One of the problems with living in the Anthropocene—our current epoch defined by humanity’s impact on Earth and its climate—is the difficulty of naming and shaming what exactly is destroying our planet. Climate change is such a vast and interconnected system of errors that no one event or cause can alone be held responsible. It is what theorist Timothy Morton refers to as a “hyperobject,” a concept so large and complex that it can never be properly comprehended. The ingredients of climate change are carbon emissions, political inaction, unethical consumption, and a host of other problems that are causing catastrophic weather events, rising global temperatures, and the displacement of millions of humans all around the world. Yet there is no icon of climate change, no galling and punchable face of this slow, interminable destruction that will inevitably disrupt global society by its sheer, unstoppable power.
That is until last week, when novelty rapper Lil Dicky released a song called “Earth.” The song features 30 or so guests singing the voices of animals, places, people, or viruses that Lil Dicky finds funny. He convinced Ariana Grande to play a zebra, Miley Cyrus to play an elephant, Kevin Hart to play Kanye West, and Lil Yachty to play the HPV virus (for his part, Dicky is donating a “portion” of the profits from “Earth” to various charities.) The terrible song has this very specific canned quality to it as if everyone was committing to this half-baked bit under threat of blackmail. It sounds less like a charity single and more like a theme to a downmarket Disney clone made explicitly to launder money for an offshore criminal enterprise.
But it is instructive, even good, that we have a song that takes the form of the hyperobject of climate change. Like the crisis it describes, “Earth” is something preventable, avoidable, created by humans, and emboldened by a vast network of power. It mimics the intractable march of manmade disaster. To sit in the ultraviolet rays of this song and watch its incomprehensibly dumb video is to feel our planet warming half a degree in seven minutes. Do you hear Justin Bieber as a baboon talking about how his “anus is huge”? Do you hear Lil Dicky saying, “We forgive you, Germany”? Do you hear Meaghan Trainor singing, “We love you, India”? What I hear is the low electrical hum of doom.
