Kim Fry rallies musicians to take a stand on energy transition and the climate crisis

Kim Fry is a co-founder and board member for Music Declares Emergency Canada along with her daughter Brighid Fry from the indie rock band Housewife. Music Declares Emergency is a group of artists, music industry professionals and organisations that are looking to create solidarity in declaring a climate and ecological emergency and demanding an immediate governmental response to preserve life on Earth. Kim has worked on energy efficiency and climate but has also spent a lot of her career as an elementary school teacher, a union activist, a staunch climate justice activist and environmental campaigner. She’s worked for a number of environmental organizations, which is part of the reason she’s found herself devising strategies for Music Declares Emergency, which is moving to get a seat at the policy table by using the specific capacities of music to move people. Our conversation covers a number of different things that we’re both curious about in relation to these capacities. But we also dwell with the material problems associated with the music industry at a time of escalating climate emergencies. How does the music industry contribute to climate change and what should be done to correct some of its impacts? Thinking in these terms helps us move beyond the tempting, but also fairly limiting, logic of condemning particular artists for their hypocrisy, their ostentatious lifestyles, etc., and into a conversation about the kind of music scenes and spaces of meaningful local music participation we’d like to see. What kinds of structural and infrastructural changes might have to be put in place for that to be realized? We’re also concerned here with problems around genre, what kinds of music resonate, which tones seem out of touch with the complexity and urgency of the crisis created by an unaccountable fossil fuel industry and infrastructure… And we can’t help but land on the fact that it’s extremely complicated: there is undeniable power and influence in celebrity, and there is an inarguable concentration of power in a still quite monopolistic music industry. Transforming these things takes time that we do not have. The pace of change we need is more like a metal song, but what we’ve got is plaintive folk. It’s not an easy problem to solve, this stuckness, but Kim encourages us to remember the meaning of the word folk – it’s meant to be the music of the people. Just as pop is meant to be the music that is popular at a given time. This might give us an opening for thinking about the emergence of a new music nomenclature for conveying the climate breakdown that is coming if nothing stands in its way.