'We could also say: Convention as a whole is now looked upon not as a firm inheritance from the past, but as a continuing improvisation in the face of problems we no longer understand. Nothing we now have to say, no personal utterance, has its meaning conveyed in the conventions and formulas we now share. In a time of slogans, sponsored messages, ideologies, psychological warfare, mass projects, where words have lost touch with their sources or objects, and in a phonographic culture where music is for dreaming, or for kissing, or for taking a shower, or for having your teeth drilled, our choices seem to be those of silence, or nihilism (the denial of the value of shared meaning altogether), or statements so personal as to form the possibility of communication without the support of convention—perhaps to become the source of new convention. And then, of course, they are most likely to fail even to seem to communicate.'

'So far, we have discussed the destruction of the older character of uniqueness of the work of art by mechanical reproduction in terms of space alone. We must add, however, that in a more indirect sense this destructive tendency holds good beyond the concept of space. Here is an example which, although it does not belong to physiognomics, certainly influences radio’s physiognomic expression. It is the repetition of standard works. By being repeated again and again some of them, for instance the Beethoven symphonies which we mentioned in Part I, not only lose their »here« but also their »now«. Even if they used to be repeated at certain specific intervals, the quasi-ritual dignity attributed to them as long as they appeared at one particular hour vanishes. Now, when they are played again and again, they can no longer uphold the dignity of the occasion. They are losing their aura because they no longer keep their distance from the listeners. They show, instead, a tendency to mingle in his every day life because they can appear at practically every moment, and because he can accompany brushing his teeth with the Allegretto of the Seventh.'

'In addition, it might seem that song and dance have always been part of everyday life, and that everyday life is itself a transhistorical phenomenon. However, if everyday life is, as social theorists from Henri Lefebvre on have argued, a modern invention, the consequence of the capitalist division of workplace and household, of “making a living” and “living,” then the songs and dances of vernacular phonograph music—forms radically distinct from earlier art songs and work songs, court dances or folk dances—were, I would suggest, the first great medium that articulated and constituted the “everyday.” The songs and dances on the “record” evaded the terms of musicology’s classic dichotomy of functional and absolute music. They were neither functional, deeply embedded in social activities at specific times and places, the way work songs, sacred songs, or wedding dances were, nor were absolute, the object of an autonomous aesthetic contemplation, disconnected from the world of utility, like the modern art musics. Records simply inhabited modern daily life, an omnipresent soundtrack to household and neighborhood. They were, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s way of understanding the arts of daily life (his examples were architecture and film), musics for distraction rather than contemplation, musics that one lived with rather than musics that separated themselves from daily life.'

'This image of early radio devoted in significant proportion to European art music might prompt an enduringly fixed and real resentment in contemporary American readers, as if that was a moment when high still thought it could lord it over low. But in the early and genuinely class-conscious decades of American radio, when questions of the equitable redistribution of wealth and privilege were actually discussed – as they now are not – and an end was sought to much openly acknowledged resentment, the broadcast of European art music was a model of possible democratization. Contrary to what might be guessed at today, the distinction between popular and classical was loosely synonymous with what in those decades was discerned as the distinction between light – or light popular – and serious music. In the manuscripts of Current of Music Adorno himself regularly deals with these two sets of categories as being easily interchangeable in the assumptions of the age. The significance of this is in what the now mostly forgotten pair light and serious music contributed to the synonymity. The distinction it drew indicates that the idea of amusement had not yet subordinated music entirely. Although the exclusivity of music as amusement was ascendant, a contrary seriousness of listening was commonly acknowledged as legitimate and valued. When high and low were invoked, the thinking involved was complex in a way that is now unfamiliar, since in the minds of many what was high was often valued as what ought to become the possession of all.'

'What's the difference? It's that what we'll call conditions of possibility are rules of usage. Rules for the use of what? Not geometry. Rules for the use of some of our faculties which, under these rules, make geometry possible.'

'… a haha, a hoho.'

'This vehement directness, or verba ardens, is a way of appearing to override or supplant print by suffusing it with the energetic directness of speech.'

When I get up enough on a language I switch devices like my old iPod to run in it, so that I'm forced to deal with it in a familiar setting. That's how I learned the Spanish verb borrar, for erasing playlists.

In one of the corridos and canciones about our martyred folk heroes that have sprung up this month, I catch the line: tu nombre que no lo van a borrar.

'El rap es la vida y es tan grande que es difícil de encasillar. Es crónica pero también es otra cosa.'