The song remains the same? On Social and Personalized Biographies of Songs

Abstract

Through a critical discussion of Adorno’s theory of musical fetishism, this paper, in accordance with the proposal of Arjun Appadurai for the study of objects, explores the possibility of developing methods for the analysis of meaning production through the consumption of music. To that end, the author proposes the concepts of “social biography” and “personalized biography” of songs as constructed entities resulting from the relationship between those entities and the social subjects who consume them.