ABSTRACTThis article investigates deixis-based chronotopic framing across a corpus of 90 songs selected based on their top-ranking positions on the UK song charts over the period of 8 years. The present study combines some tools in linguistic approach to genre analysis and some concepts drawn from pragmatics and Critical Discourse Analysis, as an analytic framework. Quantitative and qualitative focus was laid on ideologically coded thematic leitmotifs and chronotopic interplay through spatio-temporal deictic patterns across the case-study lyrics. It was found that (...) there are significant points of commonality between the lyrics in terms of thematic strands as well as chronotope-bounded deictic features which warrants the classification of popular songs as a verbally distinct genre with its own ideologically charged discursive practices characterised by political apathy, and which can in part explain the target audience's uptake of this type of songs. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this essay I draw attention to conceptual similarities in Walter Benjamin’s and Theodor W. Adorno’s reflection about language, with special attention to Benjamin’s 1916 essay about language as such, including its theological impulses. In Adorno’s case, I concentrate on language theory as it comes forth in relation to his philosophy of music and the supposed language-character of music. I argue that this particular connection between Benjamin and Adorno is largely unexplored in the literature, and I show that their conceptual (...) affinities have far-reaching consequences for a proper understanding of Adorno’s philosophy as a whole. Music is of fundamental importance for Adorno’s critical theory, and this fact points to an intricate entwinement between materialism and theology, stemming from Benjamin’s theory of language. Thinking of music as secularized prayer means to emphasize that music relates to reality in a way that resembles the logic of Benjamin’s understanding of a pre-lapsarian language of... (shrink)

Adorno’s extended conception of ‘culture industry’ renders the usual criticism of his views as ‘elitist’ meaningless. The same expansion creates, however, logical strains and contradictions in his analysis of the character and function of the culture industry: a strain in its ‘psychosocial’ and ‘status compulsion’ interpretation. In his late work Adorno attempts to solve this contradiction, but at a heavy price, by creating a conceptual barrier between pleasure and happiness.

Major sociological work related to the culture industry thesis was undertaken by Adorno during his period as a ‘refugee scholar’ in the USA. It has been charged with a ‘sociological deficit’ by leading figures within critical theory, typically without reference to that US context. A dialogue with Márkus’s work on Adorno and the Marxian production paradigm can redress failings in those critiques. However, such a task is complicated by the limitations of Márkus’s own major essay on this topic. This paper (...) thus conducts an immanent critique of Márkus: ‘Márkus against Márkus’. Márkus’s proposals for the application of the Marxian production paradigm to aesthetic culture and his prospective vision for critical theory are so found to be very compatible with Adorno’s related work. (shrink)

As the record industry’s fortunes decline, consumers experience increasing access to the world’s recorded music, legally and otherwise, through digital technologies. At the same time, recordings not only take up less physical space , they are compressed — not just as data, but in terms of dynamic range. While it allows for constant audibility in noisy environments like cars and offices, dynamic range compression has frustrated many listeners for limiting the impact of the music and causing “ear fatigue.” These listeners (...) long for access to the purity of the original recording before it was “squashed,” but the problem is that the original recording does not, in a sense, exist. Producers and mastering engineers assemble the tracks recorded and create a particular sonic product that can later be revisited and “remastered.” Ostensibly this process is meant to get closer to the original sound, but in reality it simply comprises a different manner of interpreting the existing recording. Theodor Adorno had written of surprisingly similar phenomena more than half a century ago in essays like “The Radio Symphony” and the notes collected in Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction. Though infamous for his hostility toward popular music and its “infantile” listeners, Adorno’s writings on music contain much that is valuable for an understanding of how pop works in the digital age. Combined with a consideration of works on music and postmodernity by Fredric Jameson, Jacques Attali, François Lyotard and others, Adorno’s work helps one to consider how reification continues to work in an era where music is seemingly no longer a “thing.”. (shrink)