Reverend Billy Takes On Norman Foster’s New Monolith
A little after midnight on Earth Day, the street preacher Billy Talen dragged his pulpit to the new Norman Foster-designed global headquarters of JPMorgan Chase, on Madison. His self-ordained mission: deliver a twenty-four-hour sermon, calling attention to the bank’s ties to the fossil-fuel industry. Talen, who is seventy-five, held an umbrella above his white leisure suit and silver bouffant, eying a pair of bank security guards. “Blessings upon your souls, gentlemen,” he bellowed. Members of his activist ensemble, the Stop Shopping Choir, were setting up a live stream in the rain. Savitri Durkee, who directs both the choir and Talen, who is her husband, clipped a mike to his lapel and checked her watch. “It’s go-time, Billy,” she said. “See you on the other side.”
Talen, who goes by Reverend Billy, is fond of what he calls “extreme preaching.” He began in the mid-nineties, marching around Times Square with “Antichrist” Mickey Mouse nailed to a wooden cross, in protest of the neighborhood’s creeping corporatism. In the years since, his focus has shifted to the climate crisis. Often, this involves staging musical protests in hostile venues—banks, pipeline-construction zones—until he and his flock are arrested for trespassing. But, Talen said, even that has begun to feel “predictable.” He elaborated, speaking into a camera: “The only way we’re going to start an effective movement is if each of us goes to the limit of our capabilities and claims our eccentricities. I’m a preacher, so I’m going to preach until I drop.” A choir member checked the stream, and noted that they’d just jumped from five to fourteen viewers. “Earthalujah!” Talen cried.
After decades of sneaking up on bankers and lobbyists, Reverend Billy and the choir recently booked a straight gig: touring the country as Neil Young’s opening act. (Typical song: “A Tree Is the Opposite of a Cop.”) The rock star’s fans seemed receptive to the message, relatively. “After a lifetime of being too strange, people are starting to get us,” Talen said. He’s also the religion editor for the Times-Contrarian, Young’s anti-corporate “digital newspaper.” “Neil is a hands-on publisher,” Talen said. “Sometimes he lets me write these really long things. Other times, he’ll say to me, ‘Billy, what do you mean here? What do you want to leave us with?,’ and we’ll e-mail back and forth on that.” Talen said that he’s learned a lot from Young as a performer: “He’s taught me to hold the rhythm, hit the rhyme. He gets what appeals to a mass audience.” Talen and Durkee were connected with the singer by Young’s wife, Daryl Hannah, whom they met at a 2009 protest against mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia. Talen was later arrested, after depositing mounds of “sacred dirt”—taken from the mountain, he claimed—at two Chase branches in the East Village. The bank has since decreased financing for companies involved in mountaintop-removal mining.
By 8 A.M., dark circles had formed under Talen’s steely blue eyes. “I just need to stay hydrated,” he said. Behind him, a gardener was washing a living-wall installation titled “A Parallel Nature,” designed for Chase by Maya Lin. “I’m finding myself mesmerized by this strange, sculpted nature wall,” Talen said. “It feels like a memory.” After conferring with a guard, the gardener pointed his hose at the protesters in the plaza. Talen pulled a rain slicker over his suit and glowered. Thousands of workers were now streaming into the building, mostly ignoring the doomsday preacher.
Around lunchtime, roughly two dozen choir members and other activists arrived for a 5K run around the bank. Among them was Ahmed, an asylum seeker from Guinea who had taken refuge in the choir’s former headquarters, a vacant bank on Avenue C, after arriving in the United States. “It’s very scary-looking,” he said of Chase’s sixty-story tower. Many of the runners had procured thrift-store blazers or top hats, an effort to blend in with the bankers. Durkee, who wore a pin-striped suit, led the group in some stretches, followed by twelve laps around the block. A construction worker sanding down a railing offered support—“You got this!”—but appeared confused by a runner’s sign accusing Chase of ecocide. “I thought it was, like, a charity thing,” he said.
As night fell, Talen huddled under a blanket with other choir members. His once thunderous voice had dropped to a rasp as he condemned the “gangsters in suits” responsible for rising global temperatures. In the final minutes of his sermon, he found himself at an unusual loss for words. “It feels like, well, extreme exhaustion, I guess,” he said. “Or a long hike that got out of hand, and now I have to come down the mountain.” Had the suffering been worth it? “I’m not sure we cracked the culture,” he said. “But we had a vision, and we did what we could.” ♦