WHILE FAR FROM A HOUSEHOLD NAME ON OUR SHORES

Sakamoto’s been involved with green pursuits since at least 1994, when he first moved away from plastic-jewel-case CD packaging to biodegradable paper sleeves. And he’s traversed some mighty terrain since then—as he puts it, “turning ego into eco”—which includes his latest release, Out of Noise, featuring two haunting tracks (“Ice” and “Glacier”) inspired by a Cape Farewell Project trip to Greenland viewing imperiled arctic glaciers.

Sakamoto—whose music encompasses classical, experimental, film scores, ambient, pop, jazz and electronica—is at the forefront of a larger movement that’s afoot. The vibrant relationship between the worlds of music and that of environmental concern has unquestionably gained momentum of late, and has seen genuine far-reaching and -ranging adoption (and not mere feel-good, get-on-the-bandwagon lip service to sell more tickets and product) by artists as diverse as Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Melissa Etheridge, the Roots, Pearl Jam, Moby, Bonnie Raitt, the Dave Matthews Band and Green Day. Good for the Earth? Absolutely! Good for your ears? Ditto that, and perhaps coming this summer, in a carbon-neutral manner, to a concert venue near you.
RETURNING TO SAKAMOTO’S ACHIEVEMENTS, before widening the gyre to include larger industry eco-trends and best practices, it’s easy to be inspired by his actions. Consider the following: In 2001 he used a small windmill and solar panel—both portable, of course—to generate energy during a tour; by 2005 he had completed two 100-percent carbon-free tours of Japan. He also used biodegradable cups, plates and garbage bags; set up flyer kiosks where patrons could choose the materials they wanted rather than be presented with a bundle that would end up in the trash; he also requested upcoming concert attendees to utilize as much public transportation as possible. What then remained of carbon emissions were offset with carbon-credit purchases from alternative energy companies. In 2006 his Japanese record label, commmons (the extra m is for music), became the nation’s first green label, operating its administrative activities using alternative, renewable energy, with all packaging completely carbon-free the following year.

And there’s more: Sakamoto established moreTrees in 2007 as a means to conserve and plant trees in Japan and abroad. Audi Japan sponsored his fall/winter 2009 European tour, in support of Out of Noise, to offset carbon emissions (the just-prior Japanese tour even included a carbon-offset cost in the ticket price). Out of Noise, as mentioned earlier, includes two mesmerizing compositions inspired by his Cape Farewell Project trip. Sakamoto includes ambient sounds recorded both above and below the sea—you discern the cry of seabirds and dripping of meltwater within a gently cascading soundscape of acoustic and electronic instrumentation: it’s both ominous and soothing/meditational in an Enoesque “music for …” kind of way, a musique concrete decrying cataclysmic climate change. (Read PopMatter’s insightful review of Out of Noise.)

But Sakamoto can’t do it alone. Other artists (those listed above and many more) and organizations are hoisting high the green banner when it comes to music. Reverb, a nonprofit formed in 2004 that works with green rock tours, regularly sets up eco-villages with environmental displays and activities at shows, provides carbon offsets for attendees, displays eco-slideshows on venue jumbotrons, assists with biodiesel fuelings and waste recycling/reducing, and lots, lots more. MusicMatters, a for-profit, is another leader, practicing “Effect Marketing.” It describes this as “[g]oing beyond just promoting awareness of a cause or product … incorporat[ing] initiatives that encourage consumers to take action and produce quantifiable results on important and environmental and social issues.” MusicMatters works with musicians as well as a wide variety of companies (e.g., Annie’s, Ben & Jerry’s, Clif Bar, Nature’s Path, New Leaf Paper, Utne, Working Assets).

In the greater scheme of things (and doesn’t it always come to that?), do these ventures make a real impact on the environment? According to Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at Carnegie Institution and as reported in The New York Times, “In general, these offsets do some good, in the sense they usually help fund projects that are beneficial.” He goes on to state that the direct benefits are hypothetical as carbon offsets defer future emissions, not what’s being produced by the tour at that time. But these tours, as pointed out, are also utilizing other creative means to curtail emissions (Radiohead’s use of low-power LED concert lighting a few years ago also comes readily to mind) and their green evangelical/educational component is highly significant, which, couched in a pop-culture setting and given a grand stage, certainly doesn’t fall on deaf ears.

From “out of noise” a powerful message can emerge, turning “ego to eco”—it’s as true coming from Ryuichi Sakamoto as it is from Willie Nelson or Green Day. And the audience, potential change agents all, is listening.

—Allen

“PRINCE OF DARKNESS WENT TO PLYMOUTH,

“THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS” was emblazoned across a guitar of Woody Guthrie’s, and when you think “protest singer,” Guthrie might come immediately to mind, as might Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Bono, Steve Earle, Rage against the Machine, Public Enemy, just to name a few; but I’d like you to add Spirit to that list, especially as realized on their masterfully odd, equally compelling  Twelve Dreams release (their last with the original five-piece lineup). The album may not have the tub-thumping histrionic humor of Spinal Tap and their goofed-up sonic assault on global warming, but it has a refreshing charm, powerful appeal and poignant message, particularly the anthemic “Nature’s Way” (let’s make this song a rallying cry to clean things up!) and “Animal Zoo,” a barrage on consumerism and toxicity, which brought to mind those puffed-up and spongey future humans in the animated classic WALL-E—more on this in a bit.

Spirit were an eclectic group of talented musicians who made some amazingly influential sounds: their hybrid sound included jazz, rock, proto-glam, space opera, folk and electronic/experimental (they were one of the first bands to use a Moog synthesizer). The band formed in Los Angeles in 1967 and included vocalist-guitarist Randy California (nee Wolfe), his father-in-law (!), drummer Ed Cassidy, plus vocalist-percussionist Jay Ferguson, bassist-vocalist Mark Andes and keyboardist John Locke. California picked up the “California” tag while playing with Jimi Hendrix in New York—there were two Randys in the band and Hendrix needed to differentiate. When Hendrix departed for England seeking fame and fortune, California, then 15, was too young to tag along—but already a talented guitarist. The family moved back to the West Coast and Spirit was eventually born (their original moniker, Spirits Rebellious, was taken from a Kahlil Gibran book). The band existed in numerous incarnations for 30 years until California’s drowning death in 1997.

Twelve Dreams, the band’s fourth album, is by no means a simple rehash of flower-power ethics and us/counterculture vs. them/establishment positioning. It meanders like a dream, each composition reveling in its own oneiric logic and fantastical structure—you never quite know where you’re going to go, but it’s all good, there’s enough melody to latch onto and to power you safely through. Neil Young recommended that the band work with producer David Briggs, and it was a smart choice. In the reissue liner notes, California writes that “[d]uring the five months we took recording Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, David became a sixth member of the band. David inspired and guided us to our very best studio performances.” Twelve Dreams is a great iPod/headphones download/album, but you can also blast it “old school” through speakers and enjoy the quizzical looks of friends, neighbors and cohorts!

So what gives it a green hue and makes it Green Dynamind fodder for discussion? I have to return to the key tracks “Nature’s Way” and “Animal Zoo.” I first discovered “Nature’s Way” as a cover version by art-rock super-collective This Mortal Coil on their Blood disc (4 AD, 1991). I loved this version but knew I’d have to hear the original. “I wrote this song up in San Francisco while doing a gig at the Fillmore West,” writes California in the liner notes. “Written in the afternoon, I can’t remember another song which flowed out more quickly. [...] Over the years, so many people have related how this song has helped them through difficult times. It is for the benefit of ourselves and others that the message in many Spirit songs has not diminished with the passage of time.” Over a gently strummed guitar, with choice bits of percussion (including timpani and cowbell) and added vocal harmonies, California sings:

It’s nature’s way of telling you something’s wrong,
It’s nature’s way of telling you in a song,
It’s nature’s way of receiving you,
It’s nature’s way of retrieving you,
It’s nature’s way of telling you
Something’s wrong.

He goes on to rhyme “summer breeze” and “dying trees,” before closing with the reminder, “It’s nature’s way of telling you something’s wrong, something’s wrong, something’s wrong.” Boy, we totally get it, there is a resounding power in this simplicity—and it’s time to spread the word!

What I love about the next song, “Animal Zoo,” and why it sparked that cinematic synaptic flash of WALL-E, is its refrain of  ”Oh no, something went wrong, well, you’re much too fat and a little too long.” All this over an uptempo rock beat that opens eerily like a number U2 had copped years ago in Dublin and blueprinted into its stadium-friendly rumble. California drives the eco+health-point home with:

Looking at my body, I’m slipping down,
The air I breathe, the water I drink
Is selling me short and turning me round.

The album-closing twelfth dream, despite the title “Soldier,” is far less sardonic: “You have the world at your fingertips, no one can make it better than you,” Spirit informs, and empowers, us. And that’s how I’d like to close, noting the power of song, of ideas/tropes, of a creative/artistic endeavors—maybe not changing the world in a heartbeat, but uplifting the spirit (no pun intended!) and raising awareness, even if only a listener here, a concert goer there, one at a time and yet forming a chain, growing a network, building a meaningful pathway to change—so Satan doesn’t take the credit and we take the blame.

Addendum
In a recent issue of The Nation, Bill McKibben and Lennox Yearwood Jr. weighed in with their take on the “most-listened-to piece of environmental protest music of all time.” Their take? Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology).” Read the full story.

—Allen

‘Well, it’s 1969, okay, all across the USA’

ALSO SPRACH JAMES OSTERBERG, aka Iggy Pop, on the Stooges’ eponymous first LP, released 40 years ago—the year the Eagle landed on the moon, the Woodstock music festival celebrated peace and love, John and Yoko held a few “Bed-Ins for Peace,” Ohio’s Cuyahoga River burst into flame, Charlie Manson and “family” ran murderously rampant, Vietnam War protests spread, the Chicago Eight were tried and the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) passed in Congress.

Looking back—after the initial wow factor wears off of just what an amazing year it was in matters social, political, scientific, cultural and environmental—what true change was wrought that has impacted the world today? How firmly was the establishment actually shaken? And keep in mind that while August 1969’s Woodstock spelled peaceful coexistence for the most part, December 1969’s death at Altamont displayed a darker side of the hippie dream. From a green perspective, where it’s always better to be a carpe diem realist than a laissez faire optimist, a lot of positive change was truly wrought, a good portion of the establishment was legitimately shaken. Nineteen-sixty-nine was more than just okay.

LET’S TAKE A LOOK AT NASA’S IMPACT on the environmental movement. Sure, the cold war space race was an integral part of our no-holds-barred one-upmanship versus the USSR—tactical nuclear missiles launched from orbit and pinpointed on terrestrial targets was one part science fantasy, one part How soon can we actually do this before the enemy does? In 1969, NASA successfully carried out four Apollo missions (9-12), putting humans on the moon twice—in August with Apollo 11, and in November with Apollo 12. It was a remarkable achievement; at one point, NASA employed 400,000 people while OCDing on achieving JFK’s dream of putting a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s.

But it was the breathtaking view of Earth from space, our fragile blue sphere in an infinite sea of blackness, that altered perceptions. Craig Nelson, in his excellent Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon (New York: Viking, 2009), puts it this way:

Project Apollo and the first Moon landing would have a profound effect on another aspect of science, in a very unexpected way. The speaker at one NASA scientific banquet was British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, who had predicted in 1948 that, once a photograph of the Earth had been taken from space, a whole new way of thinking about the planet would result. As he told the attendees: “You have noticed how, quite suddenly, everybody has become seriously concerned to protect the natural environment. It happened almost overnight, and one can understand how one can ask the question, ‘Where did this idea come from?’ You could say, of course, from biologists, from conservationists, from ecologists, but after all, they’ve really been saying these things for many years past, and previously they’ve never even got on base. Something new has happened to create a worldwide awareness of our planet as a unique and precious place. It seems to me more than a coincidence that this awareness should have happened at exactly the moment man took his first step into space.”

James William Gibson, in A Reenchanted World (see our book review post on this fine tome), reports how this brand of reverence was carried decades forward:

At the time of the Apollo moon missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s, astronauts did not typically express their feelings in public. But in 1983, when American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts met in Paris to form the Association of Space Explorers, they spoke of their “enhanced reverence for the Earth as a result of their space flight experience.” A committee of the new organization began work on a massive collection of interviews with space explorers, presented together with an array of beautiful photographs. Three years later, it was published as The Home Planet.

Monumental things were happening on the Earth, too. With the shock-and-awe flashpoints of an 800 square-mile-wide oil slick forming off the coast of Santa Barbara, thanks to aging burst pipes of an oil platform (it would wash ashore and cover 30 miles of beaches), on January 31, 1969, to Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River bursting into flame on June 22, 1969 (two bridges on the river were almost destroyed by the flames), environmental concern escalated—What the hell are we doing to our planet? Is the space program not just about beating the Ruskies but finding a future way off our soon-to-be-ruined, polluted-beyond-help Earth?

Time, aboard the 1969 nostalgia train in 2009, succinctly captures this sentiment in 1969: Woodstock, the Moon and Manson: The Turbulent End of the ‘60s (New York, Time Books, 2009):

The 1960s are often portrayed as a period of utopian dreams and revolutionary schemes, all of which failed to materialize. But among the lasting legacies of the period’s social activism is our modern understanding of the importance of the environment, which was parked in part by the woes of 1969—even if the sparks emerged from a polluted, burning river. …

By late October 1969, Time was reporting on “a new conservation passion: using the law as a weapon to help save the environment … the nation’s rising awareness of ecology has moved scores of judges to listen.”

So, in the nascent Nixon era, we have the genesis of the EPA and OSHA, the passing of NEPA in Congress, the passing of the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act, the founding of Friends of the Earth and activists proposing Earth Day (the first Earth Day celebration took place the following year, April 22, 1970—a 40-year anniversary to be celebrated next year). Not a bad track record for the first year of a new administration mired down in an unpopular war and surrounded by social upheavals both generational and ideological. Sound familiar?

While the music festival at Woodstock showed that we could get along, at least the youth of the era, aided by “long hair” music and an openness to alternative lifestyles (yes, we’re talking drugs, free love and Eastern thought here), issues such as the Vietnam War and its vociferous protesters (let’s throw in Lennon’s “All we are saying is give peace a chance”), the cold war, the Tate-LiBianca murders, the stabbing death of Meredith Hunter at Altamont, and the Black Panthers (founder Bobby Seale was one of the Chicago Eight) and struggle for racial equality all shouted from the mountaintop that there was still a lot of divisiveness out there.

Fortunately, with the triumphs of Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins et al., a bigger picture was emerging, literally, an in-focus view of how we’re all in this together, on this small, fragile blue sphere, surrounded by unfathomable darkness. We needed to start sharing resources, to come to some sort of an understanding and to get along, especially when disruptive differences threaten us all (and human nature dictates that that will always be in the mix). What we say, what we believe, what we do matter a great deal—think global, act local, as tired a cliché as it is, should really be a part of our DNA; the connection cannot be denied, the golden rule a global in effect, the good things in life shared, or as John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in The Good Society: “[The essence of the good society] is that every member, regardless of gender, race or ethnic origin, should have access to a rewarding life. … There must be economic opportunity for all …”

Then and now? Where are we today? Some things change, some things stay the same. A lot of us get it (I’d like to think a majority), are whole-heartedly committed to betterment and to change, the collective is effective (be it 400,000 mud-soaked Woodstockers 40 years ago sharing their dreams or dedicated members of 350.org preparing for the International Day of Climate Action on October 24, 2009). An invitation to the “good society” should indeed be open to all; we should all be part of a great dialogue, be it discussing health-care reform, getting the nation back to work, terrorism, water rights, Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, the melting ice caps or—let me close with this—the breathtaking images the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope are capturing. Let’s reach for the stars! It’s 2009—and more than just okay.

—Allen