From the Mind of Trevor Stone

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.

You put your penis in
You take your penis out
You put your penis in
And shake it all about
You do the hanky panky and you turn yourself around
That's what it's all about