Is Popular Music a Mass Produced Commodity or a Genuine Art Form?

Adorno splits music into two categories ‘popular music’ and ‘serious’ music. The main thrust of his argument is that popular music is pre-digested, mass produced and demands little or no active involvement on the part of the listener to give it meaning. This is because each individual part has little or no bearing on the whole in the way that serious music does. Adorno goes on to give examples of how certain symphonies would have no or less meaning if their other elements were different. Much like art no two pieces are the same. Each one is individual and its composite elements go to make the whole. For example Metamorphose of a Narcissus by Dalí, when glanced at seems a simple, if strangely worrying, landscape. When studied more closely other elements stand out that you suddenly realise have lent to the foreboding air of the picture. Popular music is that glance. It is seeing the Mona Lisa simply to say you have, instead of appreciating the artists’ attention to detail, light, or technique, which is serious music. Popular music is there to give “the masses” an escape, distraction without effort. It has replaced religion as the opiate of the people.Its is indeed a mass produced commodity, this doesnt mean its all bad.