Theodor W. Adorno Defender of Pop Music, malgré lui

In this essay, I will try to retrace Adornian thought in relation to popular music, to try to demonstrate how, malgré lui, the philosopher from Frankfurt, criticizing this sector of music production, anticipated forms of popular music with a connotation that he himself would have considered positive, in terms of the treatment of musical material and the relationship with the historical-social moment. To do this, however, it is necessary to proceed step by step, starting from the relationship between music and mass society and the concept of “musical material”, and then move on to the criticism of pop music and its unexpected redress