A Climate Anthem Needs to be Singable

[flwyd]

The climate change podcast How to Save a Planet did a recent episode about social movement anthems and why the climate movement is missing one. There was a bunch of great material in the episode, but as someone who grew up around both folk music and social movement awareness, I felt like they missed the mark on a really key feature of a movement anthem. And it got me wound up enough that I wrote a whole long comment to the show about it, reproduced below.

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I enjoyed the movement song digging that Kendra did around We Shall Overcome and I am excited that you did a show all about finding a good climate anthem. It's much needed!

I think the criteria you laid out are missing a key ingredient: the song needs to be easy to teach to a crowd of people, who can then constructively sing along even if they forget some of the words. A climate anthem needs the key message in an easy-to-remember chorus, and ideally the verses should be easy to sing as call and response. It also needs to work well a capella, or at most with a single guitar. A song with a catchy tune and a danceable beat is probably not a good candidate, because the band won't be at every march. Independent of the lyrics, the clip of All Star by Smash Mouth was the only one played on the show that sounded like it could succeed musically as an anthem.

I also found Dr. Redmond's assessment of the lack of a climate anthem interesting. She proposed that popular culture is tied to Black culture, but the environmental movement has for a long time not been connected to that Black culture. I think that's only part right: it's not the connection to Black popular culture that's missing in much of the environmental movement, but a lack of connection to group singing in general. Singing in church plays a big role in Black communities (and played an even bigger one in the civil rights era). This isn't just a black thing though; socialist groups and labor unions that were predominantly white sang march- and hymn-derived songs like Solidarity Forever at meetings. (Solidarity Forever is, of course, based on an abolitionist hymn and thus connected to the Black struggle for freedom. But it could spread through camps of European immigrants with no connection to African American communities or culture.) With both church and labor union membership way down among left-leaning middle-class white folks, most of us are simply out of practice at singing in groups. And the proliferation of recorded music in the last half century has meant that if we want to hear a song we usually don't need to sing it ourselves.

Comments

[willow_red]

While not really what you’re asking for here (a simple, easy-to-remember song that an untrained crowd can sing), you might be interested in a project that my friend’s husband started

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While not really what you’re asking for here (a simple, easy-to-remember song that an untrained crowd can sing), you might be interested in a project that my friend’s husband started <a href=“ https://choirsforclimate.com/”>Choirs for Climate</a>. He’s a Scottish composer who mainly does sacred music for church choirs, but also donates free music for various social causes. I don’t know that there’s anything here for you to use, but if you didn’t know about it before, now you do.

[flwyd]

Oh, that's a cool project. Thanks for sharing!

[altamira16]

I left a comment on liv's post recently about the attempts to get more diversity in environmentalism with climate justice efforts that may be of some interest to you.

As far as music goes, the older hymns were on a pentatonic scale, and they were easier. People were singing to themselves while they worked the field, and we are not going to do that in these stupid open office floor plans. Since we have been working at home, have more people been singing to themselves? 🤔

[flwyd]

Since we have been working at home, have more people been singing to themselves?

The TikTok crowd got very into sea shanties, which were written for a very open office.

Work songs kinda only work if you've got a big open space like a field or an assembly line. Work songs don't work in the modern white-collar office space because everyone's doing something different. I know I sing along under my breath to Grateful Dead anthems at my desk in an open office, but nobody else knows that's what I'm listening to.

[siderea]

With both church and labor union membership way down among left-leaning middle-class white folks, most of us are simply out of practice at singing in groups. And the proliferation of recorded music in the last half century has meant that if we want to hear a song we usually don't need to sing it ourselves.

Yes. And as an additional consequence of this – which constitutes a massive cultural shift to preferring music produced by expert professionals – our musical vernacular has changed. Modern popular music tends hard to being vocally virtuosic: wide ranges, sophisticated syncopations, chromaticism, daring leaps, lung-suckingly long melismas, blindingly quick gorgias, and complex structures. This is dramatic, affective, and attractive, but it's not easy for mere mortals to sing along to. It's not meant to be. It's meant to sound dazzling when someone really, really good sings it.

So we as a culture have developed a taste for music that's not sing-along-able. We have a set of taste values at odds with the properties of music that make it sing-along-able. Modern people awash in rock, hiphop, rap, pop, "adult alternative", etc tend to find music that's sing-along-able to sound somewhat alien, strange and archaic. It gets called "folk" because folk is often so-called because of its (sometimes) not being virtuosic.