Obviously, I'm not going to go full Adorno here and say we should all be listening to 12 tone serialism and become devotees of Schoenberg. But why is that approach seen as old, white and conservative whereas the popular culture approach is seen as cosmopolitan, open, meaningful, and multicultural?
Or put my question another way. Suppose Adorno grew up black, and he saw Coltrane and Anthony Braxton as the pinnacle of our zeitgeist and could only appreciate pop music on a strictly compositional level.
Then we would have a case of snobbery, fine. But pop must possess, in its constitution which hints at something beyond, something transcending the inverted snob. Because for the likes of say, Cardew, it was a disavowal of their prior avant-garde commitments rather than a true embrace of popular music.
So this is what I want to get at. If the future as such is omnipresent, if the avant-garde itself has become basically completely and utterly spent (which would of course be bartintosh's contension) then pop music has realised its promise of once mythical unattainability. Where to go from here, not in terms of predicting the future, which would not be fruitful anyway, but in reorienting ones framework towards listening?