An English professor Brian Rejack at Illinois State University coins a new term in search of pop songs about climate change issues. ''Cli-Hi-Fi'' anyone?
by staff writer with agencies
On twitter, Professor Rejack is leaving a trail of links and asking readers (and music lovers) to chime in as well.
It all started with this tweet: "Been thinking for a while now about contemporary music that addresses or is otherwise about climate, and although it’s a bit clunky, I’m going with the term #CliHiFi (riffing on #CliFi). The ur-text for me is Anohni’s “4 Degrees.”
Here's some of his recent tweets: "Some brand spanking new #CliHiFi: Ian William Craig's new album, out in March, was recorded amidst wildfires in British Columbia in summer 2018. The catastrophic sights lend the album its title: 'Red Sun Through Smoke'."
The other day he tweeted: Here's your #CliHiFi track for the day: "Valley Boy" by Wolf Parade: "To the south a beast is born. / It's pouring rain and the earth is on fire." Also about Leonard Cohen dying just before 2016 election because he "[knew] it was all gonna go wrong."
Another pick: Also “Utopia” by Austra. And basically the whole album it comes from, “Future Politics.”
"Another one of my favorites is “Generation Why” by Weyes Blood, especially with the video for the song," Brian notes.
There are hundreds of pop songs from the 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s and all the way to today in the 2020s with lyrics that mention climate change worries and anxieties, sometimes with humor, sometimes with literary panache, and sometimes with links to climate justice and climate action. Think Leonard Cohen, think Stingm think Nick Cave's single "Anthrocence." Think Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez and Judy Collins and Bob Dylan and others.
If you, dear readers, have more music links to share with Professor Rejack in his search for more Cli-Hi-Fi songs that echo where we have been and where we are headed,, please contact the professor or this blogger at danbloom@gmail.com
======================
POST-SCRIPT:
Professor Rejack tells this blog as an UPDATE:
Hi Dan,
Thanks for writing up the blog post above and for helping to spread the #CliHiFi word! A bit of background for you and your blog readers:
I think my interest in the idea began in a few ways.
First, during the 2016 presidential election and then immediately after its terrifying outcome, with Donald Trump becoming the president, I just kept thinking about how it seemed to portend that we were kind of screwed re: climate change.
Not that that one event actually put the final nail in our environmental coffin, but it certainly made it easy to feel that way.
And that’s why I think the turn to music made sense to me. I was noticing around 2016 the increasing sense of deep cultural and existential anxiety permeating pretty much everything (particularly from my students, but not only from them).
At the same time I was listening to a lot of music that seemed to tap into that overarching feeling of unease, and I was also coming across more and more direct references to climate issues in song lyrics. Of course, popular music has a rich and varied and long history of being a medium for protest, for the airing of cultural and political dissent, etc.
One of the challenges with climate change, though, is that it’s very difficult to conceive of and to represent, precisely because of its scale across space and time (cf. Morton’s “hyperobjects” idea). It’s one thing to write a song about “four dead in Ohio,” but how do you create a lyric out of a graph of ice core samples?
The main thing I’m interested in with #CliHiFi is seeing how artists present, mediate, transform and/or reflect on climate change through music. It’s necessarily going to be different from journalistic or scientific engagements with the issue. But I think it’s also crucial that we have humanistic, aesthetic engagements with climate change if we’re going to do anything about it. Or, as i think in my more cynical moments, if we’re going to figure out how to live amidst it when we do nothing and things get even worse.
The only other thing I’d say is that I’m interested in all sorts of ways we might understand music engaging with climate change. Lyrics that are directly about it in some way is just one option. I also think that something like the album “Rausch” by Gas is a good example of music that captures the feeling of climate anxiety without necessarily addressing it directly.
I’d say the album “Chords” by Ellen Arkbro could also be read as Cli-Hi-Fi in the way that it uses sound to urge listeners to rethink their relationship between physical environments and the sounds made possible in relation to them. (Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room” would be a model text for that sort of thing.)
Anyway, that’s a sample of my thinking on the subject. It’s not anywhere near my main area of research, but it is something I find myself contemplating a lot these days.
And I did just think of an idea for an essay on an element of all this which I would call “Uneasy Listening.” So I might have to write that!
I’d be happy to keep chatting with you and others worldwide on the topic.
All best,
Brian
Brian Rejack
Associate Professor
Department of English
Illinois State University
brejack@ilstu.edu
https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/19/21028133/climate-change-music-2019-charts-billie-eilish-lana-del-rey-play
2019 was the year ''climate change'' charted
In case the foreboding lyrics or fiery visuals don’t do the trick, the YouTube video description shares Eilish’s message in clear-cut prose: “A note from Billie,” it proclaims. “The clock is ticking… take it to the streets. #climatestrike.”
There are hundreds of pop songs from the 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s and all the way to today in the 2020s with lyrics that mention climate change worries and anxieties, sometimes with humor, sometimes with literary panache, and sometimes with links to climate justice and climate action. Think Leonard Cohen, think Stingm think Nick Cave's single "Anthrocence." Think Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez and Judy Collins and Bob Dylan and others.
If you, dear readers, have more music links to share with Professor Rejack in his search for more Cli-Hi-Fi songs that echo where we have been and where we are headed,, please contact the professor or this blogger at danbloom@gmail.com
======================
POST-SCRIPT:
Professor Rejack tells this blog as an UPDATE:
Hi Dan,
Thanks for writing up the blog post above and for helping to spread the #CliHiFi word! A bit of background for you and your blog readers:
I think my interest in the idea began in a few ways.
First, during the 2016 presidential election and then immediately after its terrifying outcome, with Donald Trump becoming the president, I just kept thinking about how it seemed to portend that we were kind of screwed re: climate change.
Not that that one event actually put the final nail in our environmental coffin, but it certainly made it easy to feel that way.
And that’s why I think the turn to music made sense to me. I was noticing around 2016 the increasing sense of deep cultural and existential anxiety permeating pretty much everything (particularly from my students, but not only from them).
At the same time I was listening to a lot of music that seemed to tap into that overarching feeling of unease, and I was also coming across more and more direct references to climate issues in song lyrics. Of course, popular music has a rich and varied and long history of being a medium for protest, for the airing of cultural and political dissent, etc.
One of the challenges with climate change, though, is that it’s very difficult to conceive of and to represent, precisely because of its scale across space and time (cf. Morton’s “hyperobjects” idea). It’s one thing to write a song about “four dead in Ohio,” but how do you create a lyric out of a graph of ice core samples?
The main thing I’m interested in with #CliHiFi is seeing how artists present, mediate, transform and/or reflect on climate change through music. It’s necessarily going to be different from journalistic or scientific engagements with the issue. But I think it’s also crucial that we have humanistic, aesthetic engagements with climate change if we’re going to do anything about it. Or, as i think in my more cynical moments, if we’re going to figure out how to live amidst it when we do nothing and things get even worse.
The only other thing I’d say is that I’m interested in all sorts of ways we might understand music engaging with climate change. Lyrics that are directly about it in some way is just one option. I also think that something like the album “Rausch” by Gas is a good example of music that captures the feeling of climate anxiety without necessarily addressing it directly.
I’d say the album “Chords” by Ellen Arkbro could also be read as Cli-Hi-Fi in the way that it uses sound to urge listeners to rethink their relationship between physical environments and the sounds made possible in relation to them. (Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room” would be a model text for that sort of thing.)
Anyway, that’s a sample of my thinking on the subject. It’s not anywhere near my main area of research, but it is something I find myself contemplating a lot these days.
And I did just think of an idea for an essay on an element of all this which I would call “Uneasy Listening.” So I might have to write that!
I’d be happy to keep chatting with you and others worldwide on the topic.
All best,
Brian
Brian Rejack
Associate Professor
Department of English
Illinois State University
brejack@ilstu.edu
How musicians from Billie Eilish to Lana Del Rey are grappling with climate change
https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/19/21028133/climate-change-music-2019-charts-billie-eilish-lana-del-rey-play
2019 was the year ''climate change'' charted
Billie Eilish, the 18-year-old singer-songwriter redefining pop stardom, recently spoke with the the LA Times about her climate anxiety. It’s taken the form of bad dreams, spooky lyrics, and high fashion: a week earlier, Eilish wore a characteristically oversized “No Music on a Dead Planet” tee to the American Music Awards.
“We’re about to die if we don’t change,” she told the paper.
A year ago, such a blunt message from one of the biggest acts in the world would have seemed like an aberration. In April, Ryan Bassil at Vice argued that musicians weren’t ready to tackle the climate crisis — and wouldn’t be for the foreseeable future. Combining climate activism with a music career isn’t a lucrative stance, especially at its extremes: Coldplay, which announced it will not tour until concerts are “actively beneficial” to the environment, stands to lose hundreds of millions in ticket sales. Activism isn’t always aesthetically pleasing, either. As Bassil noted, artists like Bono have made songs about collective action seem chronically “corny and overly sincere.” Or, as Grist put it back in 2009, the Venn diagram of “songs that suck” and “songs that are green” is basically a circle.
But it has since become clear that this was the year that the changing climate began changing music, with many major recording artists streaming their interpretations of the eco-apocalypse. It was, at times, extremely corny. In April, YouTube rapper Lil Dicky released “Earth,” a star-studded and totally unlistenable call to action. In July, The 1975 made an eponymous “song” that’s just a Greta Thunberg speech set to a tinkling piano. More often, though, musicians have found their own unique way to give voice to the experience of living at the end of days — to living, in other words, in 2019.
Eilish is arguably the most famous and outspoken artist on the climate crisis so far. In September, Darkroom / Interscope Records released the music video for “All the Good Girls Go to Hell.” For a haunting three minutes, Eilish dons the perspective — and wings — of a fallen angel who lands in the goopy darkness of a La Brea-like tar pit. As the creature stalks the seared streets of Los Angeles, Eilish whispers her refrain, “Hills burn in California / my turn to ignore ya / don’t say I didn’t warn ya.”
In case the foreboding lyrics or fiery visuals don’t do the trick, the YouTube video description shares Eilish’s message in clear-cut prose: “A note from Billie,” it proclaims. “The clock is ticking… take it to the streets. #climatestrike.”
Grimes, the experimental recording artist, has also been writing hymns for a horsewoman of the apocalypse. She described her forthcoming album, Miss Anthropocene, as the tale of an “anthropomorphic Goddess of climate change.” The first singles dropped in November. On “My Name is Dark,” Grimes sings about how “imminent annihilation sounds so dope,” while still asking God to “un-fuck the world.”
Not everyone is so high-concept. In August, Lana Del Rey released her long-awaited album, Norman Fucking Rockwell. On “The Greatest,” Del Rey put a joyfully nihilistic spin on our current catastrophe. She spends the majority of the song mixing the personal and the universal with lyrics like, “the culture is lit and if this is it, I’ve had a ball / I guess I’m burned out after all.” But at the end of the track, the former New Yorker gets explicit about her new Southern California surroundings: “LA is in flames, it’s getting hot” — an idea reinforced by the cover art, which depicts Del Rey on a boat just off a smoldering shore.
At this point, it feels like you can find climate change in everything. Fans retrospectively assign apocalyptic meaning to their favorite songs all the time. Take “Year 3000” by the Jonas Brothers (a Disney-fied cover of an earlier hit by the British band Busted) which can be understood as a message of climate optimism: your descendants will “live underwater,” but the time-traveling brothers assure you that “your great-great-great granddaughter is doing fine.”
Sometimes, it’s the artists who add new meaning to their own music. At the Global Climate Strike in New York City, thousands watched Jaden Smith perform a short musical set. He introduced his 2017 song “Icon,” which is about gold teeth and owning your own record label, as something that “really goes to show what we all have to be in this world — and in the environmental community — in order to make a difference.”
This may have been the year that climate change had a musical moment all its own, but the message has been emanating from our speakers for decades: What is “All Star” if not a reminder of just how long we’ve known about climate change? As Smash Mouth sang in 1999, “The ice we skate is getting 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 never get bored.”
As musicians develop new ways to address the climate crisis, listeners won’t get bored, either. And maybe, at Eilish’s behest, some will continue to take their climate anthems to the streets.
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