Adorno's Fetish Character from Culture Industry: Metallica & San Francisco Orchestra

“The illusion of a social preference for light music as against serious is based on that passivity of the masses which makes the consumption of light music contradict the objective interest of those who consume it. It is claimed that they actually like light music and listen to the higher type only for reasons of social prestige, when acquaintance with the text of a single hit song suffices to reveal the sole function this object of honest approbation can perform. The unity of the two spheres of music is thus that of an unresolved contradiction. They do not hang together in such a way that the lower could serve as a sort of popular introduction to the higher, or that higher could renew its lost collective strength by borrowing from the lower. The whole cannot be put together by adding the separated halves, but in both there appear, however distantly, the changes of the whole, which only moves in contradiction. If the flight from the banal becomes definitive, if the marketability of the serious product shrinks to nothing, in consequence of its objective demands, then on the lower level the effect of the standardization of successes means it is no longer possible to succeed in an old style, but only in imitation as such. Between incomprehensibility and inescapability, there is no third way; the situation has polarized itself into extremes which actually meet. There is no room between them for the ‘individual’. The latter’s claims, wherever they still occur, are illusory, being copied from the standards. The liquidation of the individual is the real signature of the new musical situation” (Adorno’s Fetish pp. 34-35)

In 1999, Metallica released its S&M album in which they recorded their songs with additional symphonic accompaniment. The idea was to combine heavy metal with an epic classical approach—mixing the low-brow with the high-brow. In Master of Puppets, there are moments where there is absolute brilliance between the band and the orchestra such as during Kirk Hammett’s solo; however, there are other moments where the orchestra isn't all that effective and the end product sounds cacophonous. The symphony really rocks when Metallica and the orchestra are blended at a good volume, so that the orchestra does not overshadow the band. Here, Adorno would see the symphony as merely imitating Metallica’s style rather than accompanying it with its own unique style. Master of Puppets is a clear representation of Adorno’s problem with mainstream music colliding with the serious, intellectual classical music: it creates yet another mainstream song without regard to the symphony’s potential to create their own masterpiece.