Theodor Adorno was no fan of pop culture.  He thought it was a guilty pleasure.

Hardly.  Pleasure contaminated by guilt, a cold glass of milk on a hot summer day, with a gnat floating on the surface….  That’s the picture I get.

Regret, a price is to be paid as life unfolds.  Guilt is the gift that keeps on giving and giving; that dark inner troll-like voice that whispers ‘what’s wrong with you?’  I am reminded that Nietzsche said that the objective of his philosophy was to excise guilt, remorse, the prick of conscience, from the outlook of his contemporaries.  No small feat in the Victorian ethos of his day.  Better, a robust, untroubled focus on the task at hand, a life lived free, in the flow of time.  I am with Nietzsche.

Think about Theodor Adorno’s criticism of pop culture, rock n roll in particular, — that such music is a shoddy, manipulative “industrial” product, degrading the listeners freedom,  created for nothing other than to pile up profit.  A superlative refutation of this thesis is to present an example of the obverse of Adorno’s contention.

I offer for your consideration Make Me Lose Control by Eric Carmen. Granted, Eric Carmen, the composer cannot be compared with Mozart.  And I do not think that we live in the time of Mozart when the patronage of wealth was crucial to achieve the training and the time requisite for a musical composition of substance.

This tune written by singer-songwriter Eric Carmen reaching #3 hit single on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1988, knocks me out.  Carmen is a song writer of no small talent,  having written Almost Paradise, and Hungry Eyes featured in the film Dirty Dancing.  And he has written more.

This song came up on the radio, while I was driving.  Is that not that native venue for listening to pop music, rock n roll? The open road, car culture, and the music of youth-rebellion against the status quo, all go together.  Think of James Dean, Rebel Without A Cause.  The tune rises up from the wide open spaces, from the asphalt of Route 66 of the American experience.

The single point of the song is simple, tactile, as immediate as the touch of human to human, male to female, which is then extended, — to embrace all of life.  Life is unspeakably, ineffably good, bursting the bounds of any description that we might give.  Only the music, “Stand by Me” (Ben E. King), “Be My Baby” (The Ronetts) does justice to the sweetness of life experienced in the automobile with Jennifer at the story tellers side.

Why go on and on about the matter….  Listen for yourself.  And does not the tune just sweep you away into the songwriters point of view?

Baby, baby
Turn the radio up for that sweet sound
Hold me close, never let me go
Keep this feelin’ alive, make me lose control