By Alastair Bland

Pop stars and big cars can have long retained a powerful hold on the hearts of impressionable music fans. Each glitzy, each sexy, each high maintenance and each photogenic, they've shared the spotlight for decades, on tour and on MTV. But a fresh undercurrent of musical culture is reinventing what's cool - and it doesn't run on gasoline. Around the country, musicians are embracing pedal-power, biking from show to show, city to city, even nation to nation. The movement arrives as a reaction to the trends of global hip-hop and mass-produced rock, worlds in which stars may preach socio-political and environmental righteousness yet indulge in glamorous, grossly extravagant limo lifestyles.

SHAKE YOUR PEACE!, a six-piece folk-soul group in Berkeley, stands at the helm of the bike music revolution. The band has helped fuel the trend both at home and throughout the West, regularly loading their gear — including a cello — onto rear-rack bike extensions called Xtracycles and convoying to their next show. SHAKE YOUR PEACE!, which began in 2005 as the solo act of 26-year-old lead singer, guitarist and fiddler Gabe Dominguez, now has three bike-powered concert tours on their resume and one currently in progress — a month-long ride around Utah. The band has performed nearly every one of its shows off-the-grid via electric converters rigged to the rear hubs of their bikes, which fans pedal onstage to power the P.A. system and fill the air with carbon-free music.

The bike band revolution can be accredited in large part to bicycle, a lower-case B hard-rock band from Seattle that helped innovate the concept in the late 1990s. The group has inspired and advised other cycling bands in the years since, though bicycle themselves have often toured in the company of a support vehicle.

But not the Ginger Ninjas. In April, this folk-ska band from North San Juan, California (fronted by Xtracycle co-founder Kipchoge Spencer) completed a fully pedal-powered tour of 5,000 miles from Lake Tahoe to Chiapas, Mexico. The Ninjas' tour — called Pleasant Revolution — included 80 dates. So did the Rolling Stones' 2006 Bigger Bang Tour, but the tired supergroup's tour also included 80 semi trucks, a jet plane and 37,000 barrels of oil — each incinerated, of course. The Ginger Ninjas, who employed a pedal-powered sound system at most shows, estimate they expended a third of a barrel of oil on their journey.