In his song “Now I’m Learning to Love the War”, Father John Misty confronts art’s materiality and its environmental impact: “Try not to think so much about / The truly staggering amount of oil that it takes to make a record / All the shipping, the vinyl, the cellophane lining, the high gloss / The tape and the gear”. With these lyrics, Misty observes the apparent contradiction between music’s cultural value and the uncomfortable realities of its mass production on vinyl records.
A similar idea underpins musicologist Kyle Devine’s award-winning monograph Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (2020). Devine asks what musicology without music might look like, foregoing aesthetic and cultural analyses of musical recordings in favour of studying the materials and labour that go into their production. He critically examines the recording industry through the lens of “political ecology”, which is “defined by critical attention to the principles of action and the forms of social order that link material environments and human culture” (18).