What does it mean to lack aesthetic freedom? For Adorno, this is about freedom in experiencing, interpreting and understanding artworks. This freedom requires an artwork to give us space and time to inhabit it, and to experience it as a unified whole. However, popular culture has lost its ability, Adorno claims, to create these integrated, unified wholes. Instead, works are now being produced that are a loose collection of moments experienced in a rapid and disconnected series.
In my own struggles with motivation, I've noticed that my consciousness is like a vehicle transmission, where it takes a lot of mental energy to shift between "gears" -- which might represent different kinds of activities, or different speeds. Some people keep super-busy, even by taking on unnecessary tasks, just because they don't know how to function in slow mode -- if they slow down, they stall. So it makes sense that we've evolved popular entertainment that moves fast and can be enjoyed in disconnected bits.
The article also mentions predictability:
When the opening scene of a film shows someone waking up in a messy bedroom, we are reasonably sure that this is our main character, and that when the alarm rings that character will wake up worried about being late for something... We are put to work in organising, checking and filing the moments of the film as it passes by... engaged in the very sort of classification and sorting that characterises the world of work we thought we were escaping from.
For the opposite of this, I recommend Terry Gilliam's Tideland. And I'm also thinking about my own recent fiction, and why people find it so hard to read despite having popular tropes and perfectly normal patterns of grammar and plot. It's partly because I try to keep it surprising, but mostly it's because my style is extremely low-gear. My goal is to have every word do something important, but that means you have to read it word by word to get it.
Music is different from fiction, because we can read at any speed, while our listening speed is fixed. My fiction style is about narrowing of focus, but Adorno likes music that demands widening of focus to hold the whole thing at once, and only then does it make sense. Here's a challenging example -- even after I was obsessed with this band, it took me a long time to understand this song, the Stairway to Heaven of psychedelic folk: Big Blood - Secret Garden.