Loading...Richard Williams, better known as Prince Ea, is a 27-year-old rapper who graduated the University of Missouri-St.Louis with a degree in Anthropology and Latin honors. That alone should tell you that he isn’t the average rapper, and when you watch even just one of his videos you’ll know that for certain. In many ways, Prince Ea is a traditional rapper; he’s been on radio shows and has 4 official mixtapes, as well as 7 singles released, the first in 2010. And yet in many ways, Prince Ea is completely unique, the things that have drawn 60 million viewers to his video in total and almost 600,000 to subscribe to his channel.
For instance, not many rappers have created a music video discussing race, labels, and society with over 8 million views. Not many rappers have released a song and music video discussion the destruction of our wildlife’s habitats all over the world along with the overall destruction of Earth in general. Two videos on that topic, in fact. Not many rappers have created many incredibly interesting, thought-provoking, well-researched, inspirational, and still great songs about topics that we desperately need to discuss, such as the two above. Prince Ea’s videos straddle the line between rapping and spoken-word poetry, every one of them very well shot and put together, as well as full of great animation.
The video above is a music video for Prince Ea’s song, titled “MAN vs EARTH”. It’s one of my favorite videos of his, along with his video “Dear Future Generations: Sorry” (which I featured a couple days ago), as it brilliantly discusses humanity’s negative effects on the Earth, from deforestation to global warming, in an enlightening and inspiring way unlike any video I’ve seen before. Using the analogy of the a day being Earth’s lifespan, Prince Ea talks about all the destruction we’ve caused in our 3 seconds of existence, and how we can come together to fix it.
Not only is the video inspiring and motivating, as most spoken word poetry is, but it gets you to care about the problem of environmental destruction, learn about it, and simply enjoy Prince Ea’s lyrics and rhymes about the topic. It’s hard to explain what about his videos are so powerful, but the way he expertly raps about whatever subject he is discussing, taking you on a journey throughout that topic and his opinions on it (all of which, to my knowledge, I agree with one hundred percent and have even tried to express myself). It’s easy to talk about pollution or race or technology, but Prince Ea goes a step beyond that and creates fantastic spoken word poems and raps that motivate you to do something, educate you, and inspire you.