April 26, 2024: Climate Culture: Climate Songs

[It’s hard not to think about the climate crisis every day in 2024, but it’s impossible not to do so on Earth Day. So this week in honor of that solemn occasion, I’ll AmericanStudy cultural works that represent and help us engage with climate change.]

On five examples of pop music perspectives on the climate crisis.

1)      Don Henley, “Goodbye to a River” (2000): As I highlighted in this post featuring Henley’s successful efforts to preserve Walden Woods, the former Eagle has become one of our most prominent and dedicated environmental activists. So it makes sense that he penned an early and excellent climate crisis song, from his wonderfully political yet deeply personal album Inside Job. That album was hugely prescient about the nascent 21^st century, and never more so than its fears for a changing planet.

2)      Common, “Trouble in the Water” (2014): If Henley’s song is a lament, Common’s track (featuring a ton of guest contributors) is a righteously enraged banger. Many of its targets are human forces, like the corporate fuckery called out in bars such as “Everything was people/Until you showed up on the land to fuck the people/Contaminate the ocean/Now the water is lethal/Four bucks for two liters/That should be illegal.” But as Common’s anthem depicts all too potently, it’s on our environment that such man-made trouble will have the most damaging effects.

3)      Childish Gambino, “Feels like Summer” (2018): This song (from actor Donald Glover’s rap persona Childish Gambino) occupies a third genre, a sweet summer ballad—yet one that asks us to look closer and think deeper while we bop along. Never more so than in the second verse: “Every day gets hotter than the one before/Running out of water, it’s about to go down/Air that kills the bees that we depend upon/Birds were made for singing, waking up to no sound.” I don’t know if Karen Russell listened to “Feels like Summer” before imagining a future with no birds in the short story I wrote about in yesterday’s post, but I know her story and Gambino’s song make for a particularly powerful pairing.

4)      Billie Eilish, “All the Good Girls Go to Hell” (2019): As I’ve blogged about many times (and even included as an example of critical patriotism in the 1980s chapter of my most recent book), rap has a long tradition of social commentary. I don’t know that pop music has the same legacy necessarily, and of course social commentary isn’t the only thing music can or should do in any case; but there certainly is plenty of socially conscious pop music, and singer-songwriter Billie Eilish’s amazing 2019 track is a great recent example. I’m not sure there’s a more hard-hitting nor better three-line verse from the last decade of pop music than “Hills burn in California/My turn to ignore ya/Don’t say I didn’t warn ya.” Whew.

5)      Midnight Oil, Resist (2022): I blogged for my Valentine’s series last year about one of the many great songs on Midnight’s Oil latest album. The whole album is deeply connected to the climate crisis, but it’s the first song, “Rising Seas,” which is a particularly bracing and vital example of where climate change music is here in the 2020s. Listen, get mad, and recognize that, as Oil puts it in the final lines of the impassioned “At the Time of Writing,” “At the time of writing we were on the brink/At the time of writing we still had time to think.”

April Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Climate texts of any type you’d share?