Check out this story by Ben Sisario in today’s New York Times about Brooklyn Bowl, the new rock club with bowling alley (or bowling alley with rock club) that will soon open in New York City. Sisario’s story contains some interesting examples of the move toward green rock shows, and mentions the non-profit Reverb, which helps plan more sustainable music events. Their website opens up a whole world of ideas about marrying a rock imagination with an environmental imagination. (Check out their partners list, including artists Kelly Clarkson, Beastie Boys, Aimee Mann and more – along with an impressive list of businesses and non-profits; some videos; and their current projects, which include some rock shows that would otherwise leave a substantial negative footprint.) Different kinds of rock have worked out different kinds of political commitments (such as gender quality, racial justice, sexual diversity, human rights, spiritual freedom) at different points in the developments of subgenres (such as punk, glam, progressive, funk), but it is fair to say that a lot of the “rock scene” has a long way to go on green issues. These kinds of themes provide natural links to theological awareness, and move us a step closer both to a realization of a more thoroughly rockish existence, and to the invention and valorization of a new definition and way of life for rock itself. The more this happens, the more we will see how as in so many other ways, Catholic women religious were prophetically anticipating the future in their turn to earth ministries (see Sarah McFarland Taylor’s excellent book Green Sisters) which we may find will overlap substantially with the theological functions of green rock cultures. That’s research yet to be undertaken.

Some readers of this blog will hate me for it, but I’m going to paste in below a link to Little River Band’s environmentally positive, and lavishly constructed and performed, tune “Cool Change.” Back in the 1970s and early 80s, LRB was all over rock radio. And it seems to me they captured a rockish and theological mood in their cry: “Now that my life is so prearranged / I think that it’s time for a cool change” …

Why not remember this rare example of a rock ballad that is not about an anxious romance? “The albatross and the whale, they are my brother.”

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York