Popular Is Not Enough: The Political Voice Of Joan Baez - Markus Jaeger

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study: it is not intended to give a subjective overall description of Baez’s life or be some sort of unauthorized biography; its aim is rather to discuss several of her ‘lifelines’—in order to explain the motivation for analyzing the significance of her work as an activist and the question which role her artistic work has played for her political efforts. In order to do so, all materials and sources are relevant for the debate, as Denzin also concludes:

      A central assumption of the life history is that human conduct is to be studied and understood from the perspective of the persons involved. All materials that reflect upon this perspective should be employed […] (Denzin 183).

      The following sub-chapter discusses the question of how far the various manifestations of Baez’s political perspective are influenced by her work as a popular singer. Popular culture theory does not offer a clear-cut possibility to define the cultural and intellectual significance of popular culture. Pop-musicologist Fuhr correctly suggests accepting the fact that particularly popular music is not to be grasped with explanation models, which attribute a problem to a single cause (see also Fuhr, 131). Fuhr is another expert, who agrees on my assumption in chapter 1.1 on the advantages of interdisciplinarity. He is convinced that a scientific analysis of popular music can only be fruitful as an interdisciplinary project (see Ibid.). A scientific debate about popular culture—and popular music in particular—is more a scientific conflict. Anyone who attempts to work on popular music should be “[…] living out the tension […]” (Middleton in Ibid.) between the cultivated side of academic training and the popular side of his subject matter. Taking this suggestion into account, it is necessary and worth a try to find an answer to the question why a singer like Joan Baez can be defined as a popular singer and why it is her deep-felt conviction that being popular is not enough.

      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

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