2019 was the year climate change charted
0Reported today on The Verge
For the full article visit: https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/19/21028133/climate-change-music-2019-charts-billie-eilish-lana-del-rey-playlist
Reported today in The Verge.
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