How we’re supposed to get from “I got horses in the back” to climate change is beyond me, and I’ve wondered if Lil Nas X — who is a joker on Twitter — just said it for the laugh, and the confusion and ridiculous theories that’d emerge as people tried connecting the two. Can you see it? Still, even if Lil Nas X isn’t serious, and the most popular song in the history of radio isn’t about the climate crisis, reading the statement as a joke still says something about the absurdist gallows humor this generation has adopted in the face of overwhelming climate dread. (That’s the best I could do — if Lil Nas X wanted us to make ourselves crazy figuring out this statement, it worked!) Either way, that wasn’t the only time Lil Nas X took to Twitter to talk climate.
If Billie Eilish and Lil Nas X are representing Gen Z, Lana Del Rey’s sadgirl vibes are emblematic of at least a segment of the Millennial generation that came before them. But Del Rey’s take, too, is different than what we’ve seen in music before now. Most of the topics in Del Rey’s most recent album, “Norman fucking Rockwell,” explore the standard pop music fare: love, heartbreak, a failed relationship. But in “the greatest,” as we listen to Lana singing, “L.A. is in flames, it’s getting hot,” and “I’m facing the greatest / The greatest loss of them all,” we realize that these mundane dramas are set against a pretty somber backdrop. There’s more climate pop music in the pipeline, too, most notably from Grimes, the queen of alt-pop, who is releasing an entire album about the climate crisis. She doesn’t have quite the degree of mainstream popularity as Eilish or Lil Nas X — not many do — and her whole image is also based around being kinda… out there. From her absurd workout regimen and extreme creative process to creating a genre for herself called “Faé,” Grimes wouldn’t be Grimes if she wasn’t being a total weirdo. But she’s a culturally significant weirdo, with hundreds of thousands of followers and over 2 million monthly listeners on Spotify. A few months ago, Grimes announced her upcoming album will be titled “Miss_Anthr0pocene,” saying in her Instagram announcement that “each song will be a different embodiment of human extinction as depicted through a Pop star Demonology.” The goal of the project? “make climate change fun (lol..??)” What, exactly, this will accomplish is hard to say, but that might be the point — there doesn’t have to be a point anymore. Pop music has advanced its climate game way past the 1975 putting instrumental under a Greta Thunberg speech and calling it a song. Lil Nas X, Billie Eilish, Lana Del Rey, Grimes — none of them are making a point or trying to mobilize people around an agenda. They’re just artists doing what artists have always done: articulating and expressing the emotional experience of being alive in a given time and place. And part of what it means to be a young person right now is grappling with the beginning of your life likely coinciding with the end of life as we’ve known it. Or as Grimes puts it: “Welcome to the end of the world.”This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Pop music and the climate apocalypse — how 2019 changed everything on Sep 20, 2019.