ABSTRACT
T. W. Adorno position is flawed by his refusal to accept that popular music’s distance from his favoured high modernism might be anything other than ideologically mystificatory. When popular music studies began to emerge as a discipline, in the 1970s, it drew most obviously on approaches in the social sciences. Yet the almost universal distrust of Adorno hampered this engagement from the start. One response from sociologists was blandly positivist: counting sales, instruments, concert attendances and so on, and reducing musical meaning to basic social facts. The opposite approach to this – most famously represented by Adorno – was to take autonomy seriously but to read social meaning as sedimented in the historically formed musical materials themselves, albeit in mutating and always contradictory ways. Jacques Attali’s argument works at a schematic level, and he offers rather little guidance to interpretation of day-to-day practice or specific musical texts.
