Negative dialectics in music: Adorno and heavy metal

Abstract

Theodor Adorno argues that music contains an indelible collective undercurrent that can be revealed in its negative dialectic with Culture Industry music. This phenomenon of the communicative power of the ‘negative dialectic’ in popular music is the concern of this study. Charles Taylor observes that the rock concert embodies the expression of a continuing desire throughout secular modernity for a spiritual fulfillment that the reality or facticity of contemporary life cannot adequately deliver. In sympathy with Taylor’s interest in the rock concert as a fusion in common action/feeling that generates the powerful phenomenological sense that we are in contact with ‘something greater’, I draw on Adorno’s critical theory in order to offer an explanation of this continuing communicative power of music. It is possible to historicize Adorno’s controversial critique of popular music without rejecting his negative dialectical approach. In order to demonstrate the ‘actuality’ of Adorno’s negative dialectical approach, I use it to analyze – quite scandalously – heavy metal music.

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