On Gondrongers Band

M. Q. Aynan

      The Gondrongers group won sing a song contest on English Olympiad 2017 few weeks ago. There were some different views on that contest. Viewers looked more intrested at sing a song contest than other contest such as speech contest. It show that music has language which is able to be accepted by everyone.

      In the first section of his essay, Theodor Adorno addresses the difference between “popular” and “serious” music. For Adorno, the hallmark of popular music is “standardization.” It is the fact that across vastly different genres, you find the “verse-chorus-verse-chorus” pattern, and many other patterns in which “nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced.” These songs are recognizable for details like the entrance into the chorus (we call it “the hook”), rather than for the abstract whole of the song — because all of these songs are identical in abstract.

      Adorno then asks the question of “who sets the standards?” It is the “cartelized agencies” of the media. One of famous magazine is Billboard. Standardization creates the illusion of free choice in the market which lets a listener pick which of the pre-digested music they “prefer”. When it failed, people wouldn’t be listener. Adorno wrote, “Standardization, moreover, means the strengthening of the lasting domination of the listening public and of their conditioned reflexes. They are expected to want that to which they have become accustomed and to become enraged whenever their expectations are disappointed and fulfillment, which they regard as the customer’s inalienable right, is denied, and even if there were attempts to introduce anything really different into light music, they would be deceived from the start by virtue of economic concentration.”

      Furthermore, the judgement of sing a song contest cannot be objective, it is intersubjective. It is group of some opinion. It is usually used in contrast to solipsistic individual experience, emphasizing our inherently social being. Each judge shares the experiences, creating belief among them. These experiences transcend the subjectivity. Finally, intersubjective judgement will create true decission.

      In conclusion, market wants to make listeners disappear in glamourness in order that we as prisoners of simulated taste. It includes in modernity has been succesful to create new version of myth. One of myth is that good singer is short haired singer. Then, The Gondrongers comes to deconstruct it by letting hair to be long. It show that members The Gondrongers have updated knowledge. They are aware that they are no longer modern university student anymore, but postmodern university student. I call The Gondrongers “Postmodern University Student Group Band”.