Plastic pop

Humming Gil Scott Heron's "Lady Day and John Coltrane" over the past few days I keep hearing the lyric "Plastic people with plastic minds, on their way to plastic homes." Which reminds me of what a bad rap plastic gets in pop--from Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees" to David Bowie's backhanded compliment to his "Young Americans"-era music, which he described as "plastic soul". I think the same veiled insult is there in the name of X Ray Spex's Polly Styrene. The least negative reference I can think of is Scott Walker's "Plastic Palace People", which being Scott Walker is so obscure and impressionistic that I can't tell if he's being positive, or negative, or something beyond either category.

But musicians should love plastic! Their acoustic guitar strings are plastic, their plectrums, and drumskins, and keyboard keys, and amp cases, all plastic. Their music has pretty much only ever been recorded on plastic, and played on plastic devices. Without plastic, there would likely be no recording industry to support musicians bitching about plastic.

You can probably tell it's a bit of a hobby horse of mine that plastic is unfairly maligned. I think it was initially looked down on from the mid-20th century as something for the poor--mass-produced so that those who couldn't afford Doulton china could get a Bakelite knock-off and start acting alarmingly like their social betters.

That horror of mass production has bled into the modern view of plastic as a byword for overconsumption. People see it as emblematic of degradation of the environment to support consumerism, which I think is grossly unfair. After all, plastic is waste material converted into something useful.

The viable alternatives are mostly paper, wood, glass, and aluminium, primary products made by the famously eco-friendly timber, smelting, and glassmaking industries. They're not nearly as versatile and, in the case of wood, they're not really recyclable. Furthermore, they're mostly a lot heavier, which means more energy is needed to move them around. Admittedly, plastic is mostly a byproduct of the dreaded petroleum industry, but there the problem seems to be petroleum, not plastic. Plastic manufacture needs hydrocarbons, not crude oil: if we switched to a non-fossil ethanol economy, we could make the same materials from renewable hydrocarbons too.

So I'm going to raise a semi-crumpled beaker to PVC, PET and all the other plastics in our lives. Long may they bend.