Version française ici.

Guest editor: Élodie A. Roy, PhD

The call

Popular music, especially from the 1960s onwards, has often been a site and medium of both protest and disenchantment, with musical and sonic material expressing discontentment with living conditions, charting alternative (or utopian) visions, as well as dystopian, apocalyptic or nihilistic representations of the past, the present and the future. Within popular music, ecological themes have for a long time had an important presence in various aesthetics and scenes, from folk and countercultural mythologies to veganism in straight edge and crust punk, via song forms, global pop icons, metal and electronic music. Popular music can contribute to raising social and environmental awareness through the dissemination of songs, performances, etc., as well as through long-term initiatives such as the setting up of educational programs, of new, sustainable production models, or sonic projects dealing with a variety of soundscapes (“natural”, industrial, urban, etc.).

Yet, the popular music industry – and its capitalist logic of the commodity – is vastly complicit with global processes of extractivism, destruction and waste outsourcing, especially in the Third World. It contributes to environmental damage in significant yet, until recently, often under-examined ways, relying as it does on highly polluting materials, such as the iconic, and famously toxic, vinyl. Beyond popular music and its fetishized material culture, digital streaming and AI too have a hefty environmental cost, as does the live music business. The recording industry has also, of course, historically relied on the labor of a range of anonymous workers around the globe (including women and, historically, children) – beyond the mediatized and visible face of performing artists: the sector’s “social ecology” is just as crippled with paradoxes.

In recent years, the awareness of the recording industry’s toxicity – in physical and digital environments – has given rise to new materially driven forms of activism, leading to the imagining and creating of new technical objects. Here, environmental action takes place at the level of materials themselves, with artists seeking, for instance, to create nontoxic records as an alternative to vinyl discs, considerations on the impact of live, amplified events on the surroundings, or consciousness-raising through experiments with soundscapes. There has been a great deal of innovations in popular music venues and festivals that aim at reducing their ecological footprint, and/or refuse the gigantism of the global touring industry, relocating the performance and consumption of live music.

“Sustainability” has indeed become a recurring element in the promotion, production and organization of popular musical events. This paradigm, however, can easily be appropriated by capitalist conglomerates, stages within the events they finance or sponsor, and whose carbon imprint is often disastrous. It can also serve new forms of neoliberal governmentality, such as “eco-friendly” gestures centered on individual agency, while sidestepping necessary structural change.

This proposed special issue of Volume! will address the rich and complex entanglements of popular music and the environment by surveying current and historical ecological practices, discourses and representations. Drawing from a range of methodological perspectives (political economy, sociology, cultural studies, history, aesthetics, sound studies, etc.), contributors are invited to pay attention to both historical and contemporary eras around the world. Objects may include (but are not limited to):

• Historical approaches to popular music and the environment

• Geographical/geopolitical approaches: popular music industries, extractivism and ecology in the Global South

• Environmental cost of popular music infrastructures (physical, live, digital)

• Resources, labor practices and infrastructures of the popular music industry

• Materiality: sustainable practices and innovations in popular music performance, production and consumption

• New green politics (social ecology, degrowth, ecofeminism…) in contemporary popular music ideologies and practices

• Environmental activism and popular music education

• Sonic ecologies, soundscapes in popular musicking

• Ecology and utopian/dystopian subcultures, representations of the anthropocene/capitalocene in popular music

• Defence of the environment / protest against green politics in popular music

• Individual case studies of performers, albums, projects, artists, etc.

Practical information

• Contributors are invited to submit papers (in French or English) to the special issue’s editor, Élodie A. Roy e.a.roy@riseup.net, and to Volume’s editorial board (redaction@seteun.net), by 30 December 2025.

• They shall follow the journal’s guidelines, which can be found on this page: http://journals.openedition.org/volume/1655

• Contributions will undergo the double-blind peer-review process, described here: http://journals.openedition.org/volume/1655