Originally published on June 23, 2021 at matthewfainor.com
Welcome to the first installment of my TikTok interview series! In this series, I probe the minds of sensational TikTokers to learn more about how the platform is revolutionizing science communication and science education, from the power of livestreaming to the virality of eco-rap music videos.
Last month, I sat down for an eye-opening conversation with Nate and Hila (@nateandhila) about the inspiration behind their latest album, the pitfalls of TikTok, and why we need a diversity of communicators. Nate and Hila are more than can be put into words. Their work can be described as deep ecology, eco-entertainment, philosophical rap, educational film, comedic performance, and social activism, and their TikTok is no different. Nate and Hila busk on the streets of New York City, extolling the virtues of compost while dressed as a discarded banana peel and a rotten apple core. Hila teaches us all how to deal with an overabundance of dill through a vintage TV screen. Nate dives deep into the etymology of the word "police" against a simple pastel backdrop. The dynamic duo raps about voting rights, honeybee sex, and the history of environmental policy.
Their creative and engaging TikToks have earned them over 40,000 followers across three channels (@nateandhila, @hilathekila, and @nathandufournyc), and their album Naughty for Nature(available to stream on Bandcamp, Spotify, and Apple Music), is one of the most intelligent, fun, and scandalous musical experiences I’ve had in the past year. The album's poetic, and often explicit, tracks explore themes of queerness, personal freedom, and human relationships through bacterial, plant, and animal sex. They are two of the most fascinating people I've had the pleasure of meeting, and I hope you find our conversation as inspiring as I did.
**This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity**
Matthew: How would you define the work and the music you make?
Nate: I think as a term, we’ve said eco-entertainment a lot. Although our work is not limited to environmental and ecological things. Taking eco in its broadest sense. The root of the word is “the house.” The house of the planet, which contains [not only] plants and vegetation and non-human organisms but also human organisms and all of their concerns. So that’s sort of what we consider our department. And emphasizing how they relate to one another and how they get along with one another.
Hila: What did we say yesterday? Thinking caps and eco raps. It’s topic-based, philosophical inquiries surrounding social justice issues, sometimes surrounding environmental science. Edutainment is another term--educational entertainment. Getting information and knowledge out there in an accessible, fun way is kind of what we’ve been doing.
M: What I love about your album was that it felt like the educational material was secondary to the thematic material. So you might have been talking about underwater hermaphrodites but it was about liberation. A lot of people who make educational content want the content to come first, and people don’t really respond to that as much. Do you have any thoughts on that kind of process?
H: I think explaining to somebody why whatever piece of knowledge you’re trying to give them is important for them to know is a big part of education. Just having facts and knowledge is one thing, but understanding why it’s important to have those facts and knowledge, the underlying reasoning for bringing this information to life, is what ties everything together. It’s the big picture versus the details.
In that song “Fuck Like a Fish,” you can learn about seahorses and clownfish, but the why is: nature is queer and [there are] lots of expressions of sexuality and different kinds of gender expressions in nature. So it ties it together. Know about this stuff so next time someone says, “Oh, you’re queer. That’s not natural.” You can be like, “Actually, it absolutely is natural.” That grounds it in something that is really important, which is free self expression and diversity of sexualities and things like that.
“You can learn about seahorses and clownfish, but the why is: nature is queer and [there are] lots of expressions of sexuality and different kinds of gender expressions in nature.”
N: Yeah, I think to add to that, the way I think of what we’re doing is it’s a very ancient thing. The knowledge of a civilization was transmitted orally through song. But it was the song. It was always the song first. Book 5 of the Odyssey, when Odysseus is escaping from the Island of Calypso there’s 25, 50 maybe, lines about him building his raft. It’s like, “If you know that song, you know how to build a raft.” But it’s not like the whole thing is about rafts. You embrace the educational role that music plays and then you make something that lives as a song but has that transmission interwoven in it as part of its fabric.
M: Totally. I have this question that’s staring out from my notes. And I really want to ask: On Naughty for Nature, why make an album all about sex?
H: I think sex sells. It’s actually one of the hooks in the song “Meiosis.” You know, it’s the beginning of life, something that all life forms do in some way in order to reproduce and continue and regenerate. It’s a celebration of life. It’s educational. And it’s something we, as humans, do think a lot about. We spend a lot of time trying to have sex, having sex. Since we hit puberty and start to understand it, we’re pretty much obsessed with it. And industries of all kinds, especially rap and music, have been revolving around sex, and so it was just kind of a natural place to explore from an ecological perspective.
N: The accidental cause is that we perform a lot at this place House of Yes in Brooklyn. And House of Yes is like a club.
H: A night club.
N: That’s present in the night life scene here, but they’re very sex positive and very queer positive. And so that was sort of in the air in our fan base here and our family here. So that made it natural. And sort of the thesis ultimately, again, of how do you ground the ethics that are boiling right now? We need to understand how queerness is inscribed in nature itself. There is no sort of heteronormativity that you can locate in that very bedrock of nature, but that’s traditionally how it’s been.
M: I love that story of the album springing from this community you’ve been part of and against this binary that we have established. Whether that’s homosexual or heterosexual or queer or not queer or even human or non-human. Straying from your community roots, I just love TikTok as a platform. I wanted to get your take on what you like about the platform and what you don’t like about the platform as a way to connect people.
H: I love TikTok because it actually sends the media to people who would not otherwise see or know about me. That’s one thing I really like about it. The other thing that I really, really like about it is just how collaborative it is. People sort of hopping on trends, engaging with each other. It’s also an extremely positive space. And the things that really succeed that I’m seeing are people showing their authentic selves and their normal lives. It’s kind of really nice to dwell in this variety and diversity of experience.
One of the things I think that I could critique is it can be really addicting and overstimulating. It’s kind of hard to maybe stop watching it. There’s no stopping point. There’s always another video. It can scramble your brain a little bit and you can sort of be there and watch TikTok for hours and hours and hours without noticing that you’re doing that. That’s probably the only negative thing.
“One of the things I think that I could critique is it can be really addicting and overstimulating.”
N: Some of the issues I have that are unresolved with it, even though I also appreciate it tremendously, are fragmentation. Fragmentation in the structure of it. [It] makes it so when you receive things in bite size form, more people can get more of the bites, but you also lose nuance to any topic, which is a larger problem just in our culture. More access to information but nobody is reading the book, and the book is actually what gets at the truth because the truth is always nuanced and manifold. And you can’t, even in 3 minutes, be truly nuanced and manifold about anything of significant importance. But that’s not to say it makes [TikTok] invalid. Hopefully it points people in the direction of doing their own inquiry.
H: As an educational platform it's so cool because there are so many teachers and educators that are using TikTok to disseminate information, especially in science. In a way it would be cool if TikTok had different channels that you could sort. If there was a way to just be like, “Okay, I want to be an educational TikTok right now,” and then just go into a space where people are actually teaching about science, that would be really cool.
N: You can imagine it in some way ultimately replacing all of the educational infrastructure that we have--or a lot of it. Replace the meeting in person with little co-op style things where people come and share information in a similar fashion, and you have probably improved education and diminished its costs in the most drastic way possible. Now you are disseminating information to everyone, so you’re in a conversation. Every class--there's no single class now--is just different pods and nodes of information.
M: How do we build paths so that once we connect with people, people want to get involved?--in either making their own knowledge or about creating a better environment or justice movements?
H: My mantra is: Lead by example and show how you do it, and then hopefully people will be inspired to find their own way to do it. But there's a lot of different ways to get involved with anything. A lot of it starts with creating your own schedule, your own life, your own rituals that make you accountable to yourself first. That sort of falls into self-help and self-betterment. Once you're doing all that, then you can really start giving to your community as well.
I think the zero waste movement is a good example of action-based content and information. It’s like, “Hey, did you know that you can bring a reusable to your coffee habit? Here’s an action you can take that makes it so that you're not throwing away a cup into the landfill every day.” Or, for example, content that inspires people to get involved politically and call their senators or learn about what's going on locally. The more we have people doing those things and showing how they do it, the more people will be able to be like, “Hey, I could do that too.” Our compost song is a great example of something like that. We created a song, and the song is super catchy. People love the music.
“‘How can I like this song and not compost?’ That's exactly the point. It's not guilting. It's too powerfully cool not to do it.”
N: The best quote I feel people have said is, “How can I like this song and not compost?” That's exactly the point. It's not guilting. It's too powerfully cool not to do it. You can never overestimate how aesthetically motivated our choices are, especially in the 21st century. Everybody wants to be a type in a culture group and know where they’re constellated in their culture group. We have to make it so this environmental stuff is so impossibly uncool not to do that people just can't say no to it.
H: One of the most amazing things that’s come out of it is that multiple people have started composting for the first time and have let us know that that's the reason that they're doing that now. Wow, that’s more than we even expected.
M: I love that idea that you brought up, Nate, about the aesthetics of people's actions and how group motivated we are. I'm very much focused on what is the aesthetic of science and how does that make people trust or not trust information? Or because you see all these sometimes cool young, female scientists, who don't wear lab coats and are kind of doing their work in a very cool and interesting way, that makes people respond much better to the information.
N: Depending on the person. If you're in rural America, like rural white America someplace, your aesthetic excludes that. Just as there are certain blind spots that [a] leftist New Yorker aesthetic also excludes. And everything associated with that is also bad. So that's the problem. The solutions to it are a bigger discussion.
M: I guess when you make content, you're always going to be excluding a group of people that isn't going to respond to that. I guess that's okay. There are different people making content for a reason.
“If you're in rural America, like rural white America someplace, your aesthetic excludes that. Just as there are certain blind spots that [a] leftist New Yorker aesthetic also excludes. And everything associated with that is also bad. So that's the problem.”
H: Yeah, the more diversity we have, the better honestly. There should be spokespeople from every walk of life to come and share information. Also, it makes more sense because you're learning from other people's perspectives and other people's life experiences. And you want that. You want the biodiversity of content creators. That's what's going to enrich it all for everybody. The accessibility of it is so important, and having as many people sharing information is good, ultimately.
You can hear more from Nate and Hila by following them @nateandhila, @hilathekilla, and @nathandufournyc on TikTok or @nateandhila on Instagram!
As always, check out more at my website, feel free to reach out with any comments or suggestions, and share this post with anyone who might enjoy it!