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Confronting Climate Change in Popular Music Texts: Nostalgia, Apocalypse, Utopia

image of Confronting Climate Change in Popular Music Texts: Nostalgia, Apocalypse, Utopia

This chapter provides an overview of ecocritical methods for probing the relationship between popular music and the environment in an age of ecological crisis. This involves an overview of existing ecomusicological scholarship on popular music and the status of textual approaches. I then set out my own position, arguing for a performative view of music as generative acts of imagination that produce scenarios and identities that help us project ourselves into the uncertain future. I exemplify my position in a case study of climate change in pop music recordings by the artists Aurora, ANOHNI, and Björk. The deceptively abstract quality of climate change makes it especially beholden to aesthetic framing and the powers of narrative. Different songs bring the issue into view in different ways, which will open and/or close certain modes of sensing and understanding, effecting the horizon of the possible.

Keywords: cultural imagination ; ecocriticism ; ecomusicology ; environmental humanities ; futurism ; pastoral

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References

  1. Allen, Aaron S. and Dawe, Kevin (eds) (2016), Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature, New York: Routledge.
    [Google Scholar]
  2. Anohni (2015), ‘Four degrees out now!’, anohni.com, 29 November, https://anohni.com/4-degrees-out-now. Accessed 1 December 2022 .604
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    [Google Scholar]
  4. Behr, Adam , Brennan, Matt , Cloonan, Martin , Frith, Simon and Webster, Emma (2016), ‘Live concert performance: An ecological approach’, Rock Music Studies, 3:1, pp. 523.
    [Google Scholar]
  5. Brabec de Mori, Bernd and Seeger, Anthony (2013), ‘Introduction: Considering music, humans, and non-humans’, Ethnomusicology Forum, 22:3, pp. 26986.
    [Google Scholar]
  6. Buell, Lawrence , Heise, Ursula and Thornber, Karen (2011), ‘Environmental literature’, Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 36, pp. 41740.
    [Google Scholar]
  7. Clarke, Eric F. (2005), Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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  8. Connell, John and Gibson, Chris (2009). ‘Ambient Australia: Music, mediation, and tourist places’, in O. Johansson and T. L. Bell (eds), Sound, Society, and the Geography of Popular Music, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 6788.
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  9. Daughtry, J. Martin (2020), ‘Did music cause the end of the world?’ Transposition Musique et Sciences Sociales (online), pp. 131, https://doi.org/10.4000/transposition.5192.
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  10. DeNora, Tia (2000), Music in Everyday Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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  11. Devine, Kyle (2019), Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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  12. Devine, Kyle and Boudreault-Fournier, Alexandrine (eds) (2021), Audible Infrastructures: Music, Sound, Media, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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  13. Dibben, Nicola (2006), ‘Subjectivity and the construction of emotion in the music of Björk’, Music Analysis, 25:i–ii, pp. 17197.
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  14. Epstein, Mikhail (2012), The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto, New York: Bloomsbury.
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  15. Feld, Steven (1994), ‘From ethnomusicology to echo-muse-ecology: Reading R. Murray Schafer in the Papua New Guinea rainforest’, The Soundscape Newsletter, 8, pp. 46.
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  16. Feld, Steven (2015), ‘Acoustemology’, in D. Novak and M. Sakakeeny (eds), Keywords in Sound, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1223.
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  23. Guy, Nancy (2009), ‘Flowing down Taiwan's Tamsui river: Towards an ecomusicology of the environmental imagination’, Ethnomusicology, 53:2, pp. 21848.
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  35. Kun, Josh (2005), Audiotopia: Music, Race and America, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
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  36. Latour, Bruno (2017), Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, Cambridge: Polity Press.
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  38. Malm, Andreas (2018), The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World, London: Verso Books.
    [Google Scholar]
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    [Google Scholar]
  46. Pedelty, Mark (2016), A Song to Save the Salish Sea: Musical Performance as Environmental Activism, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  47. Ramnarine, Tina K. (2009), ‘Acoustemology, indigeneity, and Joik in Valkeapää's symphonic activism: Views from Europe's arctic fringes for environmental ethnomusicology’, Ethnomusicology, 53:2, pp. 187217.
    [Google Scholar]
  48. Ramnarine, Tina K. (2016), Frozen through nordic frames’, Puls: Musik- Och Dansetnologisk Tidskrift, 1, pp. 1331.
    [Google Scholar]
  49. Ramnarine, Tina K. (2017), ‘Aspirations, global futures, and lessons from Sámi popular music for the twenty-first century’, in F. Holt and A. Kärjä (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Popular Music in the Nordic Countries, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 18184.
    [Google Scholar]
  50. Rehding, Alexander (2011), ‘Ecomusicology between apocalypse and nostalgia’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 64:2, pp. 40914.
    [Google Scholar]
  51. Richardson, John (2016), ‘Ecological close reading of music in digital culture’, in B. Abels (ed.), Embracing Restlessness: Cultural Musicology, Zürich: Georg Olms Verlag, pp. 11142.
    [Google Scholar]
  52. Robertson, Morgan M. (2006), ‘The nature that capital can see: Science, state, and market in the commodification of ecosystem services’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24:3, pp. 36787.
    [Google Scholar]
  53. Samuels, David W. , Meintjes, Louise , Ochoa, Ana María and Porcello, Thomas (2010), ‘Soundscapes: Toward a sounded anthropology’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 39, pp. 32945.
    [Google Scholar]
  54. Schafer, R. Murray (1977), The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, New York: Knopf.
    [Google Scholar]
  55. Silvers, Michael (2020), ‘Attending to the nightingale: On a multispecies ethnomusicology’, Ethnomusicology, 64:2, pp. 199224.
    [Google Scholar]
  56. Steingo, Gavin (2021), ‘Whale calling’, Ethnomusicology, 65:2, pp. 35073.
    [Google Scholar]
  57. Titon, Jeff Todd (1984), Worlds of Music: An Introduction to the Music of the World's Peoples, New York: Schirmer Books.
    [Google Scholar]
  58. Titus, Olusegun Stephen (2021), ‘Music and poetry representations of oil exploration, honey bee (dis)placement and endangerment in the Niger delta of Nigeria’, Bee World, 99:2, pp. 6165.
    [Google Scholar]
  59. Yusoff, Kathryn and Gabrys, Jennifer (2011), ‘Climate change and the imagination’, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 2:4, pp. 51634.
    [Google Scholar]
/content/books/9781835951033.c35
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