“In fact, unbearable”: Theodor Adorno on the philosophy of Joan Baez’s protest music
When Joan Baez was in Hanoi experiencing first-hand the traumatic unfolding of America’s bombing raids, the idea that her art was nothing more than a consumerist pretension was likely the furthest thing from her mind. As she sang the Lord’s Prayer, hoping the emotion in her delivery far surpassed the heartbreak of those who grieved lost ones, the fallacy of mass culture seemed nowhere in sight.
Baez’s firsthand experience, empathetic makeup, and desire to improve her surroundings have made her a monumental qualifier not just for the counterculture movement but for protest music in a broader sense. It also helps that Baez’s voice is both reflective and haunting, granting her the ability to carry the suffering of others and the promise of a better tomorrow in a single note.
Along with her intrinsic understanding of the world and the feelings of those around her, Baez literally lived war-torn pain first-hand. Her integrity and demand for greater justice made her one of the most impassioned campaigners of all time. After the war, she also fought against human rights abuses by the Communist government, her willingness to exist alongside those hurt and scorned becoming a beacon of resilience and hope for the oppressed, even as she faced relentless persecution herself.
Years after her visit to Hanoi, she visited the same hotel she stayed in back then and allowed her hand to touch the cold brick of an old bunker that she used to cower beneath. “That was my first experience in dealing with my own mortality, which I thought was a terrible cosmic arrangement,” she later reflected, sitting in the hotel, feeling the same calibre of despair as she did then.
The idea of protest music has been long celebrated, mainly because it takes something inherently profitable—the entertainment business—and repackages it in a socially conscious light. Most of the time, this is executed for the sole purpose of raising awareness and helping those left to fend for themselves after the perils of war and injustice. Most of the time, musicians are aware of the potentially paradoxical nature of what they intend to deliver, but most of the time, the need to effectively “do something” overrides the devastation of contributing to the cyclical money machine.
Of course, this raises question marks around the debate about consumer behaviour. Whether activism and philanthropy can ever be separated from the transactional nature of art, but in Baez’s case, it seems much more complicated and nuanced than simply rendering her another facet of the capitalist regime. Unfortunately, Theodor Adorno couldn’t disagree more.
Aside from terming the entire network a mere “Culture Industry”—that is, the entertainment industry’s indoctrination of the masses to push them into passivity to benefit the elite—Adorno also believed that this could be challenged and inverted by avant-garde art that challenged and enlightened. Most of us are probably aware of the general line of Marxist thinking where capitalism reigns supreme so long as the proletariat is kept in line, but Adorno’s work delved deeper into the nuances of how culture and art can both perpetuate and challenge societal norms.
In simpler terms, this means that someone like Baez was a walking oxymoron to Adorno, and not just because she fed into consumer culture. In fact, Baez, to Adorno, was the epitome of capitalist exploitation because her avant-garde protest music was thinly veiled in self-awareness and resistance, ultimately serving as a form of faux intellectual and emotional rebellion against the commodification of culture.
“I believe, in fact, that attempts to bring political protest together with ‘popular music’—that is, with entertainment music—are for the following reason doomed from the start,” Adorno rather bleakly commented. He continued: “The entire sphere of popular music, even there where it dresses itself up in modernist guise, is to such a degree inseparable from past temperament, from consumption, from the cross-eyed transfixion with amusement, that attempts to outfit it with a new function remain entirely superficial.”
Therefore, in his view, protest music, despite its anarchistic namesake, is still a commodity, one that is marketed as being for the greater good but, at its core, sits as far into the exploitative nature of mass culture as the films made in Hollywood. Even Baez’s music, which directly criticised violence in the form of war, was trivial in Adorno’s eyes purely because of the definitive nature of such art forms.
In his words: “I have to say that when somebody sets himself up, and for whatever reason sings maudlin music about Vietnam being unbearable, I find that really it is this song that is in fact unbearable, in that by taking the horrendous and making it somehow consumable, it ends up wringing something like consumption-qualities out of it.”
While Adorno likely acknowledged that artistic expressions could inspire people to question and confront the underlying structures of oppression and inequality, he maintained a more cynical view of their potential impact. Because of this, he was acutely aware of the pervasive nature of the “Culture Industry” and thus harboured reservations about the ability of artists like Baez to create works that truly transcended the commodification of culture and did not ultimately serve to exploit the masses.
