This ‘freezing’ of standards is socially enforced upon the agencies themselves. Popular music must simultaneously meet two demands. One is for stimuli that provoke the listener’s attention. The other is for the material to fall within the category of what the musically untrained listener would call ‘natural’ music: this is, the sum total of all the conventions and material formulas in music to which he is accustomed and which he regards as the inherent, simple language or music itself, no matter how late development might be which produced this natural language. This natural language for the American listener stems from his earliest musical experiences, the nursery rhymes, the hymns he sings in Sunday school, the little tunes he whistles on his way home from school. All these are vastly more important in the formation of musical language than his ability to distinguish the beginning of Brahm’s Third Symphony from that of his Second. Official musical culture is, to a large extent, a mere superstructure of this underlying musical language, namely the major and minor tonality and all the tonal relationships it implies. But these tonal relationships of the primitive musical language set barriers to whatever does not conform to them. Extravagances are tolerated only in so far as they can be recast into this so-called natural language.
In terms of consumer-demand, the standardization of popular music is only the expression of the dual desideratum imposed upon it by the musical frame of mind of the public - that it be ‘stimulatory’ by deviating in some way from the established ‘natural’, and that it maintain the supremacy of the natural against such deviations. The attitude of the audience toward the natural language is reinforced by standardized production, which institutionalizes desiderata which originally might have come from the public.
— Theodore Adorno. On Popular Music. 1941.
