Joan Baez Urges Modern Pop Stars to Speak Up About Politics

Joan Baez said she wishes modern-day pop musicians would use their platforms to speak up about political and social issues.

During an interview on the podcast Wiser Than Me With Julia Louis-Dreyfus, host Julia Louis-Dreyfus asked Baez about her feelings on younger artists who haven’t voiced concerns about the abuses of the Trump administration. “There’s a whole generation of really talented artists who are quite silent about the current assault on democracy,” Louis-Dreyfus said. “Do you find that unbelievably frustrating or do you understand, perhaps, where those artists are coming from?”

“I think I understand where they’re coming from,” Baez replied. “It’s revealing that the one song that’s used in all of these demonstrations is ‘The Times They Are a-Changin.’ The level of that writing from back then hasn’t been approached. No one has approached it. You can’t summon that up, I don’t think.”

She added, “The young people right now, some are writing amazing stuff. A few are willing to speak out. Brandi Carlile is. And Maggie Rogers, my pal, put [it] right out there front and center on the stage at a rally against ICE. I sort of cock my head at these stadiums filled with brilliant young women songwriters, and why can’t they just take that little step? Because they’re already richer than God, you know, most of them. So, that little step.”

Louis-Dreyfus then asked Baez what she wishes she had known about activism when she was younger. “What comes to my mind is not about activism, it’s about the singing,” Baez said. She recounted performing for the Shriners during high school. “I don’t know what I sang, but I sang something for the Shriners and they got quiet and they actually listened,” she remembered. “Some old guy came up to me afterwards and he said, ‘You know honey, don’t sign cheap. You’re okay honey, you’re going to do good.’”

Earlier this year, Baez, who has famously been an activist throughout her career, performed with Rogers and Tom Morello at the No Kings rally at the Minnesota State Capitol. The duo performed 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.

Last year, Baez spoke to Rolling Stone about the lack of a current-day protest song. “What we need is an anthem, but it’s impossible to write an anthem,” she said. “‘One in a Million’ comes closest, but you can’t drag that out of nothing. It has to come from somewhere else. ‘Imagine’ is still so beautiful. The Dylan stuff is still internationally known, and it doesn’t have the same sort of thing for me that ‘We Shall Overcome’ does. Way back then, I had the brains to know we were not going to overcome everything and have world peace. Now, it’s even more so.”