Time for more rappers rapping on climate

With guest writer Georgia Blizzard

Just a warning that this post references sexual violence in its discussion of rap lyrics.

Rapping climate

Have you ever heard a climate rap? Us neither. Today’s ‘us’ is a collab between yours truly, and one of my undergraduate linguistics students, Georgia Blizzard, who recently completed completed a first year unit with me called Language, Culture and Communication¹, which introduces students to some key ideas in linguistics - how language makes meaning, how to study natural linguistic data, and why language is so profoundly malleable, and therefore, so ideological.

We’ve done some research, and found a few minor rappers here and there who are interested in climate, i.e. the future of the planet. Here’s one of our own, Australian rapper Baker Boy, with a soulful, bilingual rap (combining English and Yolŋu Mathu) called ‘Somewhere Deep’.

The song starts like this:

The ocean is rising
Somewhere deep, she's heating up

And here’s the third verse, so you can see where it heads:

We could build a future where
We will not pollute the air
Slowly heal like every year
Mother nature's skin is clear
But they want minerals
Thoughts of future minimal
Stealing nature's medicine
Fingerprints of criminals

Baker Boy is making his mark: he has nearly 800K monthly listeners on Spotify, and this beautiful track has racked up 150K listens so far. Verse 2 is largely in language, and among the lyrical rap in this First Nations language, you can hear reference to ‘climate change’. We tried running this verse through google translate, but the results weren’t promising. Gotta learn a bit some Yolŋu Mathu if you really want to hear his message.

Mainstreaming misogyny

It’s fair to say that climate is not yet a big theme in rap music - it’s not part of the mainstream. Even if you aren’t a fan of rap, we are all impacted by what rap celebrities sing about, because rap music is a sizable cultural vehicle. Song lyrics are significant cultural artefact especially when the lyrics belong to high profile singers, with global reach. They get to project their rhythms and meanings into millions of ears, over days, months and years. Eminem, for instance, has over 75 million followers on Spotify, and tracks that have had over a billion plays. That’s enormous cultural influence. He is listed on Wikipedia as one of the top selling artists of all times.

Eminem’s track ‘Lose yourself’ has had well over 2 billion plays on Spotify. Here’s Obama rapping a few lines from this song after being introduced by Eminem at the Detroit rally for team Harris and Walz on October 23rd, in the lead up to the 2024 US presidential election.

The crowd recognises these famous lines and goes bananas. In his brief introduction before handing over to Obama, Eminem urges people to ‘use their voice’, and ‘get out and vote’, because ‘people shouldn’t be afraid to get out and express their opinions’. VP Harris, he tells the adoring crowd, ‘supports a future for this country where these freedoms and many others will be protected and upheld’.

We all know what happened in that election

There’s been a lot of commentary about the election result, including the claim that the Democrats got too ‘woke’. You can find much more informed commentators than us to get your fill on why the Democrats lost, and what it means for climate. One of the immediate algorithmic evils in the wake of this election result was a spike in online misogyny. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue - a group of independent nonprofit organisations who work to safeguard human rights and ‘reverse the rising tide of polarisation, extremism and disinformation’ - released a ‘digital dispatch’ on November 8th, titled ‘“Your body, my choice”: Hate and Harrassment towards women spreads online’. Their analysis reports a significant increase in frequency of some key misogynist memes, like ‘your body my choice’, ‘repeal the 19th’, and ‘get back to the kitchen’. We have reproduced ISD’s graph below, with the data collected on three key slogans circulating in the lead up to and just after the election. For non-USA readers, the ‘repeal the 19th’ is reference to the constitutional amendment that gave women the right to vote.

The online spread of these memes, the ISD argues:

demonstrated the influence of an increasingly vindicative set of online actors, who appear to be using the election results as a permission structure to more overtly and aggressively espouse narratives about curbing women’s rights.

They go on to explain that:

ISD researchers tracked narratives targeting women and the discussion of those narratives between November 4 and 6, 2024 across X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Facebook and Reddit. The use of derogatory and misogynistic language was already rife among well-noted manosphere and extremist communities on these platforms, and this activity has only gained steam in the past three days since the election. ISD also observed reports of these narratives being used to harass women offline, particularly on high school and college campuses.

Their report recounts some of these narratives - we won’t spoil your day by rehashing them here.

Back to the Obama-Eminem brofest

While it is fitting to blame Trump and his campaign for this outpouring of misoygyny, and it is important to track the increasing online misogyny and its creators, the extremism of this content is hardly new. In fact, let’s get back to the bro-fest between Obama and Eminem in the lead up to the election, when Americans were being urged to vote for the party fighting for women’s rights, and in particular, for our health and reproductive rights, rather than a man convicted of rape, among other felonies.

When choosing the lines he would quote from the great and celebrated rap singer, Obama mentioned the ‘vomit on the sweater’ and ‘mom’s spaghetti’, but skipped the line about ‘These hoes is all on him’ as well as those a couple of lines later:

But hold your nose ‘cause here goes the cold water

These hoes don’t want him no mo, he’s cold product.

In this little part of the narrative in Eminem’s somewhat autobiographical song, the ‘hoes all on him’ signal that a man’s career is on the rise, and their rejection of him that it is now on a downward fall. And in this tiny linguistic choice, men are construed as entitled to sex while women are utterly objectified as a prize recognizing male success. Repeat those lines over 2.387 billion times - and that’s just on Spotify.

For those Emimen fans who might feel they can overlook this misogyny, Georgia’s research for her final essay in Annabelle’s first year linguistics unit is a bit of a wake up call. Because ‘hoes’, ‘whores’, ‘sluts’ and ‘bitches’ occupy the lyrics of Eminem’s work so routinely that these labels come to appear synonymous with ‘women’. These terms are used to sexually objectify in one breath, and degrade women who dare take ownership of their sexuality in another. If you listen to just two of Eminem’s highly successful and celebrated albums - the Grammy Award winning Marshall Mather LP (2000) and the Grammy Award winning Eminem Show (2002) - you will hear the word ‘bitch’ 111 times. When we combine the singular and plural forms of this word, it’s the seventh most frequently-used word across all 30 songs released on these two albums.

Tne most frequent words in lyrics of Marshall Mather and Eminem Show

When we look a bit deeper at how these derogatory terms are used in the lyrics, it becomes impossible to discuss Eminem’s depiction of women without including his references to sexual violence. ‘Kim’, the 16th track on The Marshall Mathers LP, opens with Eminem singing to his daughter - ‘daddy’s baby girl’ - before devolving into a graphic, rage-fuelled torture fantasy that ends with him murdering his ex-wife and putting her dead body in the boot of his car.

Grotesque as this concept may be, it is certainly not isolated. When we search for common ‘collocates’ - words that are typically found with a word you are studying - with the word ‘bitch’, we find words like ‘bleed’, ‘hit’, and ‘kill’. Undeniably, violence against women provides a thematic undercurrent to Eminem’s work. Take Drips, where he angrily raps about catching sexually transmitted infections from some of the aforementioned ‘bitches’, eliciting the following response:

‘Now I don’t wanna hit no woman, but this chick’s got it comin’

Someone better get this bitch ‘fore she gets kicked in the stomach

And she’s pregnant, but she’s eggin’ me on, beggin’ me to throw her

Off the steps of this porch, my only weapon is force’

All song writing, but perhaps rap in particular, utilises double entendre and word play. Even so, in analysing words associated with violence in context across these two albums, such as ‘rape’, ‘choke’, and ‘kill’, we see just how explicit these themes are. The table below shows a selection of the words in their ‘concordance lines’, so you can see how they are being used in these lyrics.

For Georgia in particular, who has grown up with Eminem as the heralded voice of her generation, watching Obama rap those lyrics felt unsettlingly familiar. In a world where 1 woman or girl is killed every 10 minutes by a member of her family, there are ‘grab ‘em by the pussy’ leaders, and there are ‘it is absolutely men’s responsibility to fight sexism too’ leaders. While we would never equate the two, it’s hard not to feel helpless when even the latter still fawns over ‘bitch, I’mma kill you!’ men.

Monestising misogyny

Rap is celebrated for its supposedly lyrical grittly realism, as if these songs are the outpouring of the deep inner life of the artists who rap them. But sociologist Professor Ronald Weitzer and criminologist Professor Charis E Kubrin argue in a paper published in 2009 in the Men and Masculinities journal, that artists don’t exist in a vacuum. Rap lyrics are not the heartfelt musings of these celebrated artists, but a function of (at least) two key dynamics, the larger gender relations in society, and the machinations of the corporate music industry. The combination of these pressures is a lethal source of Big Misogyny. Situated in highly gendered societies, rap music is a crucial vehicle for the reproduction of hegemonic masculinity, where, as Weitzer and Kubrin argue:

to be a ‘man’ requires the acceptance of attitudes that objectify women, practices that subordinate them, and derogation of men who adopt an egalitarian orientation equally affirmative of men and women and all sexual orientations

Put in the hands of a voracious music industry, where there is pressure to maximize sales, the researchers also argue that:

record industry moguls encourage provocative, edgy lyrics. Producers not only encourage artists to become ‘hardcore’ but also reject or marginalize artists who go against the grain. As a result of such practices, a directly proportional relationship has developed between rap music’s explicitness and the sale of its records.

In this equation, women and girls are road kill. The authors report an interview with one aspiring rapper, who was asked why rap artists sing about violence and misogyny. In response, the rapper freestyled a verse about whether he could have been a doctor, a father or a policy officer, and then says ‘That’s nice, but nobody wanna hear that right now. They don’t accept that shit’. When asked ‘Who is ‘they’?’ the rapper answers, ‘The industry. They usually don’t give us deals when we speak righteously.’

In their own study of rap lyrics from highly successful songs, these researchers report that Eminem shows ‘unbridled hostility toward all women, including relatives’, to a degree that is ‘somewhat extreme but not unique in this music genre’. And there’s Obama and the Democrats celebrating a man who has made millions out of degrading and denigrating women. Would the Democrats have brought him on stage if his lyrics were racist? Unlikely.

Rap and climate

This brings us back to the issue of rap and climate - but more broadly, to the matter that messages are ‘delivered’ in some form, and these forms are crucial to their success. As Marshall McLuhan famously said ‘the medium is this message’ - or with a minor tweak, the form is an essential part of what is being communicated in any exchange. There’s plenty of discussion around the problem of how to communicate climate breakdown, and the urgency around it. It would help if some of the celebs with huge reach would do their bit. Imagine a new album by Jay Z where he dissed the fossil fuel cartel?

But while we are waiting for that to happen, how about putting in some eyeball time and likes with Baker Boy mentioned at the start, and Hila the Earth. Here’s her anti-Black Friday rap, posted just a few days back.

hilatheearth

A post shared by @hilatheearth

Or check out her ‘Dirty Talk’ rap:

hilatheearth

A post shared by @hilatheearth

Let us know in the comments of any other climate rappers you recommend.

1. As we are writing this article, this unit has been cut from the linguistics curriculum at Macquarie University where I work and Georgia is studying. If you haven’t noticed, there is something of a crisis in Australian universities going on - departments, courses, units and jobs being cut in various locations, and barely making the news. So Georgia’s study, focussing on language and gender, with her data being the lyrics of well-known rapper Eminen, arrived in the last round of student projects from this unit.