Adorno - On Popular Music task

Adorno viewed popular music as different to 'serious' more respectable forms of music, he believed it was inferior. It used cheap methods to create catchy songs that people could relate to and that would be familiar to the listener as it sounds the same as other songs. This was done through Standardisation, which relates to song structure, lyrical content, genre, time signatures and notes used. Standardisation makes songs a 'familiar experience' and has a prescribed effect on the listener.

Adorno also believes that through pseudo-individualisation the listener will be fooled to believe that what they are listening to is not 'pre digested' (Adorno, 1941) standard pop music, but something more meaningful and real. Record companies will create characters that are slightly different from the average popular musician in order to mask the completely average characteristics of their music.

The Shangri Las - Leader of the Pack

The Shangri-Las were part of a mass produced set off female pop musicians, known as Girl Groups, in the 60s. Although their music is nearly identical to other Girl Groups of the time none are nearly as recognised and popular now as they were then. The Shangri-Las pseudo-individualisation is what set them apart from other similar bands and provided a unique gimmick for them that would make them more appealing for people who wanted to believe they weren't a part of mainstream culture.

The Shangri-las were produced to have a 'bad' girl image. They predominantly sang about men who ride motorcycles and motorbike gangs. The lyrical content was still compliant to the genre, almost always singing about falling in love and bad breakups, yet instead of being about mainstream males, it was about men who are regarded as outside of popular culture yet their subculture had been absorbed by it. This will have appealed to people who also wanted to rebel against 'the norm' in the safest way possible. It gave people who were part of an increasingly popular subculture the chance to enjoy easily accessible music without them realising it was part of popular culture.

Foucault blog task

A Foucaudian reading of the modern day cinema reveals that it is a very Panoptic space. The role of the user of a cinema is extremely similar to Foucault's description of the objectification of the inmate of Bentham's Panopticon. "He is the object of information, never a subject in communication." (Foucault, 1975) relates to the nature of cinema and how it is essentially a monolog for the viewer to withstand and absorb without being able to argue against directly. Due to the layout and design of a cinema the user often 'self regulates' their behaviour. As soon as we walk into a cinema we know there are certain guidelines that we need to follow, you don't talk, you turn your phone off and you try your very best not to leave during the film. There are no signs telling us to do this, we just do it. Bentham states that power should be 'visible but unverifiable' which can be seen in different ways in the cinema. There are ushers outside the screen and sometimes in the screen room, we do not identify personally with these people to us they're just someone in a uniform, a point of authority who we have no personal connection to, although we can see what they look like and hear what they sound like we can never verify there personality, status or force. The projection room offers a more literal version of 'visible but unverifiable'. We know that there should be a person in there and we know there is a window with which they can see everybody in the room through but we never see the person in there, they can see if we're talking or being rowdy but we never see them.

There is an omniscient authority in the cinema that causes the viewer to self regulate their behaviour to a point where we feel uncomfortable to even go to the toilet even though they are provided. The architecture, as well as allowing everyone to see the screen, makes us completely in view from both infront and behind. Both these factors make us completely powerless in communication with the auteur, we can't question what we are being told or discuss with the rest of the audience nor do we feel like we can leave so we become a subject to information regardless of wether or not we personally agree with it