Analyzing The Rock Band Foo Fighters'single Song 'Run'

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Recommended: Adorno criticism of popular music

Popular Music’s Standardized Success + Singer’s Personal Ideology = Broader Social Impacts —— Analyzing the Rock Band Foo Fighters’ single song “Run” “Run,” released on June 1st, 2017, is a single song expected to be off of the upcoming ninth album produced by American rock band Foo Fighters under the record label RCA. Representing the band’s typical high-energy rock style, this song became popular almost immediately after its release. Specifically, Run achieved the first-day sales higher than any previous songs of Foo Fighters, topped the US Billboard Mainstream Rock Songs list in July 2017, and won its place in over 20 pop music “Top 100” charts worldwide. In the perspectives of Adorno T.W. and the Frankfurt School, this single vividly demonstrates …show more content…

However, Run also points out the significance of personal ideologies such as the political stands of singers, which are ignored and even partially denied in Adorno’s analysis. According to Adorno’s theory, the essential purpose of popular songs is “to be popular,” but what’s next step? Other than, undoubtedly, financial success, I will argue in this paper that the popularity of the contemporary pop music such as Foo Fighters’ “Run” eventually serves the ultimate goal of creating social effects in a broader sense through the reflection of singer’s ideology. Yan 1 While digging into the reasons behind Run’s popularity, we need first to analyze this single through Adorno’s eyes as well as defining his key terms of structural standardization and recognition. Standardization, as indicated by Adorno while discussing the features of popular music as “text,” is “the fundamental …show more content…

On one hand, Adorno’s theory of popular music failed to explain many phenomena including the appearances of new musical forms that will be eliminated if all popular music only follow the earlier standardized pattern. For instance, Rock music as a popular music form kept developing and renewing since it firstly appeared in the history — Hard rock, a music style in which Run belongs to, appeared in the mid-1960s two decades after Adorno’s article. Additionally, his analysis of popular music cannot explain the later social movements in which different popular music forms actively engaged, such as the American Punk Rock that contributed significantly to the Punk culture in the 1970s. These social effects vary considerably from short-term to long-term, local to international, economic to social, and are relatively hard to predict and manipulate than the limited model provided by Adorno and the Frankfurt School. On the other hand, personal ideologies illustrated in the popular music as a unique contemporary art form cannot achieve broad influences without the necessary commercial and industrial success enabled by elements

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