Amazing Hip-Hop Bike PSAs

Contemporary music and culture are often used to try to make an issue seem cool and relevant, but a lot of the time they just come off as corny or funny. So, can hip-hop successfully be used to encourage bicyclists to wear helmets or to use bike-racks on buses? Well, you can judge for yourself:





Are these successful public service announcements? The thing that I'm impressed with is that these are pretty good songs. Especially considering that the bus bike-rack video features a mechanic and bus drivers as the singers.

The other cool thing is that these videos are attempting (if not succeeding) to reach out and make these issues relevant to people. And hip-hop is an important part of that relevance, which can be seen in the organization Green the Block.

Green the Block is a collaboration between the youth/race advocacy group the Hip Hop Caucus and Green For All, an environmental organization. Their partnership utilizes popular musicians to advocate for "a new, green economy promises the opportunity to fight climate change while simultaneously revitalizing communities that, now more than ever, are struggling from decades of economic and environmental degradation."

With the help of hip-hop and urban culture, Green the Block is successfully mobilizing and assisting low-income communities of color to "become driving forces of the clean-energy economy". And that extremely important work isn't corny at all (even if some of the ads might be).