"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: The entire sphere of popular music, there even where it dresses itself up in a modernist guise, is to such a degree inseparable from the commodity character [Warencharakter], from consumption, from the cross-eyed transfixion with amusement, that attempts to outfit it with a new function remain entirely superficial. And I have to say that whenever somebody sets himself up, and for whatever reason accompanies maudlin music by singing something or other about Vietnam being unbearable -- I find, in fact, THIS SONG unbearable, in that by taking the horrendous and making it somehow consumable, it ends up wringing something like consumption-qualities out of it." - Adorno. Joan Baez gets Adornowned: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd7Fhaji8ow
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