The Jukebox in the Garden Nature, Culture and Literature 07 General Editors: Hubert van den Berg (Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznaýn ) Axel Goodbody (University of Bath) Marcel Wissenburg (Radboud University Nijmegen) Advisory Board: Jonathan Bate (University of Warwick) Hartmut Böhme (Humboldt University, Berlin) Heinrich Detering (University of Göttingen) Andrew Dobson (Keele University) Marius de Geus (Leiden University) Terry Gifford (University of Chichester and University of Alicante) Demetri Kantarelis (Assumption College, Worcester MA) Richard Kerridge (Bath Spa University College) Michiel Korthals (Wageningen University) Svend Erik Larsen (University of Aarhus) Patrick Murphy (University of Central Florida) Kate Rigby (Monash University) Avner de-Shalit (Hebrew University Jerusalem) Piers Stephens (University of Georgia) Nina Witoszek (University of Oslo) The Jukebox in the Garden Ecocriticism and American Popular Music Since 1960 David Ingram Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010 Cover image: www.morguefile.com Cover design: Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3209-5 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3210-1 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010 Printed in the Netherlands For my parents, Roy and Eileen Table of Contents Introduction 11 Part One: Theories of ecocriticism and popular music 1. Popular music and environmental ethics 23 1.1 Humanist Marxism: Ernst Bloch 23 1.2 Postmodern musicology: Susan McClary 28 1.3 Post-structuralism: Deleuze and Guattari 30 1.4 Critical realism and political ecology 33 1.5 Popular music and structural homology 34 2. Popular music and eco-aesthetics 37 2.1 Political modernism and popular music 37 2.2 Postmodern aesthetics and popular music 40 3. Popular music and ‘nature’ 47 3.1 Popular music, authenticity and ethical naturalism 47 3.2 American popular music and the pastoral mode 52 4. Eco-listening 59 4.1 Immersive listening and the deep ecological self 60 4.2 Rhythmical entrainment and New Age ecologism 65 Part Two: Ecocriticism and American popular music since 1960 5. Blues and country music 73 5.1 The blues and environmental ethics 73 5.2 Country music and rural authenticity 79 5.3 The farmer in country music 82 5.4 The cowboy in country music 89 5.5 Country music and wilderness conservation: John Denver 92 6. Folk 97 6.1 The rise of environmental folk music: Pete Seeger 97 6.2 Folk music and environmental protest since the 1960s 110 6.3 Folk music and the ‘American Primitive’ 114 8 7. 1960s rock and R’n’B 119 7.1 Sixties rock music as electronic pastoral 121 7.2 Biocentrism in sixties rock music 130 7.3 Environmental apocalypse in sixties rock music 134 7.4 Anti-pastoral as dystopian satire: Frank Zappa 139 8. Country rock 143 8.1 Country rock and the return to ‘roots’ 144 8.2 Bob Dylan’s nervous pastoral 153 9. Post-1960s rock, R’n’B and hip hop 159 9.1 Environmental protest in 1970s African-American R’n’B 159 9.2 Rock music and environmental protest since 1970 164 9.3 Anti-naturalism in American punk rock 169 9.4 Indie rock: a return to ‘nature’ 174 9.5 African-American hip hop and environmental protest 177 10. World music 185 10.1 World music and globalisation 185 10.2 Eastern music and environmental consciousness 192 11. Electronica 201 11.1 Popular music and environmental sound 205 11.2 Ambient electronica and the simulation of nature 207 11.3 Organicism and electronic dance music 210 12. Jazz 217 12.1 Jazz and ecological awareness 217 12.2 ‘Living Music’: Paul Winter 222 12.3 ‘Earth Jazz’: David Rothenberg 225 12.4 Jamming with nature 229 Afterword 233 Recordings cited 243 Works cited 249 Index 265 I would like to thank the following for helping me in various ways along the way: Scott Slovic, Geoff Ward, Terry Gifford and Axel Goodbody for their support, and the two anonymous referees at Rodopi for their generous and insightful comments. Early drafts of the book were first aired at conferences organised by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment at Boston University (2003), University of Oregon, Eugene (2005) and the University of Edinburgh (2008), the British Association for American Studies at the University of Oxford (2002), the University of Aberystwyth (2003) and Manchester Metropolitan University (2004) and at the University of Queensland (2002). My thanks go to the organisers of these excellent conferences. I acknowledge the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a Research Leave grant in 2003-4. An early version of part of Chapter 6 was published as ‘My Dirty Stream: Pete Seeger, American Folk Music, and Environmental Protest’ in Popular Music and Society. 31.1 (2008): 21-36. An early version of part of Chapter 7 was published as ‘Go to the forest and move: 1960s American rock music as electronic pastoral’ in The Forty-Ninth Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal of American Studies. 2 (Spring 2007): 1-16. Introduction The rise of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s saw the notion of ecological crisis enter popular debates on the natural and built environments. This book traces the various ways in which American popular musicians reacted to such developments. The historical context is well known. In 1962, biologist Rachel Carson raised fears of environmental catastrophe by drawing attention to the use of pesticides in industrial agriculture. Fears of overpopulation were highlighted with the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb in 1968. A series of environmental accidents, including the Santa Barbara oil spill in January 1969 and the fire on the Cuyahoga River, Ohio in June of the same year, added to public concerns. For the New Left, opposition to the Vietnam War turned into a wider belief that capitalism was waging war against the Earth itself, while some members of the hippie counterculture responded to the social and political crisis by setting up rural communes. As the 1970s saw this back-to-nature movement transmute into New Age environmentalism, the first Earth Day in April 1970 signalled the beginning of the institutionalistion of the modern environmental movement (Rossinow 1998: 276). The ensuing decades have seen a catalogue of environmental issues brought to popular attention, from hunger, nuclear power, species extinction, the destruc- tion of the rainforests and ozone depletion to climate change. American popular musicians have responded to these concerns in a variety of ways. Environmental issues have become the subject matter for popular music, and songwriters and composers in a wide range of styles, from folk singer Pete Seeger to jazz saxophonist Paul Winter, have lamented, and protested against, what they see as the degradation of the Earth. The Jukebox in the Garden explores how environmental themes have been represented in popular song. It also investigates the growing link between music and ecophilosophical thought, according to which music, amongst all the arts, has a special affinity with ecological ideas. Unsurprisingly, much explicit theorising about music and ecology has come from advocates of ‘art’ music, with composer John Cage most influential in such debates. Cage rejected ‘program’ music, 12 The Jukebox in the Garden in which composers seek to imitate either the literal sounds of the natural world or the subjective effects that particular landscapes have on them. Instead, music was for him an attempt to imitate what he understood to be the inner workings of the natural world, rather than its external appearances. He quoted the Indian art critic Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, who wrote that the traditional role of the artist in Indian art was ‘to imitate Nature in her manner of operation’. Coomaraswamy had taken this phrase from the medieval theologian St. Thomas Aquinas: imitation, in Aquinas’ neo-Platonist sense, meant not copying the external appearances or concrete details of the natural world, but its inner, essential forms (Cage 1961: 194; 1968: 31). Cage drew on such philosophical ideas about nature and ecology as a creative model for both composition and performance. Asserting in the early 1970s that ‘Music IS Ecology’, he developed revolutionary notions of musical form influenced by Taoist and Zen Buddhist conceptions of the natural world (1981: 229). In effect, instead of writing and playing music about ecology, Cage wanted to make ecological music; his music aspired to be a form of ecophilosophical speculation in itself (Ingram 2007a). The popular musicians discussed in this book tend to be less explicitly theoretical than art composers like Cage. Popular music, as musicologist Theodore Gracyk points out, tends to arise ‘from the materials, not from theory’ (1996: 119). Nevertheless, as we will see, ecophilosophical speculation is also emerging in American popular music, particularly under the influence of both deep ecology and New Age thinking about the relationship between human beings and the rest of the natural world. Deep ecology has influenced composer, clarinettist and philosopher David Rothenberg, who has written most extensively about music and ecological thought. As we will see in Chapter 12 on Jazz, improvisation is for Rothenberg the key to his artistic strategy of ‘looking for nature right in the music’ (2001: 7). Musicologist Charles Keil’s Born to Groove (2006) is also influenced by deep ecology, and provides another sustained exploration of the idea that playing music can be a route to ecological awareness. More unashamedly New Age thinkers on music and ecology include the British composer and music therapist June Boyce-Tillman and the American ‘neo-pagan’ Jesse Wolf Hardin, otherwise known as Lone Wolf Circles. This book is, in part, an exploration and critique of such speculations on the role that music can play in raising ecological awareness.