"I'm doing it with a rock format and the words are about people living in harmony with Mother Earth. It's very important to me - and I feel it should be for every living human on this planet"
About this Quote
There is something quietly radical about pairing a rock format with a message that sounds closer to a teach-in than a stadium chant. Jimmy Carl Black is staking out an old-but-still-contested idea: that rock music isn’t just a delivery system for attitude, sex, or personal catharsis, but a megaphone for responsibility. The phrasing matters. “I’m doing it” signals craft and choice, not vague virtue. He’s deliberately using a popular, loud, youth-coded language to smuggle in an ethic of stewardship.
The subtext is an argument about reach. Rock is mass culture; environmental concern is too often treated like a niche lifestyle or a political faction. By insisting on “people living in harmony with Mother Earth,” he adopts a warm, almost spiritual register (“Mother Earth” rather than “the environment”), which is less policy memo than moral relationship. That choice sidesteps partisan terminology and aims for something older: reverence, obligation, kinship.
Then he tightens the screws with “It’s very important to me - and I feel it should be for every living human on this planet.” That’s not modest, and it’s not meant to be. The universal claim dares the listener to stop treating ecological collapse as someone else’s beat. Coming from a working musician, it also reads as a refusal of the entertainer’s bargain: you don’t get to consume the song and ignore the world it’s sung in.
The subtext is an argument about reach. Rock is mass culture; environmental concern is too often treated like a niche lifestyle or a political faction. By insisting on “people living in harmony with Mother Earth,” he adopts a warm, almost spiritual register (“Mother Earth” rather than “the environment”), which is less policy memo than moral relationship. That choice sidesteps partisan terminology and aims for something older: reverence, obligation, kinship.
Then he tightens the screws with “It’s very important to me - and I feel it should be for every living human on this planet.” That’s not modest, and it’s not meant to be. The universal claim dares the listener to stop treating ecological collapse as someone else’s beat. Coming from a working musician, it also reads as a refusal of the entertainer’s bargain: you don’t get to consume the song and ignore the world it’s sung in.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nature |
|---|
More Quotes by Jimmy
Add to List
