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1 Pop Goes the Planet Global Music and the Environmental Crisis A long line of cars motored slowly down the road. It was a burning hot day in the high desert of Washington State, July 30, 2011. The metal pilgrims inched toward their holy shrine, the Gorge, a natural amphitheater on the Columbia River. Soundgarden’s faithful fans would be ritually released that night, their troubled minds and aging bodies forgotten with the assistance of grunge metal’s high priests. The fans’ liberated spirits would soar above the Gorge, floating on dry ice vapors and a haze of cannabis smoke. The cars were still crawling past young women in yellow safety vests as the first act took stage. Event staff directed each vehicle to the next parking attendant, shouting questions back and forth: ¿Dónde quiere estacionar ése? Cars, SUVs, and large recreational vehicles rolled onto the burnt grass field as the Meat Puppets opened a four-band show in the Gorge below. The band led with “Plateau,” a song many fans interpret as a condemnation of suburban sprawl and environmental degradation. Not tonight, however. Few had come to hear the Meat Puppets. The grunge devotees had gathered for Mastodon, Queens of the Stone Age, and Soundgarden. Clearly, most of them had never heard of the Meat Puppets, a 1980s punk band that inspired 1990s grunge. The crowd was too young to know pre-grunge punk, but too old to still be cool. Fading tattoos and receding hairlines betrayed their liminal age and status. The grunge bands they loved were either defunct or beginning reunion tour afterlives, as was Soundgarden. That same afternoon, two hundred and fifty miles to the west, folk artists Sharon Abreu and Michael Hurwicz, otherwise known as the Irthlingz, performed two sets of songs about environmental conservation 14 Chapter 1 on Orcas Island. A small crowd—enthusiasts of various ages—had gathered to celebrate their collective struggle to preserve Turtleback Mountain. They raised $18.5 million to preserve Turtleback for future generations of hikers, bikers, flora, and fauna. Musicians and artists like the Irthlingz played an essential role, as did Orcas resident Gary Larson, of “Far Side” fame, who dedicated a cartoon to the effort and provided substantial funding for Turtleback Mountain preservation. As members of the San Juan Preservation Trust enjoyed a feast of barbequed salmon, salad, watermelon, freshly baked bread, and cookies supplied by the Orcas Village Store, the Irthlingz performed “Wild, Wild River,” “The Food Chain Song,” and other original songs. They also borrowed a few tunes from close friends, including Tony Ultimate’s “Calling the Salmon Home” and “Solar Energy Shout” by the Banana Slug String Band. Meanwhile, back at the Gorge, the Meat Puppets were mostly ignored. A few audience members stopped drinking, smoking, and shouting long enough to exclaim, “Hey, those guys are covering Nirvana!” They got it backward: Nirvana covered the Meat Puppet’s “Plateau,” not the other way around. But the sentiment was stupid and contagious, to paraphrase Cobain. Tweets repeating the mistake made the rounds as the Meat Puppets rounded out their set with the folk classic “The John B. Sails,” conspicuously repeating, “I want to go home” and showing apparent punk derision for their disinterested audience. The fans of nineties grunge gathered at the Gorge appeared to be, for the most part, as oblivious to the Meat Puppet’s musical slight as to their own musical roots. Rock eats its ancestors. Other than a few music scholars, critics, and bookish fans, each generation assumes that their beloved music and musicians represent a radical break from those that came before. Later, each assumes that the next generation’s musical “crap” will lead to rock’s inevitable decline. Of all rock traditions, this cycle of exaggerated change is most constant. The ecology of rock is built on a foundation of forgetting. As the Columbia River rolled by, tamed by one of the world’s largest hydrological control systems, reveling rockers at the Gorge probably did not reflect on the musical history of that amazing place either. As we will see in Chapter 3, it was in the Columbia River basin that Woody Guthrie composed songs like “Roll On, Columbia,” now Washington’s official state song. If fans were oblivious to the fact that the Meat Puppets had inspired grunge in the late eighties, they probably did not give too much thought to Guthrie’s musical life there in the forties. Reliving the glory days of grunge, the audience...

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