The Hollywood, Entertainment, and Culture Bureau

Music

We are creating the beat of the movement.

Hip Hop Caucus is part of a growing collaborative ecosystem of organizations working to harness music’s cultural power for climate action. In 2014 we launched People’s Climate Music, an artist mobilization and music production imprint under Think 100% MUSIC. We organize influential artists to campaign and create music and culture that speaks to and of the climate and environmental justice lived experience of our communities.

A song can be written, recorded, and released in days, and distributed to millions of people within hours. An artist can respond to a news cycle, amplify a campaign moment, or shift a narrative in real time. Our Trouble in the Water music video — featuring Oscar and Grammy winner Common, responding to the Flint water crisis — was produced, shot, and edited and released with a media partnership in 10 days, while the height of the crisis was still escalating.

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“Trouble in the Water,” by Common, Malik Yusef, Kumasi ft. Aaron Fresh, Choklate, Laci Kay

Throughout our history, Hip Hop Caucus has built and proven a music x climate model that does three things no one else does together:

  • We produce culturally authentic content, at the speed the moment demands, with artists who are strategists and creators with us.
  • We reach BIPOC communities who have been systematically excluded from the climate movement’s imagination, and who are most directly living the consequences of inaction, and therefore hold tremendous power.
  • We turn that cultural reach into civic power: votes cast, permits fought, pipelines stopped, policies won.

What we have built is proof of concept. And what becomes possible when this model is resourced at scale is not incremental — it is cultural breakthroughs that shift what the public believes is possible, that make climate action feel socially inevitable, and that change political realities from the ground up.

Our Music Catalogue