From Joni Mitchell to Bo Burnham: music and Eco-anxiety
One of my earliest memories (though I struggle to place it in the timeline of my life, likely around four or five) is driving to Florida with my mother and father loudly singing Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell. A few years later, I would first be introduced to the concept of climate change. For as long as I care to remember, I have been socially minded, but climate change, global warming, and preservation of our natural beauty have always been my main topic of interest and care. Eventually, though, this immense care was replaced with fear and anxiety. Year after year of school taught me that the planet is are heating up, sea levels are rising, and the health of our planet is not improving. They are getting worse. The mind can only take so much before it stops caring until hope and care are replaced with nihilism and anxiety. I am not alone, youth worldwide are reporting feelings of anxiety, betrayal, doom, and nihilism. Environmentalism music is a long-standing tradition going back decades. However, while the climate crisis is reaching its most crucial moment and there is more awareness about environmental issues than ever before, environmental music has changed from upbeat protest music to anxiety-ridden songs. Eco-anxiety is a growing issue in our society that is under-studied, and it can be critically analyzed through the lens of the music that eco-anxiety has created. As climate change has become a more prominent issue and increasingly abstract, this abstractness has aided in the rise of eco-anxiety and hindered the creation of music about climate change that depicts anything beyond the nihilistic zeitgeist.
Some of the earliest environmental movements we would recognize today were pioneered and supported by musicians. Artists like Pete Seeger and Woody Gutherie were the first mainstream musicians to take up environmental causes within their work and beyond. In the 1960s and 70s, influenced by the Rachel Carson book Silent Spring, environmentalism had become a legitimate and large-scale movement. Concerns about the blatant pollution destroying America and Canadas environments were now a large-scale issue. Rivers were polluted, insects and birds were dying out due to pesticide usage, and urban sprawl was destroying the local landscape. Beyond the lack of a concrete understanding of emissions causing climate change, many concerns are the same as today. This was the context Joni Mitchell wrote her environmental-themed song Big Yellow Taxi in.
A classic protest song, it served as a way to express anger with the rate at which the natural world is being destroyed. Big Yellow Taxi is one of the most consequential environmental-themed songs ever written. It has served as a way to educate and express anger with the lack of environmental protection for decades. It has been rerecorded and covered hundreds of times and continues to be incredibly influential in environmental movements. This upbeat song complains that ‘They’ve paved paradise’ to build a parking lot and about the damage that DDT is causing to the environment and its life. For this era of environmentalism, concerns are real, and they are observable. Trees were being torn down for parking lots, bees and birds dying off; these are understandable concepts. There are also local concerns that someone on their drive home listening to the song on the radio can relate to and understand. However, the climate crisis is not so straightforward; it cannot be explained or conceptualized so simply. Instead, as Bo Burnham does, it can be explained with an overwhelming sense of dread and anxiety.
Born in 1990, Bo Burnham, at the age of eighteen, would become the youngest ever comedian to sign a deal for a comedy special with Comedy Central. His comedy was offensive and often vulgar, incredibly targeted towards online youth, and defining what gen Z and millennial humour would become. In 2016 he would begin experiencing panic attacks on stage so he stepped away from live comedy and comedy specials. His 2021 comedy special Inside was his first comedy since 2016. A collection of songs and skits Inside looks at the modern zeitgeist and the emotions many youths are feeling in their day-to-day lives under Covid-19 and the world in general. The entire special is an anxiety-ridden nihilistic ballad about how many youths view the world. The songs address the climate crisis as well as other topical issues. Nevertheless, throughout the entire song, there is no hint that things are getting better. It is a common feeling among the youth that Burnham’s song Funny Feelings encapsulates. The youth are more anxious about climate change than ever before, and they are more nihilistic about it. The West has been spared in parts from the climate crisis but as the crisis develops, the mental illness and nihilistic acceptance will grow as well. A generation raised constantly thinking about climate change has abandoned hope, and the more they think about it, the worse their mental health gets direr and direr. Climate change is no longer as simple as parking lots being built or chemicals killings the birds and the bees; it is an existential threat to the planet and to society as we know it. Burnham sings “The planet’s heating up/What the fuck is going on”. Later in the special Burnham sings “You say the ocean’s rising/like I give a shit/You say the whole world’s ending/honey, it already did/You are not gonna slow it, Heaven knows you tried”. Nihilism and anxiety have become common feelings when discussing climate change, an under-discussed problem. A generation raised to think they have to solve the climate crisis has given up.
Compared with the upbeat protest of Mitchell, Burnham presents a more nihilistic modern take on the environmental disaster. The hope of early environmentalists is gone, replaced instead with anxiety and nihilism. As climate change worsens, the burden on existing mental health infrastructure will be pushed to its limits. Suicides among youth are now one of the leading causes of death for youth in western countries, and it will only worsen as the effects begin to become more noticeable. My parents still listen to Big Yellow Taxi, and at every climate protest or rally I have ever been to, someone has referred to the song. For my generation though, the nihilistic eco-anxiety of Bo Burnhams Inside might be a more accurate portrayal of how we feel.
