Break Up the Concrete is a new record by Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders; Rolling Stone and numerous other reviewers have called it her best in years.
Hynde has been singing about environmental themes for decades (remember My City Was Gone?) But the title song off the new album, which sounds to me like a rewrite of “I Fought the Law,” for once is not a wistful yearning for a lost paradise or a complaint about the authorities. It’s a demand for real change, right here, right now.
Given that the Urban Heat Index is in many American cities a bigger threat to human health and happiness than climate change, the demand to return to a permeable, plant-friendly, water-cycling landscape actually makes a heckuva lot of sense.
But the song is great not because it’s enviro … but because Hynde and the boys make it rock.
