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

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СКАЧАТЬ Nonetheless, Baez continued working with her very own combination of being a popular singer and a political activist at the same time. The next three sub-chapters explain how she adapted her activities to other political realities and started to focus on political developments in numerous countries abroad. A human rights organization like Amnesty International profited immensely from Baez and her fame during the 1970s, when she—as only one example—supported the process of freeing political prisoners in Latin America. Baez articulated another significant dimension of her social conscience when she publicly supported the first activities of the Gay Liberation Movement—outing herself as having had bisexual experiences and releasing several self-penned songs which explicitly dealt with the topic of homosexuality long before it became en vogue to be out and proud about it. The end of the decade found Baez returning to the topic of Vietnam, when she ignored the national suppression of the traumatic experiences in Vietnam and—against all odds—publicly protested against organized violence in South East Asia only four years after the end of the Vietnam War.

      Chapter seven outlines Joan Baez’s most important musical as well as political endeavors during the apolitical times of the 1980s. Her musical career started to tumble over the prevailing ethos of the decade that commercial success was the one and only thing that counted for an artist. A politically active singer, who was increasingly seen as a remnant of times long gone by, had to face difficulties to keep up with a career in a climate which primarily propagated national economic and political narcissism. The first argumentative step of this chapter is again a synopsis about the then current cultural and political state of affairs in the Unites States, which offered nothing but this kind of collective bow in front of nothing else than profit. Baez, however, did not give in to these professional difficulties and continued with what she had done before. The second sub-chapter explains the overtly political background of her musical tour in Latin America in 1981. A few years later, Baez visited Poland—once more as a singer with much more to offer than the 1980s’ ethos of the big commercial hit. The third sub-chapter has a closer look at this 1985 trip by Baez to Poland and her meeting with the leader of the politically very successful workers’ movement Solidarnosc and later President of the country, Lech Walesa. The last incisive effort of Baez during this rather difficult decade of her career was a highly political performance in Czechoslovakia in 1989, several months before the Velvet Revolution, a successful non-violent political development, which President Vaclav Havel later explicitly connected to the Joan Baez concert earlier that year. This undertaking concludes the analysis of Baez’s artistic and political activities during the 1980s and most outstandingly marks the reason why the combination of popular music and political activism includes much more than Adorno’s pessimism.

      The following eighth chapter analyses artistic and political challenges for Baez during the 1990s, when she had to face the necessity to re-arrange her professional priorities. Several younger producers and new and fresh songwriting talents supported her successful attempts to hold on to a musical career, including the release of studio and live-music albums and a Grammy nomination as well as numerous promotion tours through the United States and Europe and many other regions around the globe. The general growing political dissatisfaction in the United States, as outlined in the first sub-chapter, among other dimensions, was driven by a generation conflict which labeled young people with the not very flattering X—standing for a lack of orientation. Such youth and their changing musical taste created an artistic surrounding in which it was a mentionable success for an artist like Baez (whose music often was wrongfully labeled as still purely folk) to professionally survive. The political dimension of her work forced Baez to more selective engagements, but she did not stop lending her voice to political issues. The second sub-chapter exemplifies this professional integrity in her earlier activities with an analysis of her trip to Bosnia in the middle of the Balkan War. It accentuates her experiences as well as her passionate attempts to draw international attention to the horrors of the war in former Yugoslavia.

      The ninth chapter welcomes Baez in the New Millennium. It triggers off the analysis of her activities in the first decade of the 21st century with another summation about the most important driving forces within the culture and politics in the United States and examines the question in what ways these developments are relevant for Baez’s professional life. Secondly, a discussion about her return to the anti-war movement explains in what ways the massive international protest activities against the war in Iraq differ from the organized protest movement against the Vietnam War during the 1960s and the 1970s. It gives, however, reasons why those two different historic dimensions are still comparable. The last sub-chapter observes the necessity to point out that democracy and censorship do not fit together and discusses Baez’s experiences in this regard in 2007.

      The tenth chapter finishes the analyses of Baez’s political significance and non-violent authenticity with a closer look at her activities in the 2010s. It summarizes her most relevant accolades during the final decade of her career during one of the most troubled political phases in the United States. Her song “Nasty Man” on the 45th President of her home country eloquently sums up the reason why her work is the lifelong prove for the fact that being popular is not enough.

1. Stepping Over Boundaries: Materials, Methodology and Theory

      Introduction

      The aim of this first chapter is to sketch the theoretical background for my line of argumentation. Additionally, a description of the main method outlines the reasons why the biographical method (or life history) is the most profitable approach to the work of Joan Baez. In this manner, sources and materials used to verify the main thesis are explained. On the following pages, five sub-chapters examine these columns of my research in more detail.

      The first step is to plea for open-mindedness regarding the interdisciplinary approach that I take with my analysis, because it can be very unsatisfying to limit research possibilities to one scientific branch only. Secondly, an excursion adds an explanation about the cross-border element of social movements, in view of the fact that they offer Baez’s main professional platform, where she melts the borderline between her artistic and her political work. The third sub-chapter offers a summarizing investigation of the biographical method, discussing necessary conditions and advantages of the life history, which is the main methodological approach to my analysis of Baez’s combination of art and activism. The fourth step is a closer look at the challenging relationship between popular culture and politics. It explains the reason why I refer to Baez as a popular singer and how far this classification can be a helpful means for a discussion about her political endeavors. As a last step, the incorporation of Baez’s work with Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetic theory juxtaposes the activeness of Baez’s efforts to the passiveness of Adorno’s theory as well as his slack use of musical categories—falsifying his resigned approach to the authenticity of politically active artists (particularly in the field of popular culture). The most valuable way of building these columns of my analysis is to consider more than one scientific discipline for my research.

1.1 Against Wrongful Restrictions: On the Advantages of Interdisciplinarity

      Picking out singer and activist Joan Baez as the central theme for a dissertation reveals a manifold number of risks and poses numerous questions. Satisfying answers to these questions can not be found by sticking entirely to one particular discipline only—meaning: to one specific body of knowledge, which is being delimited from other scientific disciplines. Moran analyses an important aspect of this kind of systematic delimitation: “[…] in fact, the very notion of the term [discipline] as a recognized mode of learning implies the establishment of hierarchy and the operation of power […]” (Moran 2). This is the reason why interdisciplinarity can be regarded as an attempt to overcome structures of limited power; limited to a small number of selected scientists of one single discipline as well as limited in its potential of achieving knowledge. In other words: the often underestimated “[…] teamwork […]” (Rodgers, Booth and Eveline 2003) of different scientific disciplines is a helpful means of producing knowledge, because knowledge is achieved via the verification of hypotheses—regardless on which hierarchical СКАЧАТЬ