Lil Dicky's "Earth" Fails as Both a Song and a Statement

Lil Dicky has never been one of my favorite rappers. Although I haven’t dug deep into his catalog, I did hear the I’m Brain EP he dropped under the alias Brain in 2017 - which was the exact moment I swore to never listen to another project released under his name again. However, morbid curiosity got the best of me this past month when I heard he’d dropped a new song to celebrate Earth Day - which also featured vocals from several dozen pop stars and celebrities. All the more intriguing to me, I saw that many publications and even quite a few of my friends began praising the track and citing its philanthropic message as inspiring.

I don’t think I’ve ever been more disappointed in a song that I had no positive expectations for in the first place.

There’s a lot to dissect here, so I’ll start with the musicality of the track. It’s a mess.

There’s really not a lot to be said about the production - the song is based around a generic, lifeless afrobeat instrumental with some acoustic guitar chords sloppily thrown in the chorus. Produced by walking hitmaker Benny Blanco, it couldn’t be more by-the-numbers.

The beat may be a cheesefest, but trust me, it's NOTHING compared to the vocals.

It shocks me that even though several of the most talented vocalists currently working in pop music are featured on the track, Dicky decided to sing the chorus himself. There’s a reason he’s a rapper and not a singer - his voice is pitchy, shrill and obnoxious over the course of the nursery-rhyme level hook. “We love the Earth, it is our planet. We love the Earth, it is our home," is not a line that should sound as wretched and ear-piercing as it does.

The concept of “Earth” is that each guest vocalist plays a different animal or plant that inhabits the Earth, bouncing off of each other with corny one-liners. Just like the rest of Dicky’s music, most of the “jokes” boil down to potty humor-tier comedy. Justin Bieber plays a baboon and muses about how his “anus is huge”, Shawn Mendes plays a rhino who claims to be “horny as heck”, and Miguel plays a squirrel looking for his “next nut”.

After the third chorus, Dicky breaks into the song’s only rap verse - rambling incoherently about mass shootings and pollution. Musically, it’s the most tolerable part of the track, but the verse itself is uncomfortably shoved into the last minute of the song - which draws a very awkward contrast between it and the upbeat, silly themes of the rest of the track.

The topic of the last verse transitions very well into my second series of issues with the track: its message, or lack thereof. “Earth” presents itself as a solve-it-all solution to global warming, pollution and every other threat our planet is facing - Dicky himself claimed it to be his “life’s greatest work.” The problem is that there is no real solution explained in “Earth”. Sure, you could take it as a celebration of all the lifeforms that call our planet home - but it doesn’t provide any insight into how we can actually preserve our environment and all the organisms living inside it. It’s completely inconsequential - I truly don’t see how any aspect of this song is supposed to motivate anyone to take action against climate change or anything else threatening our planet.

If there’s one thing I can commend “Earth” on, it’s the marketing campaign tied to it. Dicky has stated that every dollar that he earns for the track is being donated to a number of eco-friendly organizations. Additionally - at the end of the music video, viewers are directed to welovetheearth.org, a site that explains what issues are threatening the planet’s livelihood and all the small steps one can take to be a better economic consumer. While I do respect Dicky and his team for taking the extra step with this, my criticisms of the song and its message still hold true.

While “Earth” has good intentions, the song itself falls flat on its face - both musically and concept-wise. Considering how much thought and effort went into the philanthropic campaign behind the track, I would have assumed the track would have been a bit more meticulously crafted - but I guess that’s just the kind of artist that Lil Dicky is.