Earthololgy Records:
Making green CDs
BY MEREDETH BARZEN
“Yeah, I really like to do music, but there’s
no way I could make 100 pounds of crap.” This privileged peek
into the mind of Craig Minowa (of rave-worthy local band Cloud Cult)
was revealed in a phone interview on a miserably hot summer day
that just reeked of global warming. It also happens to be the discord
that drove the musician to create Earthology Records, one of the
first eco-friendly record labels in the country. Earthology and
Cloud Cult represent rock ’n’ roll with a green guitar
pick; music with an environmental conscience. Normally, “environmentalist
music” would imply a vast catalogue of environmentalist pamphlets
set to pre-recorded waterfall noises. These albums of dubious musical
quality would sit comfortably in the back bins at Target, while
the water nymphs and baby pandas that inevitably adorn their inserts
would glance optimistically at every hippie walking by. But here’s
the twist: Earthology churns out records that are both environmentally
and musically sound: Cloud Cult’s music is solid, complex,
listenable, challenging and dense, in addition to a host of other
positive adjectives. In short, it sells.
Musicians are an idealistic people. This comes
as no surprise, considering the fact that their job is to look at
life and making qualitative statements about it, both verbally and
nonverbally. So, naturally, when they come across something that
piques their interest—say, a love, a life, or a cause, perhaps—they’re
probably going to sing or play songs about it. Ever since Woody
Guthrie picked up a guitar and cloaked socialist propaganda in an
adorable little patriotic song (take a look at the oft-neglected
fifth and sixth verses of “This Land is Your Land”—evidently,
Guthrie was not a fan of the New Deal), musicians have been using
their work as a means to educate the masses. You know the drill:
a musician picks a pet cause and takes one of two options. They
either tell people about it until they’re blue in the face—taking
the form of singing about it, talking about it or writing it on
their hand (ahem ahem Chris Martin). Or, they sing about normal
things like love and dancing and teen angst at a smelly outdoor
concert where they donate some or all of the proceeds (does that
figure include the $4 bottles of water?) to the cause. Of course,
raising awareness about a problem or soliciting money to fund a
potential solution are both necessary and gallant gestures. But,
as they say, the proof is in the pudding.
Earthology Records runs on pudding. The record
label has taken environmentalism one step further by focusing not
on the music, but on the packaging. The entire CD replication process,
from beginning to end, hurts the environment, mainly because of
the use of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) in the production of both the
CDs themselves and the jewel cases in which they reside. PVC, says
Minowa, is “the most toxic plastic on the planet,” and
will soon be banned in many countries.
The conflict between Minowa’s environmental
conscience and the reality of the music industry first presented
itself when the time came to release his first album, Cloud Cult’s
Who Killed Puck? “It just became really overtly obvious that
I would have to figure out how to do it myself if I wanted to actually
feel comfortable creating that many albums,” Minowa says in
a reflective tone. Initially, it seemed like an either/or situation;
either he wrote and produced the music he loved and distributed
it on toxic substances, or he relegated music to a hobby and slept
well at night. It seemed Minowa wasn’t willing to accept either
of those options. So in true DIY fashion, he created Earthology
Records.
But how would his product sell, given the massive
stigma that exists toward environmental music?
“I think that environmental music and
environmental musicians have been sort of pigeonholed over time
in the sense that when people think of an ‘environmental musician,’
they think of the hippie jam bands or sort of a folk musician”
says Minowa.
“The vast majority of people, I think,
assume that it’s not going to be all that great to listen
to … It’s not a whole lot different from how people
view Christian music, for example, where it’s music with a
really blatant message.”
Indeed, it seems that many people don’t
trust music with such a teleological tone to it. An audience wants
music to exist on its own rather than be a vehicle for something
else; they want their art to be existential rather than functional.
Let’s call a spade a spade: when music and art are used to
make a message more palatable and effective, it’s usually
just called propaganda. And propaganda is so not rock ’n’
roll.
Minowa has another theory on why polemical music
often fails: the tendency toward hypocrisy.
“It kind of surprises me how many ‘environmental
message products’ there are out there that are produced on
such horrible materials, you know? I mean, I’ll run into environmental
T-shirts that are printed on standard Hanes conventional cotton.
And cotton is the most pesticide-intensive crop,” says Minowa.
“And so I think that’s part of how people got turned
off by this whole ‘preaching from the soapbox’ thing,
too, because we’ve all seen it too many times where when that
person gets off of the soapbox, they’re just like us, and
have their own flaws.” Environmental message T-shirts printed
on conventional cotton, Scott Stapp of Creed getting arrested for
public intoxication; is there any sincerity left in the world?
So, once again, how does Minowa sell this music?
His solution is deceptively simple: stay away from explicit references
within the music itself. Cloud Cult’s records, while complementary
to Minowa’s environmental message, are not the medium through
which the message is spread. That task is left to Earthology Records
and Minowa himself. Just as many of Christian rock’s most
popular music comes from “Christians in a band” rather
than “Christian bands,” Cloud Cult succeeds because
it is good music from “environmentalists in a band”
rather than an “environmental band.”
Which is not to imply that Minowa made a strategic
decision to separate his message from his music. For him, it was
more of an evolution of priorities: “I didn’t feel like
it was necessary for me to explicitly preach that message [environmentalism],
but that it was better to focus my intentions on really living it
and building our business model on it.” That business was
Earthology, and its business model is constantly progressing toward
a point where its CD replication process will become a mainstream,
cost-competitive option for musicians. Minowa looks forward to a
point where cost is no longer an issue, and musicians can choose
an eco-friendly option for ethical reasons rather than dismissing
it for financial ones.
So stop talking about it and do something. The
environment has too many fairweather friends as it is.
So what can Joe or Jane Music Fan do to help the cause? PVC—the
material used in the production of jewel cases—is toxic, so
Earthology recycles old jewel cases instead of producing its own.
The ethically minded can send their surplus cases to the record
label, which will shine them up and use them again, or they can
go to www.earthology.net for more information. Jewel cases that
are in good condition (not cracked, scratched, or written on) should
be mailed to:
Goodwill
Att: John Pozniac
Earthology Used CD Cases Dept.
700 Garfield Avenue
Duluth, MN 55802
|
