Gendron — “Theodor Adorno Meets the Cadillacs”

Author: Bernard Gendron
Title: “Theodor Adorno Meets the Cadillacs”
Year: 1986
Publisher: Indiana University Press (in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, ed. Tania Modleski)
Type: Essay

“Theodor Adorno Meets the Cadillacs” is an essay by the philosopher Bernard Gendron, published in 1986 in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, a collection edited by Tania Modleski. It tests the account of standardization in Theodor Adorno’s 1941 essay “On Popular Music” against the doo-wop of the 1950s, and its title joins the vocal group the Cadillacs to the car they were named after. Gendron finds doo-wop standardized in Adorno’s sense, but he argues that Adorno exaggerated the standardization, judged popular music by the conventions of classical music and modeled the record on the car from the assembly line, when a record is a text and a car a functional artifact. He closes by proposing that Adorno’s attention to the industry be set in dialogue with critics who study listeners.

In 1986 Gendron was associate professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and was writing a book on rock ‘n’ roll.¹

The essay begins in 1955, with the Cadillacs’ regional hit “Down the Road”. Adorno, Gendron writes, went on equating popular music with Tin Pan Alley and its jazz offshoots, though he lived at least a decade into the era of rock ‘n’ roll, and “we can be sure that he never heard the Cadillacs.” That omission, he writes, “has done much to damage the credibility of his work on popular music,” and in discussions of rock’s politics it “is usually reduced to a place marker at one extreme of the spectrum of views.”²

Adorno, Gendron argues, was primarily concerned with “two traits which only emerge in full force with industrial standardization: part interchangeability and pseudo-individualization.” In his example, virtually any mechanical part of a 1956 Cadillac Eldorado can replace the same part in any other 1956 Eldorado, while the tail fin gives the model its glamour. In Adorno’s model, as Gendron reconstructs it, rhythms, chord progressions, riffs and lyric formulas pass from song to song, and the songwriter’s hook makes the result seem unique: “The hook is to songs what the fin was to the 1956 Cadillac Eldorado.”³

Doo-wop, a vocal group style “rooted in the black gospel quartet tradition,” bears the model out. About three quarters of doo-wop songs, Gendron writes, followed Tin Pan Alley’s thirty-two-bar form and the rest the twelve-bar blues, and the Moonglows’ “Sincerely” (1954) differs little in structure and harmony from Larry Clinton’s 1938 recording of “Heart and Soul”. He imagines the genre’s options as decks of cards, one for each musical function: “In most cases, one could create a credible doo-wop recording by simply picking one card from each deck.” Adorno’s analysis, he concludes, “is not altogether implausible.”⁴

Adorno argued, “successfully I think,” Gendron writes, that industrial standardization “must be taken seriously in any political assessment of the form,” but he “greatly exaggerated its presence, especially at the diachronic level,” across the music’s history, and explained it wrongly. Holding that writing a hit was still handicraft, Adorno blamed the concentration of the industry, an explanation Gendron finds “altogether unsatisfactory.” Adorno was, in Gendron’s words, “not sufficiently sensitive” to the difference between functional artifacts, such as the car, and textual ones, such as the record. A record is two products: the recorded performance, made once, which Gendron calls a universal, and the many discs that carry it. “One simply doesn’t mass produce universals,” he writes; in 1955 the Cadillacs’ label, Josie, sold hundreds of thousands of discs but made only fifty to a hundred recordings. Songwriting can still be rationalized, as it was at the Brill Building, but the assembly line “is simply an inappropriate model for the production of texts-as-universals.”⁵

Records, in Gendron’s account, “accentuate their commonality and interchangeability just as much as they do their individuality,” and he gives the reason plainly: “I do not buy records like I buy cans of cleanser.” A listener who likes a doo-wop record wants something else in the same genre, so the industry devises “each record so that it advertises itself,” announcing its genre along with its hook.⁶ Gendron calls Adorno’s complaint that popular music never left the tonality of the Romantic era “altogether beside the point,” since popular music follows the conventions of African American music as well as those of classical music. Judged by its own conventions, popular music poses a different problem: “The question is no longer why popular music always remains the same, but why it changes as often and as significantly as it does.”⁷

The last section asks who makes the meaning of a rock ‘n’ roll record. Rock critics, Gendron writes, credit the performers, songwriters, arrangers and producers, and the Birmingham school of cultural studies, in Dick Hebdige’s Subculture, credited the youth cultures that “rewrite” records within their own practices and rituals. Both answers, he finds, legitimize rock ‘n’ roll culture, and neither addresses the industry’s part in a record’s meaning. Here Adorno is of use, in Gendron’s view, because he joined political economy to the study of signs, and the standardized core of a song may be what listeners can least reinterpret: “Perhaps nothing is as resistant to consumer reinterpretation as the standardized forms, sounds, and verbal devices operating at the conventionalized core of the popular song.” The essay ends by asking critics to “engage Adorno’s productivist approach in a constructive dialogue with the more recent and fashionable reception approaches.”⁸

Richard Middleton, in Studying Popular Music (1990), called it “one of the better critiques of Adorno’s theory of popular music.”⁹ Deborah Cook, defending Adorno in The Culture Industry Revisited (1996), replied that Gendron had charged Adorno with explaining standardization by “techniques of mass production or the economics of market concentration,” when for Adorno imitation among companies competing in the same cultural sector partly accounts for it.¹⁰

Key contributions

• The reading of Adorno’s standardization as two industrial traits, part interchangeability and pseudo-individualization, illustrated by the automobile.
• A test of Adorno’s analysis on doo-wop, which finds it “not altogether implausible.”
• The distinction between functional artifacts, such as cars, and textual ones, such as records, and with it the argument that mass production and market concentration cannot explain the standardization of records.
• The question of who makes the meaning of a record, and the proposal to join the study of the industry to the study of listeners.

See also

• The pop factory — the debate over the industrial production of pop