![]() The thicker and more irresistible this delicious sonic layer, the more distractions it offers, the stronger one’s appetites, and the more culinary enjoyment threatens to derail the unfolding of the work as a whole.įOR ADORNO, POP PROLIFERATES because it offers moments of reprieve and distraction from the capitalist drudgery that both requires and produces it. ![]() The X-ray photograph is actually Adorno’s preferred shorthand for how performance can reveal the interior bones of a work, all that he calls “subcutaneous” within it, which “otherwise lie concealed … under the … the sound’s sensory surface.” The sound of a performance enfleshes the work but also, in this very particular way of thinking about flesh, obstructs and covers its form. ‘If I love a woman,’” she says, “‘I want her body, not her x-ray image.’” Adorno, predictably, calls this “pure sophistry, apologia for the … culinary element.” Without “the hidden structural element” of a work, “the overall sound, as polished as it might be, becomes gibberish.” In Adorno’s notes from August 1966, he recounted an argument with his friend, harpsichordist Edith Picht-Axenfeld, who parried that music’s “sensual appearance” is enough, “as the structure communicates itself. It’s as though, for Adorno, if the beauty is too loud, you can’t hear the structure of the work underneath. Whoever simply surrenders themselves falls short of whatever they are surrendering to. At the same time … -leaving aside the critique of mass culture-this is the argument against culinary listening and playing, ‘easy listening’, and against any passive attitude. Only one who does not simply feel music, but also thinks it, can feel it properly. Listeners are equally susceptible-have you too lost your mind during the best part of a song? In one passage from 1959, Adorno describes culinary enjoyment as an untimely “surrender” to feeling: Performers are often guilty of these “regressive” moments of culinary pleasure, particularly, according to Adorno, “virtuosos” who feel themselves too much, “when the means”-the expressiveness or beauty of their playing-“becomes the end,” rather than subordinating itself to the realization of the work as a whole. Pop’s rigidly predictable formulas, he argues, create a kind of soothing background against which a particularly juicy musical element-a detail, an improvisation, a player’s style-becomes even more delicious, a sharper distraction amid the general blur of zoning out that contains it. Known for his blanket dismissal of pop and jazz, Adorno critiques exactly this kind of narcotic contentment and precipitous surrender to desire. “Honey” is, in short, very smooth, as Mase observes in his backup vocals partway through. ![]() Honey, after all, can double as an address of banal affection as well as (in this case, at least) a fatal sexual intoxicant: “Honey, I can’t describe / how good it feels inside.” Even the horny keening that eventually swallows up the track is cushioned by this blissful narcotic contentment. “It’s like honey when it washes over me …” Unlike other hits where Carey’s voice moves like a rollercoaster car through a sturdy pop scaffolding, “Honey”-recently remixed for the 25th anniversary edition of the album Butterfly-lets the figure melt into the ground, until overlapping liquid climaxes dissolve into a general lullaby of viscosity. How unwholesome, in this framework, is work comprised entirely of such pleasures! With its gossamer vocals and extra choruses arriving like waves on a beach, “Honey” somehow transforms Carey’s powerful vocal runs into silken, filmy layers of atmosphere wafting across the squelchy ’80s, computer-sampled bass line and tinkly melodic piano. Adorno used the word “culinary” disparagingly, warning against the impulse to succumb to the purely sensory pleasures of a passage or tone at the risk of losing grasp of the work as a whole. With its intoxicatingly dreamy melody,“Honey” presents a febrile case of what notoriously grouchy critical theorist Theodor Adorno labeled “culinary sound,” a special insult he directed not at pop lyrics about food but rather at the way musical sound itself can be mouthwatering.
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