The Mysterious German Professor

Theodor Adorno, 1903 - 1969

From The Occidental Observer, September 3, 2009

The Atlantic Recording Company’s history strangely parallels the Jewish-American elite’s cultural revolution after World War II. This elite promoted Frankfurt School teaching in a effort to weaken the middle classes — their political nemesis. Atlantic Records prides itself on plugging the same socially destructive behavior.

This article explores a possible connection between Theodor Adorno and Atlantic Records. The connection: An unnamed German professor helped Atlantic Records devise its signature sound in 1947. When this professor could no longer work with Atlantic, he was replaced by a research assistant from the Manhattan Project. I argue that this professor was Theodor Adorno.

The significance of this connection is that Atlantic Records was one of the most influential recording companies during the sexual revolution, the Civil Rights movement, and era of immigration reform. A connection with Adorno would suggest that the company at its origins was intent on tapping the expertise of one of the greatest propagandists of the 20th century.

The Frankfurt School

Adorno was the Frankfurt School’s music critic. His forte was analyzing the psychological and political impact of music on listeners. He was also interested in how new recording technology changed the listening experience. Of course the point of all this interest in the technical side of music was Adorno’s passion for finding out how to use music to achieve the Frankfurt School’s leftist political aims.

Adorno knew what made music intellectually challenging, as well as what made it appeal to the masses. Very broadly, popular music appeals to our expectations about what sounds should follow one another; intellectual music challenges those expectations.

In general leftist intellectuals during the 1930s and 1940s were hostile to mass produced culture, including all forms of popular music. Both the New York Intellectuals and the Frankfurt School saw mass culture as the result of manipulation by elites, whether it was in the Soviet Union, National Socialist Germany, or capitalist, bourgeois United States. According to Adorno, mass culture appealed to base pleasures, propped up the status quo, and led to a pervasive conformity which denied the individuality and subjective experience of the masses.

Adorno considered Jazz to be one of the worst forms of popular music. He though Jazz reconciled erotic urges with traditional Western Culture: that it transformed people into insects.

He was both right and wrong. . . . Read the rest of the article.