Ted Gioia suggests we kill the four-chord song, Ted Gioia vs Adorno and Horkheimer on what the music industry has actually been for and does

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/lets-kill-the-four-chord-song

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How do you fix this?

 

The answer is obvious. The music business needs to return to its original mission of finding artists with inspiring talent and fresh perspectives. It has to abandon the stagnant world of conformity and predictable recipes. It must take some risks.

 

Maybe the best place to start would be ditching the four-chord song.

 

Nothing contributes more to the stagnation of current hit radio than the abandonment of song form, and its replacement with repeating four-chord vamps. This approach to composition imposes deadening constraints—making it almost impossible for songwriters to develop material, and provide the surprises and contrasts essential to their craft.

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Was the original mission of the music business really finding artists with inspiring talent and fresh perspectives?  Was it really trying to abandon a stagnant world of conformity and predictable recipes by taking some risks?  

Here was a riff on what the entertainment industries were up to from the 1940s.  Maybe you've heard this one before:

A constant sameness governs the relationship to the past as well. What is new about the phase of mass culture compared with the late liberal stage is the exclusion of the new. The machine rotates on the same spot. While determining consumption it excludes the untried as a risk. The movie-makers distrust any manuscript which is not reassuringly backed by a bestseller. Yet for this very reason there is never-ending talk of ideas, novelty, and surprise, of what is taken for granted but has never existed. Tempo and dynamics serve this trend. Nothing remains as of old; everything has to run incessantly, to keep moving. For only the universal triumph of the rhythm of mechanical production and reproduction promises that nothing changes, and nothing unsuitable will appear. Any additions to the well-proven culture inventory are too much of a speculation. The ossified forms – such as the sketch, short story, problem film, or hit song – are the standardised average of late liberal taste, dictated with threats from above. The people at the top in the culture agencies, who work in harmony as only one manager can with another, whether he comes from the rag trade or from college, have long since reorganised and rationalised the objective spirit. One might think that an omnipresent authority had sifted the material and drawn up an official catalogue of cultural commodities to provide a smooth supply of available mass-produced lines. The ideas are written in the cultural firmament where they had already been numbered by Plato – and were indeed numbers, incapable of increase and immutable.

If you didn't recognize the quote already I'm referring to that notorious chapter from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment.  Thirteen years before Ted Gioia was even born these two guys contended that the four-chord formula was the modus operandi of the music industry, which is to say that fine-tuning endless variations of a handful of formulas was the mission of the industry.  Adorno might say, were he alive today, that all the music industry will do to get rid of the four-chord song is to replace that formula with the two-chord shuttle or the monochord vamp.

This year I've given myself a little reading project wherein I try to do parallel reads of the touchstone of critical theory alongside Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society. I've been slogging through the chapter on "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" in the last few weeks and I can't shake the sense that their take on the culture industry is nothing short of a fully-formed demonology.  They impute a level of satanic control to the unseen forces of capital that would nestle comfortably like a cat liking his paws on a copy of Merrill Unger's Biblical Demonology.

The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry. The old experience of the movie-goer, who sees the world outside as an extension of the film he has just left (because the latter is intent upon reproducing the world of everyday perceptions), is now the producer’s guideline. The more intensely and flawlessly his techniques duplicate empirical objects, the easier it is today for the illusion to prevail that the outside world is the straightforward continuation of that presented on the screen. This purpose has been furthered by mechanical reproduction since the lightning takeover by the sound film.

Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound film, far surpassing the theatre of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise detail without losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces its victims to equate it directly with reality. The stunting of the mass-media consumer’s powers of imagination and spontaneity does not have to be traced back to any psychological mechanisms; he must ascribe the loss of those attributes to the objective nature of the products themselves, especially to the most characteristic of them, the sound film. They are so designed that quickness, powers of observation, and experience are undeniably needed to apprehend them at all; yet sustained thought is out of the question if the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts

Yeah, yeah, we get it.  We're all trapped in a Michael Bay film.

Ted Gioia looks back on the 1920s through the 1940s and, obviously, hears a different scene than the one Adorno and Horkheimer wrote about, hearing vitality and variety where A&H heard repressive sameness

Commercial music became increasingly sophisticated during the 1920s (as the leading songwriters assimilated jazz and blues), and record sales skyrocketed. The same thing happened during the course of the 1960s, when many new styles and sounds were embraced. There’s no reason why we can’t enjoy a renaissance of this same sort in our own time.

My hunch is that a breakout superstar with a genius-level talent for songwriting will force a change, and probably sooner than later. If I worked in the music business, my goal would be to discover that artist. Leading a revolution of this sort has to be a lot more fun—and profitable!—than just putting out more four-chord songs.

Gioia's riff seems predicated on a double bind.  He laments the lack of the new and the stultification within which people go back to listen to songs from the 1960s through the 1980s.  But if there was a breakout superstar genius-level talent for songwriting in the last seventy years I would think Stevie Wonder is a pretty good candidate.  The songs made by the breakout geniuses of the last fifty years are the deadly nostalgia he wants us to not keep going back to.  What's the alternative?  Four chord songs?  We can't help but be stuck between the horns of this dilemma, can we?  If Gioia has misconstrued something foundational about the music industry, though, then it may just be a mistake to imagine that the music business has a place for a breakout superstar with a genius-level talent for songwriting.  Whoever that person could even be, he/she/they would have to get into the industry to force a change.  If we go by Adorno and Horkheimer's taxonomy of the culture industry, its whole point is to preclude anyone who even "could" rock the boat from ever being on the proverbial water.

The doom and gloom of Adorno and Horkheimer was that the music industry had already calcified every rut for every kind of popular music by the 1940s.  Choking out anything truly innovative while literally selling the illusion of variety and spontaneity was the brand, the whole mission of the culture industry.  

I am pretty skeptical about Adorno and Horkheimer's assumption that in late capitalism everything is subsumed into cultural imprisonment.  Adorno couldn't even grant that any arts worth talking about existed in the Soviet Union but, oh, here and there we get nods to Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers.  Or Benny Goodman was an amazing clarinetist. Memorable for me, is reading a passage in which the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok told Adorno to his face that tonality wasn't a spent force.  What could Adorno say to that?  He reported the incident himself and said that Bartok was an amazing and uncompromising musician and so it's not like he, Adorno, could possibly have the same pianistic or composerly chops to tell Bartok he was wrong.  In Philosophy of New Music Adorno granted that Bartok and Janacek both wrote some really good music.

Oh, really?  So if tonality wasn't used up for a Hungarian just because Germans had used it up then why couldn't jazz musicians keep playing with extended but still tonal vocabularies?  The microtonalist composer Ben Johnston remarked half a century ago that it was interesting to notice that the crisis of tonality that hit European concert music only seemed to hit within a few years of the standardization of twelve tone equal temperament in the trans-Atlantic world.  Adorno took it for granted that the new tuning system was the norm.  Shoot down that surmise and the question of whether tonality was ever "used up" has been mooted.  But this post isn't supposed to be about the pernicious double binds in Adorno's thought about musical theory and practice.  Adorno is useful here as a reminder that there are people who thought the music industry was never about innovation before Ted Gioia's birth.

Or we could take the Frank Zappa approach and say that the music industry was only ever incidentally and accidentally innovative.  When the suits didn't know for sure what would sell and to whom they could sell it, they were willing to try out everything and give everybody something that might stick.  After a few generations of the music industry being the music industry, the suits began to settle into receiving and promoting the stuff they knew they could sell. 

It can seem as though Gioia misses the days when "everyone" talked about X, Y or Z.  It's as though he misses the monoculture of trans-Atlantic but largely North American popular music.  He's a jazz and blues historian so this is, at one level, very understandable.  But back in 1967 Leonard Meyer proposed what was (and this part is inexplicable to me) a controversial idea in Music, the Arts and Ideas--and I would be hard-pressed to equal Kyle Gann's synopsis of Meyer's proposal and the history of the reliability of Meyer's insight.

https://www.kylegann.com/LongyearLecture.html

At some point, everyone eventually looked back and realized that Leonard Meyer had been right. There was no dominant new style. The ways in which all these current styles relate has remained disconcertingly consistent. A "dynamic steady-state" is an accurate term for the way it feels. It had been a scary prospect, but actually we've learned to live with it, and found that it has advantages. By one account several years ago, there were 40,000 composers in the U.S., and the idea of 40,000 people all gravitating toward one dominant style is what would have been really scary. The variety of subcultures allows a lot more artists to get noticed, and gives young musicians a choice to find what style of music-making they feel most comfortable with.

Many of the crises Ted Gioia blogs about at his Substack vanish if we refuse to take pop music, regardless of style or genre, as the barometer of cultural health or stagnation as a stand-alone variable.  The way Leonard Meyer put it was to say that in a democracy it is not important that everyone likes the same thing but that everyone is free to enjoy the music they like.  Meyer committed to a pragmatic and proceduralist idea that if millions of people didn't swoon to Berg's Wozzeck that was just fine.  Berg's music was there for whoever actually wanted to hear it (I think the opera still holds up even if I have little use for the rest of Berg, to be honest).

And where is atonality here in 2026?  The Boulez and Stockhausen types who were touted as "the" future of serious music aren't even footnotes in Gioia's cultural commentaries about the state of popular music.  Maybe Boulez retains some traction because of his conducting of Stravinsky and Bartok but his own music?  There are better things to do with your life than listen to it.  I think I can put up with Billy Joel songs at their worst (since I can't not hear him on mainstream radio) than pretend that the compositions of Pierre Boulez are worth taking seriously. 

That technocratic managerialism emerged on both sides of the Iron Curtain before, during and after the Cold War is a pretty unlimited topic.  I think it's possible to try to take seriously that Adorno and Horkheimer were trying to understand what they saw as the repressive and oppressive nature of mass culture in their day but it's frankly a bit difficult to see what they brought to the table that Dwight Macdonald and others didn't formulate more succinctly.  The snobbery and elitism still sticks.  Ellul's The Technological Society seems a more measure take on the problems of Technique as a power unto itself, but Ellul was that Christian anarchist who would say powers and principalities were things Christians ought to actually talk about.  It can seem as if critical theory wants to reinvent the concept of powers and principalities and to retain the kernel of apocalyptic critique of empire but to only have those concepts mediated through (if understood at all) through the prism of Marxist jargon.

And at the end of his life Adorno was sticking to that script. Revitalization of music was not as high a priority as the apocalypse of the culture industry.  So we can even have books about Adorno and his reception history that can comb through his ideas for revelations about how we can live now that functionally place him in the realm of apocalyptic literature.  I'm not ripping on Rachel R Rosner's book, by the way, I think it's a worthwhile project to ask why Adorno so frequently resorted to overtly theological language to make his points. Not all books attempting to situate Adorno within the context of theological ideas are actually worth reading, some of them are worthless tripe that misread and misrepresent his utterly damning appraisal of John Cage. Those can be posts, I hope, for some other time.  

Ted Gioia wants music revitalized.  He's made that point time and again.  I have begun to suspect in the last fifteen years that he wants some kind of mainstream revitalized.  I have contended off and on at my blog across twenty years that if we want to get ourselves free of the ruts of genres A, B or C or styles X, Y and Z then we need to allow for synergistic exchange and possibilities for convergence of precisely the sort that the music industry and its participants (critics and genre historians) don't want to have happen.  I've said this about Ted Gioia at some point in the past but you can't quite be a champion of the new if your vocation as a critic is functionally a gatekeeping role.  

I have written in the past about how Gioia has proposed that music can provide a path out of what he calls binary impasse, and yet Gioia's own approach to music history traffics in binary impasse.  I can appreciate his plea that art should be for the sake of people and not art for the sake of art.  There's a humanitarian and humanistic streak in Gioia's work I can still appreciate even when I regard many of his ideas as patently stupid.  I have read his work off and on across ten, maybe fifteen years, and I would say he is emblematic and symptomatic of a kind of writer within and about the liberal arts who can diagnose but has shown no capacity to move outside the conceptual ruts of the conventional wisdoms his work ultimately reflects. 

If we need a new Romantic era I might agree with some very big caveats and qualifications.  During the 19th century there were composers who were also critics.  Many composers don't write criticism and many critics can't compose.  The combination of an ability to compose music and write criticism doesn't seem like it should be all that rare in the 21st century but it's hard to think of people who combine an awareness of compositional processes and musical vocabularies with the ability to frame music in historical and cultural settings.  Kyle Gann proposed that this was Richard Taruskin's gift to writing about music, that he could situate Stravinsky's tools and creations within his time and place to show that early Stravinsky was fairly tame.   Over the course of my life I have begun to suspect we don't need more revolutions that sweep away this or that status quo.  We don't need a new dominant style. We don't need a new era of "the" anything, whether it's an era of the Impressionists or of the Swing era or whatever the shorthand may be.  

We seem to have lived in a period in which, as L Poundie Burstein put it in Journeys Through Galant Expositions, theorists are eager to pit their theories against each other.  Since I'm kind of slogging through some Michael Spitzer books lately I have mixed feelings and thoughts about his veneration of Beethoven and his speculations on metaphor and music, but what I do like is his idea that we don't have to pit metaphors against each other.  We should allow metaphors to mutually inform each other.  My pet project of transposing the Trinitarian writings of Aquinas and John of Damascus to reconceptualizing musical space is an attempt to recalibrate and recontextualize existing patterns of metaphorical thought; the history of Aquinas on the distinctions between procession, filiation and spiration and John of Damascus' discussion of perichoresis as applicable to Trinitarian ontology and the hypostatic union of Jesus' divine and human nature can be explored as human adventures in spatial reasoning and a capacity for intraspatial distinctions.  Thus "Perichoresis in Musical Time and Space" from elsewhere in this blog, and four scripts for writing sonata expositions on 12-bar blues.

Gioia's ideas about anthropology and the power of music seem predicated on concepts of the anthropology of religion that may have been comprehensively debunked.  I have been reading Adam Gussow books this year and some Richard Horsley and it could be fun to do a comparative study of Gussow on blues as literature and Horsley's ideas about apocalyptic as anti-imperial dissident literature within nascent Judaism in response to the brutality of Seleucid rule.  But that, too, is maybe a post for another time.  There's been some fascinating and, I suppose, controversial revisionist scholarship within blues scholarship and apocalypticism in the last forty years that, and I'm going out on a limb here, Ted Gioia has no real familiarity with.  

I have been thinking about a distinction that seems foundational to the difference between talking about the arts and activity within the arts, particularly writing as a Christian who has read other Christians talking about the liberal arts.  There were exchanges between Brad East and Alan Jacobs that, though I am sure they have no awareness of my having read either of them, helped me formulate a thought, metacultural speculation is not cultural production. Let me go back to one of Gioia's paragraphs:

My hunch is that a breakout superstar with a genius-level talent for songwriting will force a change, and probably sooner than later. If I worked in the music business, my goal would be to discover that artist. Leading a revolution of this sort has to be a lot more fun—and profitable!—than just putting out more four-chord songs.

It's shooting fish in a barrel to ask what kind of revolution Ted Gioia wants.  He has said we need a new Romanticism and we're going to get it but what did Romanticism entail?  What is it about Romanticism 1.0 that we need a 2.0?  Why would Gioia think that a genius-level talent would be able to get into the music industry as it now is, let alone be a breakout superstar?  To put this in terms provided by Adorno and Horkheimer, why would Gioia expect the culture industry to catalyze the thing which it has arguably never set out to do?  But even if we reject Adorno and Horkheimer's dour take on the culture industry, Gioia has not been clear about what he is hoping will happen.  

Maybe he's just waiting for a miracle?

Whoever leads whatever the revolution is, it is clear that Ted Gioia doesn't think he'll be leading it.