Rock music goes green?
Monday, June 18th, 2007 by Nigel
I think you have to admire the musicians who are putting their names to Live Earth, music’s global Gore-fest. It’s not so much the committment to playing at a humungously huge world-wide gig. A twenty-minute set is hardly going to kill them. It’s the fact that by appearing there they’re opening themselves up - for the rest of their careers - to charges of hypocrisy.
Rock music is hardly the most eco-friendly genre. There isn’t much that’s green about private jets, limos and hotel-rooms, or more importantly about a genre that persuades thousands of people to travel hundreds of miles to come and see you play. Adam Gardner, guitarist in a band called Gutser, set up a non-profit organisation called Reverb with his ecologist wife Lauren Sullivan. Reverb tries to help bands who want to be greener work their way through the maze of issues around carbon offsetting, recycling and low-emission transport.
Everywhere you look there’s waste. Just one example Adam points to: after any show there is a huge pile of batteries - barely used - which are just thrown away. They’re used to power microphones, FX pedals, tuners. They might have only been used for an hour, but they’re discarded after each show. Adam Gardner reckons a band routinely gets through about fifty a night.
Music equipment designers have never had to consider green issues like that before - but they’re going to have to now. Because now they’ve nailed their colours to the mast, rock musicians are going to be duty-bound to live up to a new set of standards and start refusing to accept such waste… thinking about whether they really do need to fly a hairdresser out with them, or to keep that limousine idling outside the venue. They’re going to have to figure out how to exist without that pile of half-used batteries.
I wonder if they’ve all thought that through or not…
Photo by MReece.
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