I feel that the reasoning beside the Earth Day Rap not catching fire and becoming a every year tradition to celebrate the holiday is because its lack of ethos. While the cast of this song may have been very star studded it is hard to actually convince a large portion of the world that this is the issue that they cared about most during this time period. These rappers at the time were bring awareness to the impoverished life style of the communities they grew up in. Communities filled with violence, lack of school funding, and police brutality. The audience members of the Earth Day Rap see this and are able to see right pass the schrod. This is clearly a song that the artist were paid to write about rather then what came from there heart like every other song they had ever preformed. The lack of ethos by placing glamor rappers in the video destroys the pathos of the lyrics. The song does a great job of explaining what we are currently doing that harms are environment and some of the necessary action we should take to fix the problem. It also creates sympathy with its choice of background audience to the performance. They use people of all different races and ages to insinuate that the world belongs to all of us and we each share equal responsibility in keeping it clean.
“Anything for a dollar this attitude destroys the next generation can’t enjoy” is a lyric truly hits home because it brings out actions into a full circle. For this verse Queen Latifah is social status actually helps get the point across because she usually speaks on the money over everything mentalities that many people share. When it comes to the earth or our communities we can not allow for money to be the root of destruction because passing on our life experience to future generation also holds a lot of value.
Another simple reason why this video is not viral today is because most people have forgotten about these rappers as artist. Of the 5 artist in the song 3 are most know today for there performances in the theater then their former rap careers. A simple change of cast could make this song more effective.
Overall, on a scale of 1-10 I would give this piece a 7. The information displayed is amazing and the song is catchy. Using rappers who following was mostly black urban community members narrows the reach of the song. However if the goal of the earth day rap was to create more interest for recycling and better eco-friendly practices in urban communities the rap is slight better.
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