026); verbatim. ↩ ↩2

  7. David Bianco, “Holland-Dozier-Holland,” Contemporary Musicians, at Encyclopedia.com (accessed October 22, 2026). ↩ ↩2

  8. Ken Emerson, Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era (Viking, 2005), read through Open Library’s search inside the Internet Archive’s copy (accessed October 22, 2026); verbatim. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  9. Jim Morrison, “Forty Years of Philadelphia Sound,” Smithsonian, February 18, 2011, read in the Wayback Machine’s copy of September 24, 2016 (accessed October 22, 2026). ↩ ↩2

  10. Clayton Perry, “Interview: Kenneth Gamble – Songwriter, Entrepreneur and Humanitarian,” May 25, 2010 (accessed October 22, 2026); verbatim. ↩

  11. Publishers Weekly’s review of A House on Fire, October 4, 2004 (accessed October 22, 2026); verbatim. ↩

  12. Ronnie Reese, “The Main Ingredient,” Wax Poetics, issue 33, online December 9, 2020 (accessed October 22, 2026); verbatim. ↩ ↩2

  13. Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues (Pantheon, 1988), read through Open Library’s search inside the Internet Archive’s copy (accessed October 22, 2026); verbatim. ↩ ↩2

The shelf behind this

  • Adorno — “On Popular Music” — Popular music is standardized in its structure, its apparent variety is a pseudo-individualization that gives standardized songs the look of free choice, and it works as social cement, reconciling listeners to their dependence.
  • Gendron — “Theodor Adorno Meets the Cadillacs” — Adorno was right that industrial standardization shapes popular music, as the doo-wop of the 1950s shows, but he exaggerated it, judged popular music by the conventions of classical music, and modeled the record on the assembly-line car, when a record is a text and a car a functional artifact; the concentration of the industry, the cause Adorno gave, cannot explain the standardization of records, and his attention to the industry's part in a record's meaning should be set in dialogue with studies of how listeners use records.
  • George — The Death of Rhythm and Blues — Black music suffered the fate of an art that accommodates power and money: rhythm and blues was diluted into crossover music, and the small record stores and personality DJs around it disappeared as the record conglomerates rose.
  • Smith — Dancing in the Street — Motown cannot be understood apart from Detroit: set within the city's civil rights activism, the company's rise from a small local label to an international business and its 1972 departure show Black capitalism falling short of its promise to the Black Detroit that made the company.
  • Toynbee — Making Popular Music — Creativity in popular music is social authorship: the musician, individual or collective, chooses among possibilities bounded by habitus and by the conventions of the field, and authorship, so reconceived, still matters.
  • Jackson — A House on Fire — Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff and Thom Bell, kept out of Philadelphia's major record companies by the racism of the music business, built Philadelphia International into a Black recording company second only to Motown, which payola, competition, a tough economy and changing tastes brought down.
  • Emerson — Always Magic in the Air — The Brill Building era's seven leading songwriting teams, most of them Jewish New Yorkers, wrote a distinctly New York pop from the jazz, R&B, doo-wop, mambo, and blues of the city around them.

Published March 4, 2026