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 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.
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