Читать книгу Popular Is Not Enough: The Political Voice Of Joan Baez - Markus Jaeger - Страница 11

Popular singers, who are repeatedly involved in political initiatives, constantly have to face the accusation of lacking political authenticity—of being interested in nothing but promotional work for successfully selling their records. In order to falsify this accusation, one has to get a clearer picture of the political impetus driving the artist’s work. The analysis of Baez’s political momentum is done on a phenomenological basis. Bogdan and Taylor define the research aim of a phenomenologist:

The phenomenologist is concerned with understanding human behavior from the actor’s own frame of reference […] the phenomenologist examines how the world is experienced […] (Bogdan and Taylor 2).

Before discussing Baez’s political frame of reference and the question of how she experiences the world, basic biographical pieces of information are essential. How did the affiliation of artistic and political components turn Baez into a mover? What motivated Baez to meld her artistic with her political activities? As Bogdan and Taylor also point out: “[…] all personal documents are valuable […] once the researcher has taken the motivation into account […]” (Ibid.). Baez is analyzed as a popular singer with a political motivation. The reason for labeling her as a popular singer can be seen in the following explanation of Strinati:

[…] popular music can be seen to be marked by a trend towards the overt and explicit mixing of styles and genres of music in very direct and self-conscious ways. This has ranged from the straightforward remixing of already recorded songs from the same or different eras on the same record to the quoting and ‘tasting’ of distinct musics, sounds and instruments in order to create new sub- and pan-cultural identities […] (Strinati 233).

These key characteristics can certainly be correlated to the musical work of Joan Baez. Starting as a folk singer in the midst of the Folk Music Revival at the end of the 1950s, she led the anti-Vietnam War movement as a singer of protest songs during the 1960s, spread the human rights cause of Amnesty International via her international fame as a singer during the 1970s and 1980s and achieved the status of a musical icon during the 1990s, still releasing new musical records and extensively touring the world in the 2000s and 2010s. All these careerstations were marked by exactly this kind of “[…] explicit mixing of styles and genres of music in very direct and self-conscious ways […]” (Ibid.). This kind of artistic characterization is argued in more detail throughout the whole study. Only one important aspect shall be noted here: popular culture has always been the matter of deep-seated scientific conflicts. Strauss, as only one example, bluntly dismisses popular culture by elaborating on the following simplification: “[…] popular culture was created to entertain the masses while the elite ruled […]” (in: Weaver 8). Eagleton, on the other hand, elevates the fact that such a dismissal is not necessarily the most sophisticated way of looking at the topic:

If one thinks of the range of artistic works, both ‘high’ and popular […] it is remarkable what common witness they bear on the question of what moral ends are to be promoted […] (Eagleton 105).

This argument leads to the hypothesis that popular music can be capable of asserting more than entertainment to its consumers. Artifacts of popular culture are able to be more than just popular in the elitist dictionary sense of being “[…] aimed at ordinary people and not at experts or intellectuals […]” (in: Sinclair 1277). This definition implies that no one who listens to popular music can be an expert or intellectual of whatever kind. Such a simplification does not fit into the research motivation of all scientific disciplines: objectivity. Berger convincingly objects to this knowledge-limiting attitude the intellectual interests of scholars, who study popular culture. These multi-layered interests prove to be

[…] the role that popular culture plays in society—[…] the way popular culture socializes young people, the psychological impact of popular culture on individuals, the depiction of women and members of other groups (ethnic, racial, socioeconomic) in popular culture texts […] (Berger 161).

Ignoring these dimensions by simply attacking the intellectual incapability of listeners of popular music is not enough for a satisfying debate. Weaver goes a step further and articulates his conviction that “[…] now, popular culture has a much more dramatic influence on how culture is defined […]” (Weaver 2). The political efforts of Joan Baez during the last 50 years—as analyzed in this study—undermine this significance. Gamman and Marshment chime in on this issue—more sophisticatedly than Weaver—and expect the critical reader to be careful with possible definitions of popular culture:

It is not enough to dismiss popular cultures as merely serving the complementary systems of capitalism and patriarchy, peddling ‘false consciousness’ to the duped masses. It can also be seen as a site where meanings are contested and where dominant ideologies can be disturbed (Gamman and Marshment in Strinati 216).

This is the point where Baez’s position as a political activist comes in. My argument is: the most significant momentum of Baez’s work as a creator of popular culture artifacts is her politics. This does not mean that she only recorded textually straightforward political songs; it puts her most famous and most important songs (and performances of the same) into a specific cultural context which transforms her artistic work into the continuing tenor of a unified political message. This hypothesis flagrantly contradicts with the position of American Studies scholar Lipsitz, who is convinced that

[…] artifacts of popular culture have no fixed meanings: it is impossible to say whether any one combination of sounds or set of images or grouping of words innately expresses one unified political position […] (Lipsitz Time Passages 13).

In order to falsify Lipsitz’s thesis, this study discusses the musical work of Joan Baez from her political point of view. The analyses of various political initiatives which Baez has supported as an activist throughout her career and the role of her work as a popular singer for this kind of activism exposes a doubtless fact: Artifacts of popular culture certainly can express a unified political message. Popular music can be political. Robin Denselow is convinced that the political potential of popular music is not at its end, as many political elites might probably wish, because

Pop musicians have learned that they have the ability to use their music as well as their position for commenting on political developments, […] collecting large sums of money, and mirroring the course of history […] as it has been done by troubadours of folk-music movements all around the world2 (see Denselow 382, transl. by Jaeger).

Joan Baez was (and still is) a representative of these folk music movements and continues to support political issues which were and still are dear to her. This kind of relationship between music and politics is old and full of complex obstacles; narrowing the topic down to songs against violent authorities, for example, still offers us a history of many hundred years (see also Stern 1978). An outstanding 20th century theorist evoking troublesome discussions about the relationship between society and art, who comes to word in the following sub-chapter, is musicologist and philosopher Theodor W. Adorno. In his 1970 posthumously published study Aesthetic Theory (Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), many critical facets can be referred to the work of Baez. She is juxtaposed to Adorno’s critical argumentation against politically engaged art (and artists) as a popular singer who wrote and recorded and performed songs with either political content and/or within political contexts. The following pages shed a critical light on the question of whether Baez would have been a successful pupil at the Frankfurt School.