Object – Popular music. • I shall study Schopenhauer in order to establish how ideas concerning music have changed over time. • For Schopenhauer music is a good, an end in itself. • Music is set aside from all the other art forms, it does not simply manifest the ideas of the will but is a direct expression of the will. • Music is the key to suspending will for a moment through an aesthetic break from everyday pain. Adorno. • Popular music is an instrument for another good instead of an end in itself. • The function of the culture industry is ultimately to organise leisure time in the same way as industrialisation has organised work time. • Customers of musical entertainment are themselves objects of the same mechanisms which determine the production of popular music. Their spare time serves only to reproduce their working capacity. • Work leads to mass culture and mass culture leads back to work. Popular music is standardized, and in order to conceal this standardization, the music industry engages in pseudo individualisation. Thus listeners are kept inline by making them forget that what they listen to is already pre digested. Problems with Adorno. Popular music has changed a lot since Adorno who was writing in 1941. Is it still as monolithic as he would have us believe? Does pseudo individualisation really explain things like the advent of rock and roll in 1956, the emergence of The Beatles in 1962 or punk rock in 1976? Popular music from Adorno onwards. Rock and roll as religion – a good in itself. Robert Pielke suggests that rock and roll is most properly understood as a religion that has created a transformation in culture. He compares the 6 characteristics of a religious experience presented by Rudolf Otto with feelings generated from listening to rock and roll or attending a concert. Charles Pressler and Derrida’s outline of ‘The Colossal’ The awe-inspiring concept that rock and roll presents is ‘the colossal’. The presentation of ‘the colossal’ is like an enabling energy that allows a new set of values to be taken onboard by the rock and roll audience.