Switched on Pop - Pop On A Perilous Planet (w Kyle Devine)

Episode Date: April 20, 2021

Earth Day 2021 gives us the chance to pause our usual programming and consider the role pop music plays in our deepening climate emergency. On Side A, we listen to artists who have confronted the climate crisis head-on. Side B considers the environmental cost of streaming music with Kyle Devine, author of Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music. Songs Discussed: George Pope Morris - Woodman, Spare That Tree! Joni Mitchell - Big Yellow Taxi Marvin Gaye - Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology) Tower of Power - Only So Much Oil in the Ground Various Artists - Love Song for the Earth Anohni - 4 Degrees The Weather Station - The Robber DJ Cavem - Sprout That Life Learn more about the environmental impact of NFTs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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euphoria. Welcome to Switch Dawn Pop. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. Songwriter Charlie Harding, it's Earth Day. Yes. Well, okay, it's two days until Earth Day, but it's close. And I want to celebrate by...

Beautiful. Doing a two-parter. Okay. where in the first half, we'll listen to songs of environmental activism and awareness and think about how contemporary musicians are responding to the climate crisis. And in the second half, I'm going to sit down with the author Kyle Devine, whose book Decomposed explores the energy costs of consuming music since the dawn of recording, including the hidden costs of streaming.

Okay, interesting, so it's important. But before we can think about how modern musicians, are referencing the environment in their music. I think we need to think about how artists through history have tackled this subject. So come, if you will, with me way back to the 1830s, and we're going to listen to one of the big hits of the era and one of the first hit songs to address the environment.

It's Woodman, Spare That Tree by George Pope Morris, sung here by Douglas Jimerson. This is interesting to me because this is far before the conservation movement. What's the story? This is not really an environmental anthem in the way we think about it. This is more of a sort of personal reflection about a beloved tree that has over the years, I think, gained this kind of nascent environmental consciousness. But yeah, it would be wrong to say this was part of like, you know, the 1830s version of the Sierra Club or something.

Right. This was a poem that turned into a song about a man who loves a tree. So instead of having like a dog or some other pet affection, somebody just really fell in love with a tree. That's fine. I dig it. Yeah, why not? And I think it speaks to the fact that, you know, environmental action was not this collective movement. It was this maybe more of an individual humanistic.

relationship. I like that, though, because fundamentally, one of the most important parts of getting in touch with what's going on in our climate crisis is having a relationship with our ecosystems. And so I like how this song develops that relationship with that tree. I totally agree. And it's kind of maybe surprising then that for the next, I'd say, 100 years or so of pop music history, we don't get a lot of expressions of love for nature. Popular music seems more. concerned with, does she love me? Does he not? The really important questions that people grapple with. Yes, the anthropocentric kinds of issues. But starting in the 1960s and 1970s, we really enter a golden age of songs about nature and the environment. These must be coming post Silent Spring. Yes, the publication of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring,

which showed how the use of certain synthetic pesticides were decimating animal populations awakened a new environmental consciousness, which certainly started to seep into the sound of American popular music. So by the end of the decade, you start to hear a new kind of subject matter appearing in pop songs, including tracks like Joni Mitchell's big yellow taxi I haven't heard this forever Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got

Till it's gone It's paradise Put up a parking lock Oh Oh I sometimes feel that way Living in Los Angeles Looking out at the great And the sea of cement

That it feels like Yeah we pave it over paradise And it's not just folk artists That pick up this call It's R&B and soul artists like Marvin Gay with his track, Mercy, Mercy, Mercy Me, the Ecology. That's a song, which I learned,

introduced Motown Records founder Barry Gordy to the term ecology. Whoa. Oh, mercy, mercy me. All things ain't what they used to be. Now, now. Where did all the blue skies know? Poison is the wind that blows.

From the Lord and Sondon. It's a song about climate grief from the soul era. And I'm sure Barry Gordy wasn't the only person to be introduced to the idea of ecology through this song. And it's still amazing to listen to this like 50 years later and hear Marvin Gay making acid rain and radiation sound so beautiful and haunting and poignant. I mean, this track, I mean, scarily, it is every bit as relevant as it was when it came to. out in the early 70s. Deeply, deeply, yeah. And every bit is effective. If you'll permit me, let's get one more 70s environmental jam in here. For sure. Because it's not just folk, it's not just so funk bands like Tower of Power even tackle this new environmental consciousness

with a song like, Only So Much Oil in the Ground. The playing is so frenetic. All of the anger, angst and frustration you can hear in the bass and the organ, just like moving along kind of like a motor powered by oil, you know? I love that analysis. And when we listen to these three songs, Joni, Marvin, Tower of Power,

I think it really gives us this panoramic picture of the way that so many different artists were responding to this new environmental movement in the 60s and 70s. Right. And then come the 80s, Reaganism, consumerism, individualism, deregulation, synthesizers.

And all of a sudden, and this topic kind of disappears from mainstream popular music. I mean, not completely, and we could name a number of really powerful tracks about the environment from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. Sure. But generally, when we encounter this topic, it's either tucked into the second verse of a hit song, like All Star by Smashmouth. pretty thin, the water's getting warm so you might as well swim. My world's on fire. How about yours? That's the way I like it and I'll never get bored.

Right. Or more recently, we find hastily assembled supergroups coming together to support environmental causes with, let's just say, perhaps mixed results. I present to you the 2015 track, Love Song to the Earth. The only collaboration I know that features Natasha Bettingfield, Paul McCartney, Sean Paul, John Bon Jovi. Have a listen. Looking down is a tiny blue my board. Oh, Lord.

All right, Bon Jovi. I can hear the Earth crying listening to that monstrosity of a track. It does all of the worst things, right? It's like, let's take an important cause. let's turn it into an issue of celebrity and let's make the most overproduced cliched. Yeah, cliche.

I can't even, I can't find the words because I'm just wincing. It's an exercise in self-mockery, which I think points to the kind of role that the environment has in popular music today. It's not cool the way it was in the 60s and 70s. Yeah, I mean, especially because if you think about like the modern environmental movement in popular consciousness hasn't been driven by music, but rather by a PowerPoint presentation.

An inconvenient truth was incredibly powerful in terms of waking people up in Al Gore's entire movement spread by many, many other activists as well. Yeah. And beyond that, you know, the countless grassroots organizers who have done the work of making us understand the far-reaching implications of the climate crisis. There's an important seriousness there that doesn't seem to translate well through song. I don't know why. I don't either.

So what I propose is we listen to three recent songs that address the environment and the climate crisis in three very different ways and see if we can step back with a clearer picture of the way artists are reckoning with this moment and how they might do so moving forward. Let's start with a track called Four Degrees by Anoni Off her 2016 album, Hopelessness I want to see this world I want to see this world I want to see it's only That's powerful. It's as if she's sort of taking on the perspective of some arch-evil, which is working as hard as possible, to make sure that we hit that four-degree mark of basically entire ecological collapse.

I know. It's really shocking to hear that. I think that's probably the point, you know, to say I want to see the Earth boil and burn. Like, that's not the kind of the love song to the Earth that we just heard. And maybe that's the point here. I think it's really powerful, though, because one of the great issues about systemic problems is that it is difficult to point at a moment. figure and say, hey, you fix this. You are the villain. There are many villains. We villainize

ourselves. We necessarily villainize industry, which perpetuates the climate crisis. But here, she gives us an archetype, this singer that we can say, hey, you. It is very motivating. I dig that analysis, Charlie, and it reminds me of something that Anoni said about this song and this album in a pitchfork interview. She said a lot of the songs were criticized for being naive and simplistic. But they were never designed to be a sophisticated conversation about this issue. They were designed as stealth assaults on denial. The idea was to crack my own denial, crack the denial of people around me and find a new way into an atrophied conversation. When I listen to this song, four degrees, I hear an artist taking all of the pain and fear and putting it into a song that

expresses that directly. I mean, you hear it in her voice. You hear it in the production with these jagged drums that are the first thing we hear on the track. It's only four degrees. It's only four degrees. And then Hans Zimmererish kind of

cinematic scoring of like, this is the climactic moment. Oh, wow. Okay, pun. Sorry. Climactic climate. I'm sorry. Continue.

You were going somewhere. I told me this. We already had this discussion. Climactic and climate are not the same thing. That's, I'm, ugh. My brain is broken. Okay, okay, let's reset. And listen to a song that takes a very different approach.

Rather than turning all those emotions into their sort of sonic equivalent, our next song, which just came out this year, is from a band called the Weather Station, from an album all about the climate crisis called Robber. And this is the title track. This one's a little more obtuse, help me think through it. This central idea of the robber as this figure of someone's kind of stealing your inheritance and your future. Someone that you don't believe in because no one is presumably actively trying to do. destroy the world.

Who actually, why would any, there's a couple people. Who are the villains? Well, there are plenty of villains, but the average person, yeah, I don't think is trying to be the bad guy. Let's say then it's a mindset of disbelief. That's real. Let me read to you something that the singer and writer behind this project, Tara Lindemann, said about this song.

She said, it's a strange thing to be the recipient of something that's stolen. which is what it means to be a non-indigenous Canadian. We're all trying to grapple with the question of, what does it mean to be here at all? We're the beneficiaries of this long ago genocide, essentially. I think Canadians in general and people all over the world are sort of waking up to our history. So to sing, I never believed in the robber,

feels like how we were all taught not to see certain things. The first page in the history textbook is, people lived here, and then the next 265 pages are all about the victors. Wow. The takers. So both the Anoni work and here the weather station, they're operating at getting inside our emotions, very different than a PowerPoint presentation, really getting into our own inherited and created grief. And with this song, The Robberts pointing to the intersectionality of this climate crisis, that it's not just a, about using less plastic.

Yeah. It's about recognizing environmental injustice as a defining feature of capitalism. Mm-hmm. Which brings us to one final entrant in our

panorama of recent environmental music. It's Sprout That Life by DJ Kavam. This is my soul's I got no more land Pull up on your block In that veggie van

Keep my broccoli local Like I always there Give me your bucket or two A sprinkle plan of the streets This is fun because it takes a certain style Of hip hop Raggedoshio and turns it from Talking about celebrating capitalism

To celebrating Making fresh veggies at home This dude DJ Kaveam Is a vegan hip hop artist From Denver who is passionate about the environment. He says, I want people to understand that one of the best ways to make an impact on the environment is being more conscious of what we eat and understanding that our everyday food choices impact the environment in a positive or negative way.

So there's no innuendo here. This is a dude whose last album was released with a set of seed packs. This is someone who practices what he preaches, literally planting. seed with his music. That's fun. I mean, I was obviously referencing broccoli because it's used not infrequently as a stand-in for marijuana, which is also, I think, connected to issues of racial justice, environmental justice, how it's grown, who controls it, and so on.

So whether or not it's in there, I don't know, I hear it as like a larger hip-hop reference and another sort of source of reclamation. Right. I mean, this is an artist whose message is inspired by the real. realization that his neighborhood was a food desert and the injustice of the food we eat and how that affects different populations. I mean, this is what he's taking on head on. But in a way that isn't like preachy or saccharin, but bangs. I mean, this track bangs.

It's fun to live. You don't have to sacrifice anything to get down with this track, which is something I appreciate. Okay, so there's our little sampler platter of contemporary songs addressing our climate, all in very different ways. Anoni's 4 degrees is direct and volatile. The weather station's robber is kind of introspective and ambiguous. And Sprout that life is just like a call to action. Let's eat differently. When I step back, I don't see one response that musicians have.

And that makes sense because there isn't one thing we can do to change the world. It's a million tiny actions and us ultimately coming together to create a collective action that is going to change things. And I wonder if what artists can offer is a reflection on who we are and what we desire and a chance to rethink a new kind of future together. I feel like what these three songs do so much better. than Love Song for the Earth is rather than trying to make this kind of art, which is not in conversation with culture, but is this larger other thing in the same way that we sometimes treat nature as this other thing separate from us. These works actually use contemporary culture and sounds from contemporary culture so it fits into our larger ecosystems. Both are built culture environments, but also us as humans living in ecosystems.

And so I feel like these songs connect better inherently just because it's working on a much more natural level. Charles, I hear what you're saying. And it brings us to the topic that we're going to discuss in the second half of the show. Because this is only one side of the conversation, the way that artists through their music, are responding to this unprecedented moment we live in. But what about the way that just listening to music, the very act of listening to music, affects the environment?

All that after a quick break. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova, and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss. ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness.

I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Ready. Do not sugarcoat something for me. No, no. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey.

Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. We've discussed the way that modern artists are responding to the climate crisis through song, but what about the way that music consumption fuels our energy crisis? To answer that question, I sat down with the author of a book that explores the unexpected linkage between music listening and the fossil fuel economy.

My name is Kyle Devine. I'm an associate professor in the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo, and my research is about the human and environmental costs of recorded music. In your book Decomposed, you write about the three forms of materiality that music has taken since the start of the 20th century. Could you give us an overview of those different stages of music's materiality? The stages of music's sort of materiality are that between 1900 and 1950, most of the commercially successful recording formats were made of substantially something called Shalak. And Shalak is a resin that comes from a bug,

and that bug was mostly harvested in India during that period. Between 1950 and 2000, every single major or commercially successful recording format was made of plastic. We're talking about LPs, 45s, cassettes, and CDs. These are all different kinds of plastic, but they are all fundamentally plastic formats. And then since the year 2000, increasingly, people listen to music as data, whether that's direct downloading or especially since 2015. subscribing to streaming services. In the current stage of materiality, the data stage, I think we might have a perception that when we listen to music in the cloud,

when we stream it or download it, it's essentially this dematerialized weightless, perhaps consequenceless process. It's in the ether. But you say that we might be misunderstanding the ecological impact of data-driven music. There's a tendency to think of the history of recorded music as a history of dematerialization, a history where we moved from these things that we have and we hold, and these are treasured objects on some level to this history,

where everything is somehow up in the cloud, in the flow, as part of some magic stream. But one of the fundamental difficulties I think about talking about music, And more than music in this way, is that people talk about this history as a history of a move from the physical to the digital. And what I've been talking about, and many people have been talking about,

is that the digital is physical. If those file formats were nothing, if they took up no space, the hard drive on your phone or your computer would never fill up. Right? So these things take up space. And by taking up space, they require energy. And so storing and transmitting and downloading all of this musical data requires energy.

And that energy is dependent on your local power grid or the local power grid where that data is stored or transmitted or anything. So when we are streaming music, we are burning coal, we are burning uranium, we're using energy, essentially. I imagine someone listening to this might feel a certain guilt, or let me speak for myself, I feel hearing you describe the ecological impact of streaming makes me feel a certain guilt for listening to the majority of my music. via Spotify and YouTube and band camp and other online platforms. And yet I can also imagine the listeners saying, well, I don't own a record player. I don't own a CD player. I don't own a cassette player. And I want to listen to recorded music.

So what option do I have besides streaming? Which raises the question, you know, is this, if we want to change the intense energy usage of streaming music, do you have? do you feel that responsibility lies with the music listeners or with the music producers? I don't think that the responsibility lies with the consumers. In terms of guilt, I mean, one thing that I always say about this is that nothing I say about, you know, the carbon imprint of listening to music as data or streaming music is meant to make any individual consumer feel guilty. That's not to say that knowing about these things, you know, if it makes an individual consumer think differently about how they listen to music, I mean, that's fine and that's important.

But the bigger thing that we're talking about is a structural musical culture that has been built up over 150 years almost where we expect more, more, more, now, now, now, all the time, all the time, all the time. And that sort of set of desires is a microcosm of the set of desires that exist around traveling all the time that exist around, you know, more, more, more, essentially. None of that is meant to make any individual person feel guilty, right? Like I, for example, am fully willing to implicate myself in this, right? I subscribe to a streaming service. I have CDs. I've played in bands that have released CDs, LPs, EPs, bands that have their music online, right?

You know, these are the conditions that are available to us and that we have to engage. You know, so I'm never trying to make any individual feel. guilty. What I'm trying to draw attention to is the bigger sort of culture of listening that we've built up over 150 years, which has been built up alongside a bigger culture of want and desire, but more and more and more. Quantitatively, music is nothing, right? Some people sometimes accuse me of saying cows, meat, or airline travel, or the aluminum industry, or the concrete industry, you know, these are where we should be focusing our attention. And those things are true. But I don't think that the fact that music is caught up in all of this is a good

argument for ignoring the fact that music contributes to all of this. And I think it's important to ask ourselves these questions, because this is, for many of us, it's the corner of the world that we care to like a garden on some level, right? And the fact that this is a really nice part of the garden doesn't mean that we should say, well, it's a nice part of the garden. Let's ignore the fact that it is a part of this bigger picture where it's actually not a garden. It's a factory farm. Hearing that makes me think that with so much of our current climate crisis, as you say, it's driven by want and desire and the need for more, and to imagine an alternate climate future

might demand sacrifice and might demand a new system than the one we're used to. And yet, perhaps that alternate future wouldn't be necessarily destructive to the way we enjoy and celebrate and tend to our musical garden. Can you imagine what a more sustainable vision of music consumption looks like moving forward?

Many people during and since the publication of the book have asked, okay, so what do we do? That's an important question, but for me, the hidden assumption in that question is, what can we do that allows us to continue doing as we have always been doing, but just creating a little bit less damage? What I call that solutionism, and I think that's think that solutionism is very much a part of the problem. It's a mode of thinking and wanting to be in the world that allows us to continue as we have been doing, just doing a little bit less damage. And the solution, you know, the real ways of addressing the problem that are needed, actually, and this is going to be a little bit sort of spinny,

require us to address what we actually want in the first place. And, you know, music has this draw for people, politically, personally, in terms of community. And I think it may be one small place where we could not try and make music sustainable in terms of the desires that we bring to it, which is more and more and more, both in terms of streaming services and concerts and festivals and all of this. But one place where we could really fundamentally ask,

what do we want to sustain in the first place? Or what does betterness mean in the first place? Just before we hop into our credits, I want to say an overwhelming thanks to Bridget Armstrong, who is going on to bigger and better places. She has been such an invaluable part of the production team on Switched on Pop. We're going to miss you, Bridget. So for one more time, this episode was produced by Bridget Armstrong, Charlie Harding, and me Nate Sloan. Our executive producers are Nashat Kuroa and Hana Rosen, and we're

proud members of the Vox Media Podcast Network and Vulture. Nate, I'm really glad you brought this conversation up because I've been reading a lot about the biggest fad in music, which are NFTs, non-fundable tokens and all kinds of artists like Grimes and Aifex Twin and Stevie Oake are making lots of ridiculous amount of money selling crypto digital goods. It turns out that economy, which is, you know, it's a growing fad and a lot of people are saying it might be the next big thing in music, uses an absurd amount of energy. Absurd. Like one Ethereum transaction to trade an NFT is like the equivalent of using

all the energy in your house for two days. What? And I've got some research on it, a great video about the relationship between NFTs and our ecosystem, which I'll post in our show notes, which you can find on our website, switchedonpop.com. They are in the bottom of your feed right now if you're listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. And I'll also be sharing that information on social media at Switched on Pop on Instagram and Twitter. Speaking of social media, I realize I forgot to shout out our social media manager.

Abby Barr, our amazing illustrator, Iris Gottlieb. Yes. And our heroic engineer, editor, Savior, Bill Lance. Join us next week for a deep dive into the world of Montero. Yes. Which is, of course, the single from and real name of Lil Nas X. We're going to be talking with his collaborators, Take a Day Trip. Whoa, spoilers, Charlie.

I didn't know. You're giving everything away already. I didn't know that. It's going to be really fun. So we'll be back next week talking about that. It's going to be great. And until then, thanks for listening. Thanks for listening.