A little help from my neo-Marxist philosopher: was Adorno the fifth Beatle?

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.’”