Is the streaming era any greener than the heyday of physical media? Can a vinyl record be made without petroleum? What’s the carbon footprint of an arena tour or summer festival?
The latest book by Dr. Kyle Devine, Dean of UWinnipeg’s Faculty of Graduate Studies and Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies and Sciences, will appeal to anyone who has ever wondered about the intersection of music and climate change.
Verso Books published Recomposed: Music, Climate, Crisis, Change on July 14. An excerpt can be read on Longreads.com.
Recomposed shows how musicians around the world are leveraging the cultural power of music to foster climate awareness and action. The book asks if the music industry—which, like every industry, protects its bottom line—can transform itself amid the ongoing climate crisis.
“It focuses on people who are offering technical solutions, mainly in the record industry,” Dr. Devine said. “These are really great, hardworking people who rightly believe in what they’re doing.”
The road to Recomposed
Dr. Devine writes about the political economy and political ecology of culture. He is a sought-after expert on the music industry’s carbon footprint.
His first book, Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (2019), is an environmental history of the record industry that shows how recorded music has been a significant exploiter of natural and human resources.
The previous book avoided easy answers and was short on hope. This one is all about answers, and although it’s not optimistic, it is hopeful.
Dr. Kyle Devine
“I started out thinking I was writing a book about climate and crisis, and eventually realized I was writing a book about capital and class,” he recalled.
The book was a crossover hit. Academics, music critics, industry figures, and musicians lauded it for drawing attention to the energy intensiveness of streaming, and for contesting the notion that ‘music digitized is music dematerialized.’
Reviewed by The New Yorker, excerpted in The Guardian, animated on YouTube, and featured on the Switched On Pop podcast, Decomposed received several awards and is now being translated into Japanese.
The response to Decomposed led Dr. Devine to conversations with people inside and outside of the music industry who were working to change the status quo.
“There were basically two kinds of people reaching out to me,” he said. “There were those who would say, ‘Hey, I’m making records out of sugar, I’m making solar-powered stereos, check out what we’re already doing.”
“The second group of people—journalists and students, primarily—they appreciated the book, but they also didn’t want 300 pages describing the mess on our hands,” he continued. “They wanted to know how to clean it up. They wanted a list of the top five things that they could do to be more environmentally friendly.”
Dr. Devine also started getting invited to sustainability panels at international events organized by music companies and advocacy organizations.
These conversations led him to write Recomposed, which explores solutions that range from the individual to the institutional level.
He described Recomposed as an attempt to be constructive while avoiding trite solutions.
“The previous book avoided easy answers and was short on hope,” Dr. Devine said. “This one is all about answers, and although it’s not optimistic, it is hopeful. It’s all about answering the ‘what do we do’ question.”
Writing the book involved fact-finding trips to Norway, the Netherlands, and Hollywood. Dr. Devine profiles EarthPercent, a music industry climate foundation co-founded by Brian Eno; enrolls in a course on carbon literacy for the music industry; and investigates a platform to help musicians finance solar energy.
“I followed the story around essentially wherever it led me,” he said.
He also talks to manufacturers and inventors who are trying to make vinyl records more sustainable by recycling old vinyl or making discs from plant-based plastic.
“Those solutions are the first two-thirds of the book—how music is changing its own basic situation,” Dr. Devine said. “The third section opens out into cultural solutions. It gets into the territory where people will say, well, musicians have platforms, artists have voices, music communicates ideas and touches hearts and minds, it can raise awareness and lead to climate action.”
Throughout, Dr. Devine maintains a focus on labour, systems, and structures, and a healthy skepticism toward pat answers.
“There is a tendency in a lot of this type of work to become the problem that it set out to solve,” he explained. “If it’s not asking questions about certain fundamental underlying economic forces, it can get stuck on a hamster wheel.”
Recomposed is available locally at McNally Robinson Booksellers, or online from Verso Books and Penguin Random House Canada.
