Shifting Baselines: Conveying Climate Change in Popular Music

ABSTRACT

Popular music is a generation-specific zeitgeist, while music affords otherwise unobtainable engagement with environmental themes. Despite being the most widespread form of music there is a paucity of scholarship on climate change vis-à-vis popular music. In turn, this article explores how popular music may provide a soundtrack that narrates the rapidity of contemporary biophysical change. Approaches of conveying versus communicating climate change in music are considered across a spectrum of musical forms, from contemporary and historical popular music to contemporary classical music and sound art. The article applies the framework of shifting baselines to music engaged with environmental change in order to formulate a closer relationship between objective and quantitative intergenerational biophysical change and subjective and qualitative socio-cultural change. To cease losing track of such inexorable degradation, the article speculates on future musical forms that may obviate such intergenerational myopia by conveying and/or communicating the unprecedented rapidity of biophysical change.

KEYWORDS:

• Popular music
• popular culture
• environmental narratives
• environmental communication
• climate change
• shifting baselines

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editors and reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Josh Wodak http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5095-2910