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The Climate Crisis Has a Music Problem
Perfect music is teaching us to hear the silencing of difference as harmony
The climate crisis is a crisis of coordination. Full stop.
Addressing the climate crisis requires every facet of modern society to act in concert. Governments at every level, labor, industry, civil society, and culture must remain responsive to one another and to the nonhuman world on which human life depends.
The challenge is monumental, and our capacity to organize the people, institutions, knowledge, and resources required to meet it is being systematically undermined by the corruption of the very symbolic order through which we understand our lived experience and make it intelligible to one another.
That corruption is the crisis of perfect music.
The graph above shows the tempo movement of the top five Billboard hits for each year from 1960 to 2025. Each blue line represents the tempo range of one recording. Each orange mark represents a recording with one unchanging tempo. Across the 50 top-five recordings from the 1960s, every recording showed measurable movement in tempo. From 2016 through 2025, 35 of 50 showed no movement in tempo at all. Put another way, 70% of the top five hit songs from 2016 to 2025 had machine-perfect time, a time no human…
