It’s not every day that you find yourself rapping in front of world leaders and diplomats at the United Nations, but that’s exactly where I just was, alongside fellow Event Rap artist Dex McBean, the week before last at UNEA-6, the United Nations Environmental Assembly.

Let me take you back to the beginning. It all started when the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) decided to share and repost a custom rap video that Dex produced, Carbon Calamity, made in collaboration with carbon removal marketplace startup NORI last year.

UNEP was already a huge fan of that video and was gearing up to produce the Sixth United Nations Environmental Assembly (UNEA-6) in Nairobi, Kenya, from February 26 to March 1, 2024. They were specifically seeking innovative ways to engage delegates and inject energy into the serious discussions surrounding environmental issues. That’s where we came in.

The United Nations Environmental Assembly is a relatively young gathering, established in 2012, with roots that trace back to the inception of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 1972. UNEP was created with the purpose of coordinating environmental activities within the UN system and developing international environmental policies and treaties. Over the years, UNEP has played a crucial role in addressing pressing environmental challenges, from climate change to pollution control to biodiversity loss.

And to their credit, UNEP also takes criticisms of environmental multilateralism seriously, so they asked us to produce a new custom rap song and video, “Get With the Programme”, co-written with Tanzanian rapper Frida Amani, to premiere at the conference. The song is structured as a rap battle between a proponent and a skeptic of the value of UN-led multilateralism, with Frida as the UN-booster and Dex playing the devil’s advocate.

The final music video was shot on site at the UNEP campus and is still in production, but Frida and Dex performed the song live for the full UN Assembly on February 29th, including more than 100 government ministers, 12 heads of state, and President Ruto of Kenya sitting just a few feet from them during the performance. A trailer for the video was released as a UNEA-6 conference recap.

As the participants filed out of the main assembly, UNEP set us up with a portable speaker on the red carpet and we delivered a 20-minute improvised freestyle set for passing diplomats, rapping interactively with the attendees as they walked by, or in many cases as they stopped to listen to our raps.

Next up was the ‘rap up’ component, which consisted of three high-level dialogues on challenging topics: Technology and Data, Nature Financing, and Multilateralism, hosted in a main assembly room with representatives from many countries present.

For each of these 90-minute sessions, Dex and I attended and wrote and performed a comprehensive rap summary, a ‘rap up’ recap highlighting the essential elements of the conversation and acknowledging the keynote speakers and contributors, which included the Chair of the IPCC, several government ministers, youth climate activists, NGO leaders, and private sector representatives working in this space.

We also spent a good deal of time rolling around the various installations and displays, freestyling interactively with whoever we met and learned from. This was about more than just music – it was about using our art form as a tool of engagement and a catalyst to inspire conversations and ambitious environmental policies and actions.

And our final act was a staff celebration, rapping in the UNEP offices and thanking everyone, by name and by department, who contributed to producing this massively ambitious and successfully world-changing event.

At the time of this writing only a few of the videos have been published from more than a dozen we created on site with our live performances, but as we continue to sort through them and reflect on the experience I am filled with gratitude for the opportunity to contribute, to make an impact on the decision-makers driving our response to the world’s more-pressing environmental crises, and I sincerely hope and believe that we lifted their spirits and at the same time heightened the sense of urgency behind their reason for attending, and the need for ambitious policy.

That’s Event Rap at it’s best, rap with an impact on *both* on-site experiences and future actions!