ABSTRACT
While music is an important medium through which people communicate about environmental issues, it remains one of the least studied, and research on eco-musical communication has paid little attention to contemporary popular music. This chapter addresses that gap by examining how artists in two emerging electronic musical genres – “eco grime” and “solarpunk” – use both music and language to convey sustainable futures. In this chapter, the authors take a musicolinguistic approach to illustrate how both genres combine language and music to convey diverse visions of sustainability in a climate-changed future. Eco grime artists use shifting musical instrumentation (e.g., moving from heavy machinery to flowing water) and distorted representations of language (e.g., synthetic speech or vocal samples reconfigured to unintelligibility) to imagine a post-human future of total natural harmony. Solarpunk artists draw on new age and ambient music, natural field recordings, ethereal vocals, and multilingual references to renewable technologies, to imagine a progressive future for humanity as one part of a sustainable natural world. Both genres imagine positive futures for Earth, but their divergent use of language and music signals a marked difference in the status of humanity in their respective visions: marginal or even extinct in eco grime, and one part of an interconnected web of natural life in solarpunk. These emerging genres challenge the perception that musical environmental communication happens primarily through classical, folk, and art music, and, through their use of music and language, they produce “the club” as a space of sonic environmental activism.
