With the exception of the bridge 2:40 into the song, Keys plays the same piano riff for the entirety of the song, including both verses and all three choruses. “No One” heavily features the I-V-vi-IV chord progression in the key of E Major. A good place to start our analysis is in the central musical component of the song, the chord progression. The point is that “No One,” a major hit and product of the culture industry, shares many of the same qualities as most other pop songs. But whether or not Alicia Keys produces true art is beside the point. For true art (in Adorno’s sense of the word) to exist, artists cannot be indebted to appealing to the masses in order to make a profit. Artists must play along with the system, or risk becoming isolated and obsolete. Since the culture industry centers on producing art with a widespread appeal, record labels and songwriters will reuse successful formulas. It’s simple, the higher the appeal and marketability of a song, the greater the profits for the record label. These companies, which control a significant majority of the industry, seek to put out products that have a widespread appeal. Adorno argues that the major entertainment companies control and manipulate the consumers. We as consumers should learn and realize that even what we consider the “best” art probably comes off a metaphorical assembly line.Įver since the industrial revolution, culture has become an industry in the United States. This leads to the insight that much of the modern music industry is a product of formulas and machines. If we dig deeper into the song-the music, lyrics, and structure-we will find that “No One” follows the same simple “winning” formula as thousands of other pop songs. She won two Grammy Awards for the song, which has consistently been ranked as one of the greatest R&B songs of all time.
Alicia Keys’ “No One” topped the Billboard Hot 100 for five consecutive weeks after it was released in the fall of 2007. Surely, if we examine the best art produced by our culture, we will find distinctive features and elements that explain its success.
This is a scary claim, especially in a country like the United States, which is notorious for its fear and criticism of communism and socialism. In his essay “The Culture Industry,” German philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno makes the claim that when culture is mass-produced, all art is in danger of becoming the same.
0 kommentar(er)
