Rocking Out, Greening Up

People are all about “going green” these days. Everything from eating organic foods and using eco-friendly house products, to reusing shopping bags and picking up trash when seen lying on the ground, are examples of this. Rock ‘n’ rollers, too, have gone from “bad boys” (and girls) wearing oh-so-stylish leather jackets to putting on “friendlier fibers” and donating CD and concert sale revenues to help clean up our loving planet.

Radiohead, for example, made a rather bold move with the release of their 2007 CD “In Rainbows.” Granted, it was only offered as a digital download “for any price you want to pay” in order to make piracy a useless action for their album, however, it reduced packaging costs, which I’m sure Mother Earth was smiling about. If you wanted a tangible copy of the CD, you needed to drop $82 on the discbox, but this did include both CD and vinyl versions of the bands album (Frucci).

A more purposeful example of a rock artist helping the environment is KT Tunstall. "Stop completely twatting your planet. We haven't got anywhere else to live," the Scottish rocker barks on the Global Cool website. (Tilden). Tunstall also had her house and recording studio built using “reclaimed wood, sheep's wool for insulation and solar panels for energy. To offset the carbon footprint from the making of her first CD, she planted 6,000 trees in Scotland” (Tilden). What's more, Tunstall claims: "I use biodiesel fuel on my buses and carbon-neutralize the audience's journey to gigs” (Tilden).

Reverb, a Portland, Maine-based environmental organization, also helps artists such as Alanis Morissette, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Barenaked Ladies, to go green. Reverb invited greening coordinators to gather up broken and used strings from the stage after gigs to be recycled by a New Hampshire company into jewelry” (Williams).

Rock on, you green-goers, you! Continue to give Mother Earth something to sing about!

References

Frucci, Adam. "Radiohead offers new album for whatever you want to pay". Gizmodo-The Gadget Blog. May 28, 2009 .

Globalcool.org

Tilden, Tommi. "Rock the Green". The Daily Green. May 29, 2009 .

Williams, Alex. “Have Guitar, Will Recycle”. Fashion and Style. May 29, 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/15/fashion/15reverb.html