Let’s face it, kids, your parents have been messing with the planet. They knew a long time ago that too much oil, too many cars, too much plastic, and too much air travel was going to exhaust planet Earth. But they went ahead anyway because it was easier, and you’re going to inherit the mess.
Might as well drown your sorrows in music, right? That’s the aim of this selection of songs, where each singer in their own era talks about the environmental catastrophe that has set in, about choosing the bicycle over the car, about the daily struggle or about feeling helpless. Marvin Gaye’s sweet soul song “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)”, written in 1971, was already addressing the subject. This was before the first oil crisis, before the subject even really appeared in the papers, but it was definitely already there:
Ah, things ain’t what they used to be
Where did all the blue skies go?
Poison is the wind that blows
From the north and south and east…
A year earlier, Joni Mitchell sang about the ever-expanding asphalt in her song “Big Yellow Taxi”, one of her most important songs to this day:
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hot spot
[…]
They took all the trees, and put em in a tree museum
And they charged the people a dollar and a half to see them
In France, it was Nino Ferrer, that eternal melancholic, who sang “La Maison Près de la Fontaine”, a haven of peace bathed in silence and birds’ nests, that ended up becoming a sad and grey council estate. Closer to home, Björk warns of the threat of a virus, and Mos Def talks about water wars. However, since there is no question of giving up, we can also sing of the Sun with Bob Marley, the green grass with Pete Seeger and above all move forward in chorus with Daniel Balavoine:
Il faudrait retrouver
Les oiseaux blessés
Ils sont bien quelque part
On peut les sauver
Vaut mieux tout recommencer
On peut pas se suicider…’
We should find
The wounded birds
They’re out there somewhere
We can save them
It’s better to start over
We can’t kill ourselves…