[D66] Was Adorno the fifth Beatle? | theguardian.com

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A little help from my neo-Marxist philosopher: was Adorno the fifth Beatle?
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theguardian.com
Tue 10 Sep 2019 18.16 BST
Last modified on Wed 11 Sep 2019 10.10 BST

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Neo-Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno. Photograph: Ullstein
Bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images

Name: Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno

Age: Born 1903. Died 1969.

Occupation: Neo-Marxist philosopher, Holocaust survivor, composer and,
apparently, fifth Beatle.

Hold on. So the moptops consisted of John, Paul, George, Ringo and
Teddy? That’s right. At least if you believe Brazilian president Jair
Bolsonaro’s political guru.

Remind me, who is Bolsonaro’s political guru? Self-taught philosopher
Olavo Carvalho, scourge of lefties like Adorno and author of The
Collective Imbecile and The Least You Need To Know Not To Be An Idiot.

What’s Carvalho’s theory? “The Beatles were semi-literate in music, they
barely knew how to play the guitar. Who composed their songs was Theodor
Adorno,” he said.

Where did Carvalho get that idea? A long-running online meme argues that
Adorno not only wrote the songs but his estate sold the rights to
Michael Jackson.

Did he? Of course he did. Picture the scene. It’s 1963 and Lennon and
McCartney are struggling to write She Loves You. “She loves you,” says
Lennon. “What comes next?” “Yeah, yeah, yeah?” chips in Adorno.
“Brilliant, Teddy, just brilliant,” says McCartney. The rest is history.

Are you being sarcastic? Yes. In fact, Adorno despised the Beatles and
everything they stood for. “What can be urged against the Beatles,” he
said in the magazine Akzente in 1965, “is simply that what these people
have to offer is something that is retarded in terms of its own
objective content. It can be shown that the means of expression that are
employed and preserved here are in reality no more than traditional
techniques in a degraded form.” Adorno was also scathing about 1960s
protest music, arguing in this interview that it was corrupted by its
association with commodified popular musical tropes.

But didn’t Adorno like the Scottish singer Lulu? No, he admired Alban
Berg’s opera Lulu, about a femme fatale murdered by Jack the Ripper, not
the Lulu whose 1969 Eurovision entry Boom Bang-a-Bang topped the hit
parade. Before becoming head of the neo-Marxist “Frankfurt School”
(Institute for Social Research), he trained with Berg and wrote
modernist works, including an opera drawn from Tom Sawyer called The
Treasure of Indian Joe.

So why would Adorno write for the Beatles? According to the meme, Adorno
spearheaded a neo-Marxist plot to destroy western values and the band
were useful idiots. “The Beatles,” goes one account, “were introduced to
the public as a means to spread youth culture which led to the spreading
of the ‘New Age’ culture and this was all geared to setting up a
nihilistic culture that is all to [sic] present today.”

Isn’t that silly? Yes. But of a piece with Carvalho’s toxic ranting.
“The media is crazy, all journalists are drug addicts. Everything is
fantasy!” Carvalho told guests at a screening of a film about his life
earlier this year. He is to Brazil what his friend Steve Bannon was to
Trump.

Don’t say: “The power of the culture industry’s ideology is such that
conformity has replaced consciousness.”

Do say: “If you play The White Album backwards, you hear Adorno saying:
‘Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as
irrational leftovers of the past.’”