SIMPLY LONGING FOR WILDERNESS.

FICTIONS OF NATURE PRESERVATION IN WESTERN POP MUSIC

Resumo

The individual and social longing for an intact and untouched nature is a core element of environmental crisis dynamics. To what extent is the reinvention of an authentic nature and of compatible lifestyles a theme of pop music? Can cultural production promote lacking communicative capacity to moderate environmental conflicts and sustainable living? This article reflects the societal dimension of pop music to examine its communicative potentials in processing the problem of environmental degradation and nature preservation. It is particularly the Western trope of wilderness, the idea of an unaltered, virgin nature, that deserves interest. With its origins in the 19th century land ethic, it still today offers an entry
to renegotiate fictions, norms, dreams and futures of nature in times of major environmental destruction and apocalyptic disasters. The selected songs show recent attempts to reconcile wilderness and modern life, staging the colonialist narration of the Noble Savage – the Indian as a wise steward of nature. These and similar ideas of wilderness, indigenous knowledge and compatible lifestyles address the core postulate of sustainability for global and intergenerational justice. The analysis of textual and sound regimes not only offers a hybrid mirror of political communication on sustainable development through politainment; it additionally permits to discover latent structures of social systems by unveiling conflict dynamics which are mostly ignored in the public discourse.