200 Part III: Emigration Years
widely played and highly popular in Europe and the USA. Rather,
his analysis focused on tracing the social mechanisms at work in the
harmonic, melodic, rhythmic and instrumental qualities of the musical
sound. He began with a description of what he thought were striking
musical characteristics: the simultaneous presence of individual and
stereotypical features. This he related to the historical situation of the
people who consume commercial music, and it led him to the notion
of the ‘compulsive consumer’ from a standpoint critical of capitalism.
By this he wished to suggest that this type of commercial music was
‘pseudo-democratic’ ‘in the sense that it characterizes the consciousness
of the epoch; its attitude of immediacy, which can be defined in terms of
a rigid system of tricks, is deceptive when it comes down to class differ-
ences. As is the case in the current political sphere, so in the sphere of
ideology, reaction is the bedfellow of such a democracy.’^55
In his investigation of what constituted the deceptive nature of light
music, Adorno tried to expose its mechanisms. They amounted to a
skilful synthesis of salon music and march music: ‘the former represents
an individuality which in truth is none at all, but merely the socially
produced illusion of it; the latter is an equally fictive community which
is formed from nothing other than the alignment of atoms under the
force that is exerted upon them.’^56 The jazz fan represents a historically
specific social type. By consuming the music he enjoys, the individual
seems to gain the feeling of emotional mastery that is suggested to him
by the use of improvisation. But the ordered pattern of the music’s
structure as a whole enforces his subordination: ‘to obey the law and yet
be different. This type of behaviour is taken over, bound up with the
gradual abandonment of the traces of playful superiority and liberal
difference, by the “hot” subject.’^57 Towards the close of his discussion
Adorno proposed the daring idea that jazz has an affinity with fascism:
‘In Italy it is especially well liked, as is a commercialized version of
cubism. The ban against it in Germany has to do with the surface
tendency to reach back to pre-capitalist, feudal forms of immediacy and
to call these socialism. But, typically, this ban is a powerless one.’^58
In ‘Farewell to Jazz’, an essay that appeared in the Europäische
Revue in 1933, Adorno had stated that the Nazi decree banning jazz was
of no importance because jazz was anyway in decline. So how did he
explain the fact, three years later, that Goebbels and his comrades
were still agitating against a musical genre that was supposed to be
intrinsically close to the Nazi view of art? He attempted to show that
the Nazi belief that jazz was ‘decadent’ was racist in nature, that is to
say, that jazz was identified as the original black music. In his new essay
written in Oxford Adorno tried to prove that, with the growth in its
popularity, jazz had now ceased to be an authentic form of black musical
expression. This critique turned racist views of jazz on their head.^59
His assumption was that jazz had now joined the mainstream of dance
music and light music, and had accordingly been taken over and lost its