Horkheimer and Adorno Today:

Punk Rock, Hip-Hop and Streaming

An essay written for a philosophy class in university on a topic I find personally interesting. Language is very dry for academic purposes so read at your own peril.

Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s seminal works on the culture industry today was a product of its time. In the shadow of a postwar world the social order split between two ideological camps of communism and capitalism. It was in this ideological struggle that Adorno and Horkeimer (1944) analyzed the disturbing similarities between the Nazi Party propaganda of their German homeland and the culture industry of the United States. Though the Cold War has long come to an end, the current era of Pax-Americana has developed a less visible culture industry which continues to set the parameters of socially acceptable art. In this essay I will use the examples of standardizing practices imported into the punk rock and hip-hop music scenes to reaffirm Adorno and Horkheimer’s central theory on the culture industry. The medium of streaming will also be discussed as it relates to the alienation of people from culture. Defining what constitutes the standardization of a form of art is a difficult task and therefore methods used in this essay will reflect a generalized view of mainstream pop culture. Through the lens of culture theory we can analyze where the Frankfurt School’s ideas stand today in the information age and the evolution of music since the postwar period.

The development of rock and roll music from the 1950s onwards is where Adorno and Horkheimer would have found themselves criticizing at the time of their writing. The importance of this period was marked by the emergence of what music pundits call the “album era” in which the long-play album as a format was the dominant medium of engaging with music (Zipkin, 2020). Artists such as Elvis Presley, The Beatles and later artists in rock music became the early icons of this era with their appeal supported by a standardized medium known as a vinyl record. One could distinguish between these acts based on their unique voices but as Horkheimer and Adorno (1944) note, “How formalised the procedure is can be seen when the mechanically differentiated products prove to be all alike in the end.” If we return to early rock music in this context, the differences between artists was quite small as they functionally retained their form as variations of rock and roll. This was a deliberate choice as rock music became a marketable audience and became a worldwide sensation following the massive success of The Beatles (Fulk, 2017). Rock music itself held revolutionary roots in blues and working class folk music but it would take another twenty years for a critical take on the sound to develop.

The uniformity of popular music as presented in the styles of rock began to break down in the 1970s as these older artists and bands broke up or began to fade away. One such style known as punk music returned rock to its primordial roots and intentionally carved out a particular rebellious niche within the culture industry. Moore (2007) describes punk subculture as a form of autonomous media, strictly focused on independence from corporate firms which in effect represent the culture industry. This significant development intuitively kept the universalization of the style at bay with an emphasis on shoddy musicianship, low-budget production, shock value tactics, and confrontational personalities. Indeed, it was only a matter of time until such practices themselves became synthesized into the wider music industry. In the 1970’s, Moore (2007) notes that record production costs fell and many independent labels later became successful companies that released critically acclaimed artists like Green Day, Nirvana, and The Offspring who had mass appeal. This period of commercial success was described by Gerfried Ambrosch (2018) with the following observation: “When punk broke into the mainstream in the mid-1990s, politics fell by the wayside. Many so-called neo-punk bands deliberately ignored controversial political issues and focused solely on their music career”. It is in these observations that we see the marketed differences of punk rock from its counter cultural origins to what had now become absorbed into the culture industry’s machinery.

A similar transition could be seen in hip-hop music. Hip-hop’s roots in street culture primarily found in African American communities defined the post-Civil Rights era (Ford, 2019). An important distinction with punk was that hip-hop was almost a completely new form of popular music with very little precedent in the mainstream and therefore makes it authentic culture rather than a deconstruction in the manner of punk. Described by Smith (2016, pp. 3–4) as limitless music that held mastery over turntables, it was completely fresh and massively popular during its inception in 1970s-80s block parties. This period of popularity did catch some mainstream interest but research (Myer & Kleck, 2007) posits that industry encroachment on hip-hop would only become more prominent from 1997 onwards with the purchase of many small independent labels. The reason for this I believe is because punk was easily dislodged from its authentic culture roots due to its unsustainable nihilism and easily sanitized image that could be turned into a fashion identifier. The roots of hip-hop in contrast remain firmly intertwined with the experiences of the African American community and therefore its appeal cannot as easily be pacified. This position that hip-hop finds itself introduces some unique situations which challenge cultural hegemony and white supremacy despite being absorbed by the industry.

The range of hip-hop’s influence go beyond radical artistic statements and abstraction. Its influence on politics remains a sore spot among industry and society alike. In Matthew Oware’s book I Got Something To Say (2018, p. 3), the intersections of hip-hop music with politics, race and gender is intertwined from its beginnings. In Oware’s words, “Rappers possess agency and determine the amount of liberating and regressive messages in their songs — not wholly operating at the whims of record executives” (p. 144). This would appear to be a contradiction to the concept of the culture industry which could be conceived as having top down deployment strategy. This is not necessarily the case as the original nature of hip-hop as a distinct expression of authentic culture gives it some leverage in this relationship. Adorno and Horkheimer (1944) state that breaking the influence of the entertainment industry over consumers will not happen via decree rather through “the hostility inherent in the principle of entertainment to what is greater than itself”. Major labels are a business and the market for this particular style cannot be turned down even if said style is at times hostile or antithetical to its desired aims. The result is a wide platform for independent artists to speak on topics such as racial injustice, police violence, and socio-economic conditions in poor or marginalized neighbourhoods (Vito, 2015). Further, many hip-hop artists have succeeded in leveraging independent success on new mediums such as streaming and with far less reliance on major labels (Morgan & Bennett, 2011).

As we move past the age of the album, a new method of popular music deployment has emerged in the form of streaming as a medium. This is, in many ways, the industry’s response to internet piracy of the late 1990s and early 2000s which saw major lawsuits against companies like Napster for providing peer-to-peer file sharing services. Napster could have accounted for at least a 20% decline in revenue (Hong, 2013) and this was enough for major labels to panic and sense the loss of their grip over the market in this new era. This trend at the time which saw music shared in the more open internet appeared to continue until the ubiquitous nature of smartphones and streaming on apps like Spotify. This new style of deployment has become a rational alternative to online piracy which carries a security risk and inconvenience while also providing a social element. The prevalence of streaming apps I believe, requires an updated assessment of the culture industry in order to contemplate its relevance in the information age and how it effects our concept of choice.

One could argue that the internet has been a democratizing force for the culture industry and that was likely truer in the nascent stages. Social media companies, streaming sites, and other hosts offer platforms for artists to potentially reach any audience they desire through the careful use of search engine optimization and advertising campaigns. In a sense, this would suggest that the culture industry no longer has monopoly power on what we consume with art and we now live in an era of choice. I believe this would be a misunderstanding since our choice has simply shifted from physical items to digital downloads and record labels have lost power to social media companies. If we examine the privately owned Spotify as a new medium for artists like the vinyl record or the compact disc, we can see that the strategies are the same. As it is an app with social media style elements, Spotify relies on a key concept known as playlists. These playlists are built by its userbase and can be collaborative in nature. What makes this significant is that some playlists are extremely popular and facilitated by celebrities like Barrack Obama or music pundits in NPR (Haupt, 2012). Music in effect becomes curated by individuals rather than explicitly through organized marketing campaigns but the result is the same. Music as well becomes utility based and focused on specific themes, moods, and activities that eliminate the need for a consistent album or composition of work. Spotify as well pays its artists very little (Nath, 2019) and therefore requires a strong listener base to be built in before joining the site and therein lies the hurdle that many musicians struggle to overcome. We can see from these examples therefore that Spotify and other streaming platforms are simply a rebranding of capitalism and once again providing an illusion of choice rather than a democratic model or an organic way to reach fans.

What this means for Adorno and Horkheimer’s culture industry is that music is reflecting a new reality consistent with the evolution of capitalism. Where the western worker was once infused with mass production, he divided his leisure time accordingly and consumed entertainment which mirrored this. Today we see trends of longer hours for some (Kuhn & Lozano, 2008) and lower wages for others (Roper, 2020) in the service-based economy. This new society operates in the shadow of runaway factories which set the framing of a cultural milieu with a false sense of identity if any at all. Workplaces in response to this have adjusted to repackage alienation into things like mindfulness, awareness, “wokeness”, and other forms of anthropomorphic corporate identity. These changes force the culture industry to adapt to how it deploys standardization knowing that people will not simply accept the regular methods of advertisement. In order to compensate busy lives and career driven personalities, music is deployed with hyper accurate market discrimination rather than a truly online democracy and platform for artists.

The theory of the culture industry laid the foundations of our understanding on this topic and how the effects of it work in unison to defend a particular ordering of society. Returning to the examples of hip-hop and punk music, it is through the former that we see the begrudging acceptance of a style that is birthed from authentic culture and tied to social justice and political change. The importance of hip-hop as an outlet for marginalized and oppressed people is that it is able to reach an audience unlike anything we have seen in the past. The same lineage which criticized excessive policing of black and brown communities takes center stage in the ongoing racial reckoning within the United States. Though it may be facing some of the same challenges that punk music had, the deeper authentic roots and ties to social justice give hip-hop a field advantage in the struggle for an independent voice even in the age of streaming.

Adorno and Horkheimer have tasked us, perhaps pessimistically, with fixing the unfixable. Punk music attempted to subvert what they saw as corporate overreach through an authentic cultural expression but it largely failed. Hip-hop gave voice to the voiceless and though it has significant features that allow for its independence from firms, it too is facing some similar strains. These histories weave together the wider story of 20th century music which faced astounding cultural innovation at a time of great technological and social change. The features of capitalism bleed profusely into the cultural sphere though it is easier to forget today that it exists at all. It is difficult to see how our endless array of choice could be in any way manipulated by an outside market force if we are the ones creating the playlists. Subverting this standardization of an essential human activity like music is easier said than done and will require a conscious effort to develop authentic culture once again outside of online platforms. It is possible therefore to hold the belief that we can someday see the return of autonomy to art and the restoration of our communal connection to music hopefully in concert with an improvement to human development. In the words of the famously antagonistic Chumbawumba, “Nothing ever burns down by itself, every fire needs a little bit of help”.

References

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Ambrosch, G. (2018). The poetry of Punk: The meaning behind Punk rock and hardcore lyrics (1st ed.). Routledge.

Ford, J. (2019). The Unclean Break: Re-imagining the sound of hip-hop. College Literature, 46(1), 269–274. https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2019.0012

Fulk, K. (2017). Sounds German?: Popular music in postwar Germany at the crossroads of the national and transnational. German Politics and Society, 35(2), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.3167/gps.2017.350201

Haupt, J. (2012). Spotify (review). Edited by Anne Shelley. Music Library Association, 69(1), 132–138. https://doi.org/10.1353/not.2012.0115

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Moore, R. (2007). Friends don’t let friends listen to corporate rock: Punk as a field of cultural production. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 36(4), 438–474. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891241607303520

Morgan, M., & Bennett, D. (2011). Hip-Hop & the Global Imprint of a Black Cultural Form. Daedalus 140(2), 176–196.
https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_00086

Nath. T. (2019). How Pandora And Spotify Pay Artists. Investopedia. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/121614/how-pandora-and-spotify-pay-artists.asp

Oware, M. (2018). I got something to say: Gender, race, and social consciousness in rap music. Springer International Publishing AG.

Roper, W. (2020). Working more for less: How wages in America have stagnated. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforce-america-united-states-wages-stagnate/

Smith, S. (2016). Hip-hop turntablism, creativity and collaboration. Routledge.

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Zipkin, M. (2020). Best albums from the last decade, according to critics. Stacker. https://stacker.com/stories/3713/best-albums-last-decade-according-critics