The concepts of negativity and critique are central in Adorno's work, where they refer to that which transcends factual reality by preserving the possibility of a different society. Adorno's aesthetics conveys an idea of art as an overflowing of 'what is'?, including of art itself. Art is simultaneously also a social fact with a historical dimension. It is by refusing the constraint of the empirical - and not by submitting to it - that the empirical is present in a subliminal form in creative works. For Adorno, the only music capable of embodying this negativity was the music spawned by avant-garde experiments, on the fringes of the totalizing system of the culture industry that spoils all negativity. This fixation on this type of music, seen as the only guarantee of negativity, locked Adorno in a certain musical tradition by making him insensitive to subversive innovations and experiences in the world of pop music.