Gendron — “Theodor Adorno Meets the Cadillacs”

Author: Bernard Gendron
Title: “Theodor Adorno Meets the Cadillacs”
Year: 1986
Publisher: Indiana University Press (in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, ed. Tania Modleski)
Type: Essay

“Theodor Adorno Meets the Cadillacs” is an essay by the philosopher Bernard Gendron, published in 1986 in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, a collection edited by Tania Modleski. It tests the account of standardization in Theodor Adorno’s 1941 essay “On Popular Music” against the doo-wop of the 1950s, and its title joins the vocal group the Cadillacs to the car they were named after. Gendron finds doo-wop standardized in Adorno’s sense. He argues that Adorno exaggerated the standardization and judged popular music by the conventions of classical music. Adorno’s analogy between the song and the car from the assembly line, in Gendron’s view, misses that a record is a text and a car a functional artifact. Nor, he argues, can the cause Adorno gave, the concentration of the industry, explain the standardization of records. He closes by asking who makes the meaning of a rock ‘n’ roll record, and he proposes that Adorno’s attention to the industry be set in dialogue with critics who study listeners. Writers on popular music read the essay both as a critique of Adorno and as a defense of his approach: Richard Middleton called it one of the better critiques, Roy Shuker an attempt to defend the political economy view, and in 1996 Deborah Cook defended Adorno against it.

In 1986 Gendron was associate professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and was writing a book on rock ‘n’ roll.¹ The essay is the second chapter of Studies in Entertainment, edited by Modleski and published by Indiana University Press in 1986 as the seventh volume of the series Theories of Contemporary Culture, from the Center for Twentieth Century Studies at Gendron’s university.¹

The essay begins in 1955, with the Cadillacs’ regional hit “Down the Road”.² Adorno, Gendron writes, went on equating popular music with Tin Pan Alley and its jazz offshoots, though he lived at least a decade into the era of rock ‘n’ roll, and “we can be sure that he never heard the Cadillacs.”² That omission “has done much to damage the credibility of his work on popular music.”² Many in what Gendron calls “the present generation of culture theorists” had come out of the radical movements of the 1960s, for which rock ‘n’ roll was the chief cultural expression and the Frankfurt School the first teacher of theory. They usually rejected Adorno’s work on popular music outright.² In discussions of rock’s politics it “is usually reduced to a place marker at one extreme of the spectrum of views.”²

Gendron finds standardization of an older kind in Haydn and in the English folk ballad.³ Adorno, he argues, was primarily concerned with “two traits which only emerge in full force with industrial standardization: part interchangeability and pseudo-individualization.”³ In Gendron’s example, virtually any mechanical part of a 1956 Cadillac Eldorado, a carburetor for instance, can replace the same part in any other 1956 Eldorado, while the tail fin gives the model its glamour.³ In his words, “Part interchangeability results from the drive to minimize the cost of production; pseudo-individualization results from the imperative to maximize sales.”³ The Cadillacs, Gendron writes, had asked General Motors for permission to use the car’s name.³ In Adorno’s model, as Gendron reconstructs it, rhythms, chord progressions, riffs and lyric formulas can be exchanged from song to song, and the songwriter’s hook makes the result seem unique: “The hook is to songs what the fin was to the 1956 Cadillac Eldorado.”³

Gendron then applies Adorno’s analysis to doo-wop, a vocal group style “rooted in the black gospel quartet tradition” in which the background singers “take on the role of instrumental accompaniment.”⁴ He writes that about three quarters of doo-wop songs followed Tin Pan Alley’s thirty-two-bar form and the rest the twelve-bar blues, and that the Moonglows’ “Sincerely” (1954) differs little in structure and harmony from Larry Clinton’s 1938 recording of “Heart and Soul”.⁴ He imagines the genre’s options as decks of cards, one deck for each musical function: “In most cases, one could create a credible doo-wop recording by simply picking one card from each deck.”⁴ In Gendron’s words, “What is true for doo-wop also holds true for other rock ‘n’ roll genres,” and punk “has standardized the musical sneer.”⁴ His conclusion is that “Adorno’s analysis of popular music is not altogether implausible.”⁴

Gendron writes that Adorno argued, “successfully I think,” that industrial standardization matters in popular music and “must be taken seriously in any political assessment of the form.”⁵ Adorno, Gendron writes, “greatly exaggerated its presence, especially at the diachronic level,” that is, across the music’s history, and gave the wrong explanation for it.⁵ Adorno “was aware that assembly line technology has little to do with the industrial standardization of popular music,” held that writing a hit was still handicraft, and blamed the concentration of the industry instead, an explanation Gendron finds “altogether unsatisfactory.”⁵ Adorno was, in Gendron’s words, “not sufficiently sensitive” to the differences between producing functional artifacts, such as the car, and textual artifacts, such as the record.⁵ In functional artifacts, part interchangeability is “largely a consequence of the technology of the assembly line,” while recording technology, if anything, “greatly expands the possibilities for variation.”⁵ A record, Gendron argues, is two products: the recorded performance, made once, which he calls a universal, and the many discs that carry it, its particulars.⁵ As Gendron puts it, “One simply doesn’t mass produce universals.”⁵ In 1955 the Cadillacs’ label, Josie, sold hundreds of thousands of discs but made only fifty to a hundred recordings.⁵ The writing and performing of songs can still be rationalized to give management more control, as it was at the Brill Building, which Gendron calls a “‘song-writing’ factory,” but the assembly line, he writes, “is simply an inappropriate model for the production of texts-as-universals.”⁵

Adorno held, Gendron writes, that each record’s pseudo-individualized features must camouflage what it shares with other records.⁶ Records, in Gendron’s account, “accentuate their commonality and interchangeability just as much as they do their individuality,” apparently because of qualities peculiar to commercially made texts, to which Adorno “was clearly insensitive”: “I do not buy records like I buy cans of cleanser.”⁶ A buyer who likes a can of Comet buys another can, while a listener who likes a doo-wop record wants something else in the same genre.⁶ So the industry, Gendron writes, devises “each record so that it advertises itself,” announcing its genre early and clearly along with its hook.⁶ The industry’s “simplistic self-advertisement,” Gendron writes, is probably owed more to hurried consumers than to passive ones.⁶

Gendron calls Adorno’s complaint that popular music never left the tonality of the Romantic era “altogether beside the point,” because popular music follows in part the conventions of African American music as well as those of classical music.⁷ If popular music is studied in terms of its own conventions, Gendron writes, the issues change: “The question is no longer why popular music always remains the same, but why it changes as often and as significantly as it does.”⁷ In functional artifacts, Gendron writes, “fashion is at the periphery, the mechanism at the center,” while in the text “there is no mechanism to distinguish from the fashion, since a text is all style or all fashion.”⁷

The essay’s last section asks who makes the meaning of a rock ‘n’ roll record. Most rock critics, Gendron writes, credit the performers, songwriters, arrangers and producers.⁸ The only recent alternative, in his account, came from the Birmingham school of cultural studies: Dick Hebdige, in Subculture, argued that a rock ‘n’ roll record’s meaning cannot be understood apart from the youth cultures that consume it, which “rewrite” it within their own practices and rituals.⁸ Gendron finds that both answers have the same political effect, to legitimize rock ‘n’ roll culture, and that no one was addressing directly the industry’s part in a record’s meaning.⁸ Here Adorno’s work is of use, in Gendron’s view, because it joined political economy to the study of signs.⁸ Among Adorno’s failures, Gendron writes, “His elitism led him to musical essentialism, and his modernism to a too uncritical stance toward the ideology of aesthetic rebellion and anti-standardization.”⁸ Yet the standardized core of a song, Gendron suggests, may be what listeners can least reinterpret: “Perhaps nothing is as resistant to consumer reinterpretation as the standardized forms, sounds, and verbal devices operating at the conventionalized core of the popular song.”⁸ The essay ends by asking critics to “engage Adorno’s productivist approach in a constructive dialogue with the more recent and fashionable reception approaches.”⁸

Later writers cited the essay both as a critique of Adorno and as a defense of his approach. Jim Collins, in 1989, credited it with “the crucial point that texts are not like other commodities such as cars.”⁹ Middleton, in Studying Popular Music (1990), called it “one of the better critiques of Adorno’s theory of popular music.”¹⁰ Shuker, in Understanding Popular Music (1994), wrote that it “provides an interesting attempt to defend” the political economy view of rock that Adorno’s essay represents.¹⁰ Of Gendron’s claim that the doo-wop analysis holds for other genres, among them rockabilly, heavy metal and funk, Shuker wrote, “This claim is not teased out.”¹⁰ Cook, defending Adorno in The Culture Industry Revisited (1996), replied that Gendron had charged Adorno with explaining standardization by “techniques of mass production or the economics of market concentration,” when for Adorno imitation among companies competing in the same cultural sector partly accounts for it.¹¹

Key contributions

• The reading of Adorno’s standardization as two industrial traits, part interchangeability and pseudo-individualization, illustrated by the automobile.
• A test of Adorno’s analysis on doo-wop, which finds it “not altogether implausible.”
• The distinction between functional artifacts, such as cars, and textual ones, such as records, and with it the argument that mass production and market concentration cannot explain the standardization of records.
• The question of who makes the meaning of a record, and the proposal to join the study of the industry to the study of listeners.

See also

• The pop factory — the debate over the industrial production of pop