By Jamie Harvie, ’25, Anthropology Major
It was on Day 5 of COP29 that I began taking solitary walks around the city of Baku. I had been badged the Days 1-3, running around the stadium trying to attend as many events as possible, absorbing as much information as possible, and passing out from exhaustion before 9:00 PM. For Day 4, however, I wasn’t badged. Unfortunately, I spent Day 4 running around Khagani Street and Azadlig Avenue, pre-occupied by a long and exhausting laundromat debacle.
It was only on Day 5 that I really had time to sit down with my notes from Days 1-3, process what I heard, and begin trying to synthesize it in a cohesive manner through my writing. Yet this tasked proved difficult for a litany of reasons: too much information, a few memory gaps, illegible chicken-scratch, etc. But above all, the greatest obstacle in this process was severity of the content I was pouring over and recording.
Nearly every page held descriptions of ongoing climate disasters and dire proclamations of an even worse future to come – most often made by those trying their best to stop or slow it. No doubt some bits of hope and optimism glimmered through on the paper, brought on by the conversations I had, and the events I attended, around the subject of subnational and local climate action. Unfortunately (or fortunately), it has been my experience that climate optimism and pessimism are not a zero-sum game. The presence of one does not negate the presence of the other. Instead, I am forced to sit with the experience of both and consider their often-contradicting implications.
As is usually the case when I am dealing with tumultuous emotions, I decided to sideline my immediate work and responsibilities to make a playlist – one in which the mood and lyrics of the songs matched what was going on in my brain. Over the days that would follow, I would listen to this playlist every time I went on a walk at sunset or after dark, using the music as vehicle to help process the emotional aspects of COP29. While I frequently rotated the selection being played, there were two songs – detailed below – which remained constant on these walks.
“Taijin Kyofusho”
Artist: The Evpatoria Report | Album: Golevka
The Evpatoria Report are a Swiss post-rock band, owing their name to Crimean city of Evpatoria. This track has been my favorite of theirs for years now. Its title, “Taijin Kyofusho,” is derived from the Japanese term for a form of social anxiety in which individuals fear that their presence and comportment in a space disgraces the people around them. However, the song itself is an 11-minute instrumental about the Columbia Space Shuttle explosion in 2003 – when Ground Control could only watch as the spacecraft disintegrated upon re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven of its astronauts.
Although the Columbia exploded on February 1st, 2003, the disaster began 17 days earlier during takeoff on January 16th. At 10:40:22 a.m., 82 seconds after takeoff, a piece of debris ≈2ft. long and ≈1.5ft. wide broke off the large external tank. Travelling at a rate of ≈500mph, the debris then struck the shuttle’s left-wing. At the time, however, the Columbia appeared to be unaffected. In fact, the debris strike was not even known about until a standard review of takeoff footage two days later.
“Taijin Kyofusho” begins with audio snippets of Houston’s communications with the shuttle crew as they prepared for atmospheric reentry. By this point, the debris strike had been investigated by NASA’s teams and by Boeing, producing conflicting results from their risk assessments. Ultimately, it was not clear if the impact posed a significant danger to the crew – and even if NASA did understand the risk, any planned rescue missions would’ve been highly unlikely to succeed (but still possible).
The first four minutes of the song are characterized by a slow, clean guitar riff repeated over and over again – technically known as an ostinato in music theory. Its tempo, however, begins to increase as the riff is interspersed with Houston’s attempts to establish contact with the Columbia space shuttle. Over the course of a few minutes, we hear the phrase: “Columbia, Houston, UHF comm check” five times. Each time is more urgent than the last. In the fifth and last one the professional demeanor of the Houston comms-man falters, and a sense of pleading can be heard in his voice. By then, it was clear what happened: the Columbia space shuttle had imploded upon reentry as a result of the debris strike.
The song changes following this final attempt at communications. The guitar riff fades out momentarily and a deep, coarse bass line fills the space. When the ostinato returns, it returns distorted and accompanied by an eerie string chorus. And with an intensifying speed, more instrumentals are added to the auditory landscape. The song crescendos as the volume swells, even more tracks are added, and the distortion effect increases. Soon, it just becomes a solid wall of sound – one that hurts your ears when it’s on full blast (although I can never turn it down).
This climax can be interpreted in two ways. The first time I heard the song, I saw it as the broken bits of space shuttle incinerating as they careen through Earth’s atmosphere. Alternatively, it could represent the moment when Ground Control realized their failures and was confronted with the utter horror of their miscalculations. This second one evokes the title of the track, as their miscalculations here not only disgraced and brought shame to all of NASA for some time, but also disgraced themselves.
Nevertheless, both interpretations were relevant to my experience at COP29. As I walked around the streets of Baku, the chaos of the climax would evoke images of natural disasters – typhoons destroying villages in the Philippines, wildfires wiping out enormous swaths of land, and so on. At the same time, I would think on my own experience with the eponymous phenomenon of “Taijin Kyofusho.” As an American college student, it was not uncommon for me to feel as though my presence at COP29 was a disgrace to that space. I was frequently grappling with impostor syndrome and, following the election of Trump, feelings of guilt by association. And I have to wonder if John Podesta, the US climate envoy to COP29, felt the same when he was met with cries of “shame!” from Global South delegates while departing the final climate finance talks. Or if all the Global North parties felt a similar sense of disgrace, failure, and guilt when several negotiators from the world’s most vulnerable nations walked out in protest of the lackluster deals.
So even though there are no actual lyrics for this song, I still found its sounds, story, and background to match the mood that COP had generated. That said, there are differences between climate change and the Columbia disaster. Chief among them is that, in contrast to NASA, we know fully well what will happen if we don’t act quickly and ambitiously. For NASA, there was an uncertainty around the severity of risk. That is not the case for climate change. We know the risks and the realities, and we know what we have to do to act. As I sat at Baku’s waterfront on the edge of the Caspian sea, I often thought of what will happen if we don’t.
“A Quick One Before the Eternal Worm Devours Connecticut”
Artist: Have A Nice Life | Album: Deathconsciousness
Whereas the previous song enabled the immersion of my mind into the pessimism and despair conjured by COP29, “A Quick One Before the Eternal Worm Devours Connecticut” did something different. Of course, its title does allude to an impending disaster – that being an eternal worm devouring the unfortunate state of Connecticut. Nevertheless, part of its title is a lie since there is nothing ‘quick’ about this song. On the contrary, it is a slow, 8-minute instrumental that – like the first half of “Taijin Kyofusho” – is characterized by a 4-bar ostinato. Unlike the previous song, however, it does not build up to anything. Instead, the repeating phrase meanders throughout the piece at a pace of 75 beats per minute.
As long melodic notes play over top of it, I often fell into a state of tranquility. Like the ostinato, I would meander through the streets of Baku while listening to this song. My favorite time for it was the weekend nights when the avenues were brimming with people and it was hard to even get by. Eschewing the hustle-and-bustle around me, I always slowed down in these moments. With the bittersweet melodies of the song shaping the mood, I would observe all the families, couples, and friend groups in the space and romanticize these moments in my head. They were a reminder that even in difficult and frightening times, humanity and all the lovely things that come with it still persist – and I found a great sense of comfort in that.
For me, this song evokes the quote from Bayo Akomolafe often repeated by our professor, Sarah Hautzinger: “The times are urgent, we must slow down.” It’s a proverb that I sorely needed in Baku. For the destructive capabilities of humanity often take center stage at COP and it became easy to forget all the good that we bring to this world and to each other. However, each time I took a break from my work and stepped outside with this song, I was reminded that not all is lost yet. Sure, maybe the eternal worm will devour Connecticut, and maybe climate change will extinguish all human life on Earth. But until that happens, we can continue to act against it and we continue to live.
Other Songs in the Queue:
“Remembrance” – Balmorhea
“This Empty Northern Hemisphere” – Gregory Alan Isakov
“San Luis” – Gregory Alan Isakov
“That Funny Feeling” – Bo Burnham
“The Vanity of Human Wishes” – Willie Dunn
“Wounded Lake” – Willie Dunn
