Marlaina Buch, aka Hunter Rapper, is high-kicking her claim to both the male-centric musical genre and outdoor sport: hip hop and hunting. In keeping with rapper heritage, Buch uses her own life as her lyrical subject. And this Northern Ontario raised white girl came of age where “partridge hunting was as common as a snowbank in January.” Buch, fittingly pronounced buck, interrogates gender expectations and culturally contested food politics, all to her own pro-meat, self-made beats.
Imagine the compelling parts of The Omnivore’s Dilemma confrontationally rhymed by a woman wearing a pastel, foam-core salmon-shaped helmet. Boom. Meet the Leslie Hall of the North. But Buch doesn’t rap solely about pastoral locavorism—although her fondness for all things wild is clear, she manages to keep it real by popping Pringles tubes and shaking cans of Pam throughout her debut EP, Gittin Cosmic Bout Death (follow the link for a free download). Check out her feminist biodynamic rhymes:
I’m not picky I’m pro-protein
Heart, brains, lungs, tongue, liver and spleen
Placenta polenta
Tripe and beans
Parts are just parts
They’re not unclean
There’s more waste in a pack of tofu
Than the carcass of the deer I brought you
Ask me if its life mattered
Before its fat fried and beer battered
Shaky, shaky shake them death rattles
Watch your shoes get splattered
When I cut the moose bladder
Apples from Cali, figs from Peru
Barrels of oil makin food for you
Frogs killed by tractors, Snakes run over too!
We’re all psycho killers when the day is through
“I don’t eat eggs, I don’t eat cheese” Please!
Your cell phone is killin off all them killer bees
Carrots aint holy
That’s what I’ve deduced
And everything suffers when it’s mass “pro-duced”
Give props to the trappers and Rednex
Cause it all makes sense in context
Art school educated, Buch is no hunter-poser. Currently packing a fishing licence, she grew up shooting clay pigeons off the back deck of the family home in northern Ontario, hanging out at the rifle range, and digesting freshly killed game and fish. Currently living in Victoria, BC, Buch does most of her hunting at the library, reading about animals, cookery and the outdoors, entertaining fantasizes about moving to interior British Columbia where property’s cheap and the trucker hats a-plenty.
Currently, Hunter Rapper is working with London, ON rapper Phonecard on a 7” entitled “You’re So WestJet”, absorbed in the BBC cooking show Two Fat Ladies, and taking dance choreography at the YMCA in Greater Victoria. Keep an eye out for her live show at a BBQ near you.
10 Comments Have Been Posted
A white person from Canada
Anonymous replied on
A white person from Canada making some horrible raps. Fun.
oh, omnivores...
Miriam Griffin replied on
yeah...while this lady's out roughin' it in the woods, shooting animals & saving the world, all those listless vegans will be sitting at home with their plastic boxes of tofu, texting their buddies about the newest produce imports...
oh how i love it when
Anonymous replied on
oh how i love it when omnivores try to make killing look progressive and vegans like elitist fools. i just hope people keep on using their brains and checking the facts so that this nonsense will only lead to a bored yawn. im pretty disappointed about this article. sounds to me as bad as the "real men need meat"-shit.
I dont think vegans are
Clair de Lune replied on
I dont think vegans are elitist but its not fair when they critique on others food choices of eating meat or saying people are "disgusting" for eating it. I've heard all that before from vegans and vegetarians and it makes me feel judged and upset. I used to be a vegetarian but I was allergic to soy and got extremely sick from it.
Veganism can be elitist though it seems there are many more in rich areas than poorer ones. I know because I moved from a poor to rich area though my family is far from the affluent average here. There are lots of vegans here and none that I knew of where I lived before their parents buy them special foods.
Hunters when educated on local animal populations... which are over and which are under can actually have a positive effect on the environment. I found a link once on a Canadian nature conservancy website I would link to it but I cant find it right now. But like someone here said all those vegan products are imported and that takes a lot of fossil fuels to do so. I think vegans should keep their opinions of others peoples eating habits to themselves and be open-minded that their way isnt the only way and for some people it isnt realistic for them, healthy or possible.
I think that was ignorant how one commenter said that Canadian rap is bad. Its more underground but Canada has some amazing metal and hip-hop. You just have to dig for it.
vegans don't have a problem
Anonymous replied on
vegans don't have a problem with other peoples "food choices", vegans make the point that animals are no food but beings that deserve ethical treatment which forbids using them as you please. i certainly don't want to make excuses for rude behavior and assholes are everywhere - yes, vegans can be assholes too, who knew it - but maybe you can imagine that a person who feels empathy for a living being that had to suffer and die before you eat it's corpse, that this person is really disgusted by that cruelty and ignorance. to face it every day and to be made fun of for standiing up against this is a fight and definitely not a privilege. veganism is a question of education so of course it is more common in richer areas. but lets not forget that animal products are the true luxury. vegans don't need soy. there are plenty ways to live healthy and vegan without it. and it is definitely cheaper. there is nothing good about hunting. actually hunters are responsible for overpopulations. and it makes sense for who wants to saw on the own branch?
there are so many pages on the web, books to read, videos to watch so please educate yourself. it has all been said before. and fortunately more and more people get it.
so again, eating habits are a personal choice, no question about that. but animals are no food and to ignore that this third party is involved in this matter is just ridiculous. i have no problem with what you put in your mouth, i have a problem with you killing for it.
Chewing the Fat
Anonymous replied on
The ignorance and cruelty of eating animals has sustained our species (better or worse) for thousands of years. The diversity, affordability and availability of a staggering plentitude of new food sources has only become a reality in a comparative eye blink of time and often at the expense of local cultures, seasonality, food security and environmental integrity as it crosses the globe to find us, is produced using methods all but invisible to an urban eater, at prices so agreeable something else is likely being compromised - from the wage of the checkout person to soil airmiles away. It's very difficult to maintain a consistently pure or harm-free food supply even in a city, in an affluent neighborhood - the golden crown of hypocrisy is never far from our food choices these days, because ALL diets take a toll.
Many people no longer need to eat meat to survive. But don't kid yourself - no matter how carefully you move through the world, you're fucking it up by degrees - it's unavoidable and destruction is inevitable, whether you knowingly killed and animal and ate it or whether you unwittingly poison a stream. The violence of meat eating is just more visible.
the violence of meat eating
Anonymous replied on
the violence of meat eating is easily avoidable. its not an accident to raise, abuse and slaughter animals. and to see that is not hypocrisy.
the ecological footprint of an omnivore will always be worse than that of a vegan. it's funny that omnivores always speak of the imports for a plant based diet and how bad that was for the environment but what do you think do the farm animals eat and where that food comes from?
in this system no diet is free of cruelty, that's right. but still there is a huge difference between a vegan and an omnivorous diet. to deny that is simply ignorance. but even if there were no benefits for the environment or health, at least you don't torture and kill animals. and that is the point that far too few progressive people get since they still refuse to see the moral responsibility we have towards animals.
Technically I said this white
Anonymous replied on
Technically I said this white person from Canada is bad.
I'm not sure why we're
Miriam Griffin replied on
I'm not sure why we're talking about vegan elitism here...the artist in question is on the opposite end of the spectrum -- she's portraying her meat-based diet as morally supreme and making condescending generalizations about vegans/vegetarians. Shouldn't we be discussing her elitism?
also: the above comment about imported vegan food was sarcasm. Some vegans do eat a lot of imported produce and prepackaged food (just like many omnivores), but others subsist primarily on local, sustainable foods.
"but others subsist primarily
Whitney replied on
"but others subsist primarily on local, sustainable foods."
How lucky and privileged of them.
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