The Greatest Ecologically And Environmentally Aware Songs

 

Going "green" may be a sadly necessary part of existence and not just a fad in the early 21st century, but the real groundwork for being environmentally progressive was of course laid in the late Sixties and early Seventies -- an "ecology" movement that paved the way for today's awareness. Here are a sampling of the best "green" oldies: classic hits and misses that spoke to the need to protect the only home we've got.

1. "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)," Marvin Gaye

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For anyone else, this would be a sole career peak, but for Marvin Gaye, "Mercy Mercy Me" was only one of a trilogy of hits pulled from his landmark 1971 LP, What's Going On: the title track, about generational strife, the closing (and self-descriptive) "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)," and this gem, which utilizes the exact same heavenly lamentations and jazzy arrangements of its brethren yet fades off into a choir of anguished moans, as if to signify that the Earth was already ready to give up her dead. It usually gets less play than the title track, as the Sixties ecology movement has faded away, but look for it to resurge on players everywhere, and soon.

2. "Don't Go Near The Water," The Beach Boys

This is the last bit of advice you'd expect The Beach Boys to dole out, but it's actually a clever way of repurposing the old cliche into an environmentally conscious plea -- one suggested by their new management to get them back on the charts after the mental flameout of leader/resident genius Brian Wilson. It didn't work, exactly, but not for lack of trying: this appealingly skewed little number keeps just enough of that old magic to satisfy fans, yet listen carefully and you'll find a musical background as queasy as the polluted oceans it laments. And who better to mourn the loss of the beach as a social hangout?

3. "Pollution," Tom Lehrer

The master of blackcomic parody does his usual Harvard-educated best at essaying the title problem in this mid-Sixties favorite. "Throw out your breakfast garbage, and I've got a hunch / That the folks downstream will drink it for lunch," he sings, and as always, it's a joke that sticks in the craw. Cleverly designed as a warning for visiting foreigners, this little ditty mainly sees the problem as another sign of urban decay. Little did we know the ozone layer wouldn't make that kind of distinction.

4. "Big Yellow Taxi," Joni Mitchell

"They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot," sings Joni on this 1970 hit, her first and among her most endearing. And while she typically veers off at the end into the sort of romantic musings that make love seem like an absurd dance, don't be fooled by her angelic voice: she recognizes decay in all its forms. "Took all the trees, put 'em in a tree museum / And charged the people a dollar and a half just to see 'em," she sings of a real botanical garden in Hawaii, of all places. Which is also where she spotted the parking lot, creeping up on a breathtaking range of mountains.

5. "Where Do The Children Play?," Cat Stevens

This leadoff track on Stevens' genre-defining 1970 LP Tea For The Tillerman takes a mildly defensive approach at first, agreeing that technology, innovation and progress can be wonderful things. But when Cat gets to the chorus and asks the title question, he's really asking us what price we're willing to pay for such convenience, not just in a interdependent "spaceship Earth" way, but in our very souls. Some might argue that children can play in asphalt-covered playgrounds, which were all the rage at the time, but what child wouldn't get something more out of, say, a forest?

6. "Earth Anthem," Turtles

This latter-day cover was released on a concept album that found the sunshine-pop group pretending to be a different fictitious band on each track (take that, Sgt. Pepper!). Actually, this closing number was supposedly performed by all the "bands," and it sounds like it: a entire choir of Turtles coming together at the end of a variety show to deliver a serious message. Written by folkie Bill Martin in the mid-Sixties, it has a more spiritual and defiant air than any of the others on this list, suggesting that the Earth itself, as our home, takes on a certain Godlike status -- a life-giving deity that its inhabitants should be willing to die for.

7. "Hungry Planet," Byrds

Harder and funkier than you might expect from the guys who invented folk-rock, this late-period Roger McGuinn classic speaks from the POV of the beleaguered Earth itself, explaining that space exploration (among other things) led to a depletion of natural resources. It plays less dry than that sounds, especially with the tasty little acoustic solo.

8. "Only So Much Oil In The Ground," Tower Of Power 

Well, well, well. A warning about finite oil reserves from a big-band R&B outfit? In 1975? Yep, even before the first energy crisis had fully taken hold, the band behind "So Very Far To Go" was declaring, "We just ain't got sufficient fuel" and concluding that "Alternate sources of power must be found." They were not rewarded with a hit for their prescience, but the bottomless greasy club funk here would fuel a whole fleet of Willie Nelson tour buses.

9. "Whose Garden Was This?," Tom Paxton

With an intro that proves his importance to the burgeoning singer-songwriter movement (Jim Croce's "Operator" owes a lot to it), Tom Paxton's "Whose Garden Was This" is nonetheless a searing indictment of our own wastefulness, imagining a future where flowers are extinct things you've merely read about, like dinosaurs. Paxton's signature sarcasm, which is not leavened by an ounce of pressure-relieving humor, is a stark wake-up call. So why did no one wake up?

10. "Tapestry," Don McLean

Done with his usual attention to the minutest poetic detail, Don McLean's "Tapestry" (not to be confused with the Carole King song of the same name) probably works a little too hard to paint a picture of the cosmos with lines like "And every dawn that breaks golden is held in suspension / like the yolk of the egg in albumen." There's none of the epic yet gentle sweep of "Vincent" and "American Pie" in this poesy. Yet there's a real righteous anger in the way he sees man's inhumanity to his planet, especially when he speaks of "smoldering cities, so gray and so vulgar / as not to be satisfied with their own negativity / but needing to touch all the living as well."

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11. "Saltwater," Julian Lennon

This single (a hit in the UK) dates from 1991, which puts it over a decade outside the scope of this site. But Julian is John's son, sounds just like him in fact, and damn if he didn't create a sad anthem that sounds just like something the ex-Beatle would have done circa Double Fantasy... that is, if he'd known the skies were disappearing. Along with veteran producer Bob Ezrin, Julian shrewdly subverts the utopia of a song like "Imagine" while keeping the empowerment theme, resulting in a hymn for those who've decided to stop being so selfish with their bit of the earth. "I have lived for love / but now that's not enough / for the world I love is dying / and now I'm crying." Hence, the saltwater.

12. "Crazy Horses," The Osmonds

No, really. "Crazy Horses" isn't just a jaw-dropping rocker totally out of place in the catalog of this, the original lame boy band, it's also a knock on smokestacks and their output, the "Crazy Horses" of the title. Well, see if you can explain a line like "What a show, there they go smokin' up the sky / Crazy horses all got riders and they're you and I" or the admonition to "see what they've done" and then stop them from multiplying. Of course, you can just enjoy it as a really good glam-rock song and still be just as amazed it came out of this camp.

13. "Nature's Way," Spirit

The lyrics to this minor 1970 hit by the band known for "Got A Line On You" are mostly one couplet, repeated again and again: "It's nature's way of telling you something's wrong / It's nature's way of telling you in a song." Okay, so maybe they think they speak for all of nature, and maybe they rhyme "soon we'll freeze" with "dying trees," as if that explained everything. But it's atmosphere that drives this message home, a combination of gentle acoustic picking and plaintive vocals that would dominate countless, less talented Seventies arena-rock bands.

14. "Pollution," Bo Diddley

Although it's done in the gutbucket bluesy funk style of his early-Seventies work, and thus bears no traces of his signature hambone beat, Bo's take on the environment is more enjoyable than many. Of course, the lyrics are the usual singsong couplets you get with Bo, which means that his solution to the problem is largely reduced to not throwing garbage in the street. Still, when you consider the rise of, say, corporate pig farm, he may not be too far off the mark.