Joan Baez says modern pop musicians should be using their platforms to speak up about political and social issues, and she pointed to younger artists she thinks have already taken that risk. On the podcast Wiser Than Me With Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Baez was asked about younger performers who had not spoken out against the abuses of the Trump administration, and she said, “I think I understand where they’re coming from.”
But Baez also made clear she wants more from singers with stadium-sized audiences. “The young people right now, some are writing amazing stuff,” she said, adding that Brandi Carlile is willing to speak out and that Maggie Rogers put it “right out there front and center on the stage at a rally against ICE.” She then drew a line between that kind of public stance and the silence she sees elsewhere, asking of younger women songwriters in stadiums, “why can’t they just take that little step?” and answering herself: “Because they’re already richer than God, you know, most of them.”
The comments fit the pattern of a career spent in activism as much as music. Earlier this year, Baez performed with Rogers and Tom Morello at the No Kings rally at the Minnesota State Capitol, where the three played Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” Baez and Rogers also took part in the Artists United for Our Freedoms event in March in protest of Trump’s changes to the Kennedy Center.
Baez has long argued that protest music has become harder to write in the present day. Last year, she said, “What we need is an anthem, but it’s impossible to write an anthem.” She added that “’One in a Million’ comes closest, but you can’t drag that out of nothing,” and called “’Imagine’” still beautiful. She also said the Dylan songbook remains unmatched in one respect, saying, “The Dylan stuff is still internationally known, and it doesn’t have the same sort of thing for me that ‘We Shall Overcome’ does.”
That is the tension inside Baez’s argument: she is not just asking younger artists to sing louder, but to do what she sees as the hardest thing in pop culture now, turn fame into public risk. And for Baez, the benchmark is still the same song she keeps returning to in these demonstrations. No one, she said, has reached the level of writing in Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” from back then. “Way back then, I had the brains to know we were not going to overcome everything and have world peace,” she said. “Now, it’s even more so.”
