Mass music’s regressive listening confirms rather than merely diverts its audience

Evidence

The regression is really from this existent possibility, or more concretely, from the possibility of a different and oppositional music. Regressive, too, is the role which contemporary mass music plays in the psychological household of its victims. They are not merely turned away from more important music, but they are confirmed in their neurotic stupidity, quite irrespective of how their musical capacities are related to the specific musical culture of earlier social phases. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 96

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines regressive listening as forcibly-retarded primitivism rather than undeveloped naivete.
• SEED: An essay angle: how Adorno’s ‘forcibly retarded’ listener maps onto modern algorithmic feeds that keep users infantile.
• XREF: connects to: Capitalist commodification of music causes listeners’ hearing to regress psychologically to infantile passivity. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 578; Music’s forms and listener attention reflect the social status of their performers and public — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 54; Mainstream rock music now insulates listeners from the present rather than registering its tensions.

Related

• Mass listening regresses to an infantile, forcibly retarded stage rather than remaining undeveloped (similarity 0.92)
• Capitalist commodification of music causes listeners’ hearing to regress psychologically to infantile passivity. (similarity 0.86)
• Mainstream rock music now insulates listeners from the present rather than registering its tensions. (similarity 0.85)
• Modern music’s ugliness is a deliberate strategy against a commercially desensitized hearing (similarity 0.82)
• Music’s forms and listener attention reflect the social status of their performers and public (similarity 0.80)
• Intellectuals’ praise of mass culture masks self-denunciation (similarity 0.80)
• Modern canned sound degrades the general ability to listen, forcing composers’ audibility. (similarity 0.80)
• Deconcentrated listening makes perception of a musical whole impossible (similarity 0.79)
• Attempts to escape consumer passivity only deepen entanglement in it (similarity 0.78)