Posts Tagged Mass culture
January 17, 2003 at 4:52 pm · Filed under Mass culture ·Tagged Mass culture
“In general they are intoxicated by the fame of mass culture, a fame which the latter knows how to manipulate; they could just as well get together in clubs for worshipping film stars or for collecting autographs. What is important to them is the sense of belonging as such, identification, without paying particular attention to its content. As girls, they have trained themselves to faint upon hearing the voice of a ‘crooner’. Their applause, cued in by a light-signal, is transmitted directly on the popular radio programmes they are permitted to attend. They call themselves ‘jitter-bugs’, bugs which carry out reflex movements, performers of their own ecstasy. Merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impoverished and barren existance. The gesture of adolescence, which raves for this or that on one day with the ever-present possibility of damning it as idiocy on the next, is now socialized.”
o Theodor Adorno, quoted in The Sociology of Rock by Simon Frith, 1978, ISBN 0094602204
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