Baba's Word on the Web

Album Release and Review Round-up

2011-07-04T10:22:00.005+01:00

First thing's first, I have a new CD out! The Rap Guide to Evolution: Revised is a brand new 14-track album produced by Mr. Simmonds. It started out as a "remix" of the original RGE CD from a few years ago but soon took on a life of its own with all new music, new collaborations, and most of the lyrics re-written (performance, feedback, revision), plus three completely new tracks. We've been working on this album all year long and finally finished it last week. Click here to listen to the evolution of the rap guide, and download it Radiohead-style (pay what you like).

The record came out just in time too. Last Sunday was the official launch of the Rap Guide to Evolution off-Broadway at the Soho Playhouse, and after the official opening comes the official reviews. (Hold your breath, I did).

The first indications were a little off-putting, with a review from Theatre Mania generally praising the show but complaining that my slogan "Don't Sleep With Mean People" is "a little too simplistic" (kind of like the Golden Rule?), followed by an utterly ignorant and petty review from Backstage that accused me of being insufficiently brave and claimed that I am "interested less in Darwinian theory than in the newer and murkier fields of evolutionary biology and psychology." WTF?!

However, Darwinian theory predicts that critics this clueless about Darwinian theory will soon be supplanted by critics with a higher level of Darwinian theoretical fitness, and I was not disappointed. On Tuesday the New York Times published a double feature, with a glowing review in their Theatre section ("brainy and entertaining") and a feature article in their Science section ("hard to beat"). I am told this is the first time the NY Times has ever profiled a show in both the Science and Theatre sections in the same day, which is consoling since the Science section decided to print the most unflattering photo of me ever taken, hands down.

We also got a nice review in the New York Post ("a total Dar-winner") and a four-star review from Time Out New York ("Dope, data-filled raps"), as well as reviews and write-ups in Respect Magazine, NYTheatre.com, The Inept Owl, Think Thoughts Do Stuff, and Sci-ence (with an awesome cartoon of me and Jamie).

So what does all of this fanfare mean? It means we've had full houses! The last few days the show has been packed, and that makes for happy staff, happy producers, and happy crowds, able to shake the walls with a rousing chorus of "When I say 'Don't Sleep With'... you say 'Mean People!'"

Beat the Drum!

2011-06-17T08:48:00.005+01:00

Greetings from New York! Jamie (Mr. Simmonds) and I arrived two weeks ago, and after a weekend of performing at the World Science Festival we got settled into our new apartment here in the West Village and immersed ourselves in daily rehearsals and re-writes for the off-Broadway run of the Rap Guide to Evolution at the Soho Playhouse, which starts tonight!

The most amazing part of this process so far has been the collaborations with some of New York's top theatre artists, including Julliard's Derek Stenborg on set design, Jason Boyd on lighting design, Dodd Loomis the director, Wendall Harrington on visual projections, and Ken Travis on sound design, and of course Jamie Simmonds who has been producing new music for the show, which will soon be a new album: "The Rap Guide to Evolution: Revised". Take a moment to check out their bios and credentials on the show website.

The result of all this collaboration is a truly stunning production with an audio/visual tapestry that complements the words in a way I have never experienced. I really can't wait to get it up and running, but with the launch tonight I guess I won't have to. Check out Derek's new mural designed especially for the show, which is now painted in full relief on the theatre wall:

For now this is me beating the drum and asking for your help. We will be running for a minimum of two months, eight shows per week, but if the audience response is strong enough the run could be extended for several more months, and the only way that will happen is through word of mouth. If you know anyone in New York or anyone planning to visit, please send them an invite, a recommendation, and/or a link to the show website: http://www.rapguidetoevolution.com

Also, if you know anyone who does a blog, any journalists, anyone with Twitter followers, that's how we'll reach the most people. For instance, here's a recent post from the science writer Carl Zimmer at Discover Magazine helping to spread the word on his blog, The Loom. Now we need more evolution-lovers to beat the drum!

Hope to see you at a show, and wish us luck,

Baba

Rapconteur at the Rio (Post-Election Smut)

2011-05-04T10:51:00.005+01:00

Here's a moment of hilarity to take the edge off.

My last Canadian performance before I depart for New York and London and beyond is on Thursday night at the Rio Theatre in East Vancouver. Well, yesterday Canada had an election, and my mother, Joyce Murray, was a candidate for the Liberal party in Vancouver Quadra (the West side). You'll be happy to know she won the election, although her party most emphatically did not, but that's another story. Congratulations to my mom the MP!

So the hilarity came the day before the election, when she decided to use her high public profile to help promote my final show (if that's nepotism then I'll take it) so she wrote to her campaign assistant, Leah, asking "could you put some kind of link to Baba’s gig on my FaceBook and website?" This might sound like an executive order, but Leah's response (generously forwarded to me) is worth quoting in full:

Hi Joyce,

I went to post this on facebook but think it may be inappropriate until after the polls close tomorrow: the picture for the event blatantly has people having sex in a tree. Are you ok if I put it on facebook as of 7pm tomorrow?

I don't think it is appropriate to have it on the website.

See you soon,

Leah

But... but... that's a scene from the Merchant's Tale! It's Chaucer! It's educational! Ah well, I guess the poster is a bit too liberal even for the Liberals, and democracy should never be confused with entertainment. Check out the event on facebook here, or the ticketing site here, or get more details about the show on my website here.

If you're in Vancouver I hope you can make it, and you'll find out how illuminating and non-gratuitous sex in a tree can really be.

Countdown to Launch

2011-04-20T11:25:00.007+01:00

Here's a quick update about my recent goings-on for your amusement.

Upcoming Gigs and Tours

In about two and half weeks I'll be leaving for New York (six days), London (two weeks), and then New York again (indefinitely), but first I've got a couple of shows coming up in Vancouver. I'm hosting a launch party for my new Lit Fuse Records website on April 25th at the Library Square Pub featuring my label-mates Aaron Nazrul and the Boom Booms and Smoky Tiger. I'll also be presenting Rapconteur at the Rio Theatre on May 5th, the debut Vancouver performance of my new Chaucer/Gilgamesh/Beowulf adaptations.

Rap Guide to Evolution Music Video UK Premier

We have confirmed the Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square, May 25th, as the launch event for the Rap Guide to Evolution video project. The final DVD probably won't be finished and ready for sale by then, but we will be showing the finished videos and launching the website at that event, with the DVD to follow shortly. Huge thanks to the Wellcome Trust and all of the Crowfunding supporters for making this possible.

Lit Fuse Records .Com

Check out my new record label website, with links to listen to all of the music I have released and executive produced over the years. The site is especially designed for showcasing our artists, for easy access to buy their music digitally, and for film and television producers to browse our songs (including instrumentals) for licensing purposes. If you know someone working on a film or web project or video game that needs synchronized music, please send them to LitFuseRecords.com!

Off-Broadway Venue Confirmed!

Starting June 17th I'll be performing eight shows per week at the Soho Playhouse in downtown Manhattan, running for somewhere between six weeks and complete incapacitation, so as the date approaches I promise you'll be hearing more from me about that. I'm also planning to write a blog about my adventures in New York. (I'm not blogging right now because my days consist of sitting at my computer typing and adjusting my broken ankle for comfort and occasionally recording a rap song, so not much to tell). Soho Playhouse is a great venue though, check it out.

Don't Vote For Mean People!

Some of you will no doubt recognize this slogan from the Rap Guide to Evolution, in which I admonish the audience to do their part for humanity by refusing to sleep with mean people. Well, as a variation on the theme and since we're in an election right now I recorded a battle rap song about the mean-spirited uber-conservative automaton we've recently been forced to call the Prime Minister of Canada. Click here to watch the music video, filmed at my mom's campaign launch (she's a candidate for the Liberal Party here in Vancouver). The star of the show is my formidable grandmother Charlotte, a fact picked up on by some of the media response. It also ran on the six o'clock news before the leaders' debate last week.

To all the Canadians reading this, let's vote Harper out! We can do this by talking to people, staying engaged, rallying the vote on May 2nd, and by voting strategically where there's a close race with a split left. It's the only way to avoid voting for mean people by proxy. Check out Project Democracy for guidance.

Don't Vote For Mean People - Press Release

2011-04-12T02:53:00.005+01:00

Press Release: "Don't Vote For Mean People" Sums Up the Election in Rap

April 11 2011

Vancouver rap artist Baba Brinkman, the son of a Liberal candidate, has released a Youtube video for his new anti-Stephen Harper rap song "Don't Vote For Mean People," and it's already generating some buzz, including tweets from prominent Canadian writers Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake) and Andrew Potter (The Rebel Sell).

Joyce Murray, the Liberal candidate for Vancouver Quadra and Brinkman's mother, was quick to distance herself from the video, writing in her weekly campaign update: "I don’t always agree with every detail in his creative interpretation of the issues, but his raps are always entertaining." Vancouver's Georgia Straight newspaper ran a story pointing out that Murray was also promoting the song by mentioning it in her campaign material.

The music video was filmed at Murray's campaign headquarters and features Liberal signage, but its message is entirely national in scope. Brinkman also departs from the Liberal Party line in advocating strategic voting for the NDP in ridings that are "heavily NDP polling." The song calls Stephen Harper "a menace" and accuses him of "acting like a dictator". Brinkman's previous Youtube postings have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

Joyce Murray is featured in the video, as is Brinkman's fearsome grandmother Charlotte Murray, whose presence has drawn Youtube comments. In the Youtube notes Brinkman writes: "Yes, that is my grandma. I advise you not to mess with her." He also includes a list of recent news stories about Conservative misdeeds under the heading "Mean stuff that Harper has done."

The video can be viewed here.

And the song can be downloaded here for free.

Shiny and New

2011-03-24T22:40:00.004Z

I don't usually do headings, but this is a heady update. Each headline could have been its own email. I didn't want to carpet bomb you though, so here goes.

New Website

I have a brand new website! I am officially phasing out my old babasword.com site for the more straightforward bababrinkman.com, which has now been fully redesigned for ease and enjoyment. Please take a moment to check it out.

Twin Studies

In other news, I received a weird random Skype call from my long-lost identical twin brother recently, which was pretty surreal. Luckily I had the presence of mind to screen capture the whole thing. Have a look.

I'm A African!

Would you like to be in one of my music videos? We're doing a video for the song I'm A African and we need lots of people to send in video clips of themselves rapping along with the song, so we can cut between dozens of faces all proclaiming "I'm A African!" like any well-informed Homo sapien. If you'd like to join us, click here for instructions.

Fail Beyond Belief

The Rock Beyond Belief concert at Fort Bragg that I was so looking forward to performing at has been cancelled! This was a blatant example of discrimination against non-religious people by the US Army, but there's a chance it might be resurrected in the Fall, or it could result in a court challenge. Here's their latest update if you're curious about the unfolding drama.

Broken Ankle

As for me, I'm laid-up in Vancouver at the moment since I broke my ankle bone snowboarding a few weeks ago, which earned me 6-8 weeks in a cast and on crutches. This is inconvenient to say the least, but I'm cracking on with desk work in a state of general agitation while I heal.

Politricks

Speaking of agitation, I made some political videos, including one about Canada's sleazy Prime Minister and one about US Health Care Reform.

Tours and gigs

My upcoming off-Broadway run is now scheduled to start in mid-June, which clears some time for fun in the run-up. On May 9th I'll be presenting at TEDxEast in New York, and then I'm heading over to England for a few weeks. I'll definitely have a gig or two in London, but if anyone out there knows of a UK venue or event I could be part of roughly 11 - 30 May, I'm looking. I'll also be in Vancouver until May 7th or so if anyone wants to set up a local gig.

Rapping Chaucer

Yeah, I still do that, although lately I've spiced things up a bit with Beowulf and the Merchant's Tale. I'm still surprised that schools let me perform the material from Rapconteur in their classes, but I'm glad too, 'cause the kids lap it up. I'll leave you with a video of one of my recent school performances captured by a Vancouver TV crew.

I'm A African!

2011-03-24T10:15:00.009Z

Calling all Homo sapiens!

I'm currently working with a video production team in London on a series of music videos for my album The Rap Guide to Evolution, funded by the Wellcome Trust and Crowdfunding. The result will be part hip-hop swagger and part educational nature documentary, showing the animal roots of human behavior and the unity of all living things by descent, and we need your help!

We need some additional footage for the "I'm A African" video - yes that means footage of you. If you would like to be a part of it, all I need you to do is download the song, familiarize yourself with it, and play it on your stereo in the background while making a video of yourself rapping along to the lyrics as close to in time with the rhythm as you can (keep the camera still!). Don't worry if it's not all perfectly in time, or if you just want to do a segment of the song rather than the whole thing, but keep in mind that we can only use the parts that are in time!

If you can memorize the lyrics great, but if not you can get them from Bandcamp, print them off, and place the cheat-sheet near the camera so you can read them while facing the lens. Please make sure the scene is well-lit, the background isn't too cluttered, and the camera captures you from the torso up or closer. iPhone4 is okay, or Quicktime via webcam (make sure the recording quality is set to "Best" under preferences), but if you have an HD video camera that would be even better, and of course all ages, races, genders, and body-types are welcome, that's the point!

If you would like to take part please email me at info [at] babasword [dot] com with the subject "I'm A African!" to confirm your participation (first come first serve!) and I'll respond with instructions on how to send me the files. All submissions must be received by April 15th!

**Note: this deadline has now been extended until April 30th, but please get them in soon!

Then once we get everyone's clips we'll cut back and forth between me rapping and all of you rapping to illustrate the evolutionary fact that we are all African under the skin. So say it loud and proud: I'm A African!

Disclaimer: I can't guarantee that everyone who sends me a video will appear in the final cut, as this will be left up to the discretion of the video design team and it will be based on video quality, timing, expressiveness, and the need to represent diversity of ages, races, genders, etc. However, we will stop accepting footage once we have enough to work with, so your chances are much better than average.

Legalese: we don't have physical consent forms for you to literally sign, so please be advised that sending us footage via email in accordance with the instructions attached means you consent to your image being used in the video for us to distribute and promote as we see fit, and for us to use in material for the purpose of promoting the video and the Rap Guide to Evolution project as a whole, worldwide, in perpetuity, etc, etc. That way you can't sue us if you get cold feet after sending something in!

Rock Beyond Belief Canceled Due to Lack of Intent

2011-03-16T12:41:00.003Z

Some of you will have heard via Twitter and Facebook and other sources, but the concert that was due to be held at Fort Bragg, NC on April 2nd has been cancelled because the Army administrators reneged on their commitment to provide "equal support" to the event after sponsoring an evangelical christian concert on the base last year to the tune of over $50,000. Masala Skeptic over at Skepchick put it perfectly: Fail Beyond Belief.

As if this wasn't hypocritical enough, I recently heard from one of the organizers and apparently the Fort Bragg admin people are now trying to justify their decision to pull the funding and downgrade the venue by pointing out that the performers hadn't signed a "Statement of Intent" with the concert organizers. So they asked me to write a short letter confirming that I had indeed intended to be there. This is starting to take on the same surreal feel as the Dover Intelligent Design trial which put the whole "Liars for Jesus" phenomenon on full display. Anyway, here's the letter, now public:

Fort Bragg

Subject: Statement Of Intent

ATTN: Erica Walker, Benjamin Abel, Stephen Sicinski

It has recently come to my attention that questions are being raised as to the seriousness of my compact with SGT Justin Griffith to perform at a concert event he was organizing at Fort Bragg for April 2nd called "Rock Beyond Belief". Please allow me to clear up any confusion by saying that I did confirm this gig with SGT Griffith, in writing, and although my usual fee to perform is around $2,000 I had also agreed in writing to waive my honorarium for the event, because the cause (equal treatment of those with divergent religious beliefs, including atheists) is one I believe in strongly.

My written confirmation was sent to SGT Griffith via email on February 6th, and on February 13th I wrote a blog announcing the event to my fans online, which you can read here: http://babasword.blogspot.com/2011/02/shows-tours-vids.html. I also followed up with a newsletter that went out to my personal email list of more than 7,000 individuals, and I received many encouraging responses and expressions of interest from fans around the world. If you have any doubt about this I would be happy to show you the messages and/or send out a follow-up newsletter asking everyone on my mailing list to individually write to you via email in support of SGT Griffith and in protest of Fort Bragg's discrimination against his event on religious grounds, in clear violation of the US constitution. I was very disappointed to hear that the event was cancelled, but under the circumstances I think SGT Griffith made the right choice.

I should also add, in case anyone is foolish enough to quibble over the "official" status of email confirmation as a form of written compact or "Statement of Intent", that I currently perform more than 100 gigs per year and the majority of those events are confirmed via email with no formal contract, and never once have I canceled a gig for anything other than grave illness. Once an event has been confirmed via email and announced online and one's name has been added to the poster, it would be career suicide to treat such commitments frivolously. The music industry, like many other professions, is mostly governed by a code of honour enforced by peers with a strong interest in each others' reputation for integrity, something that is worth more than a signed contract in many spheres. I am proud to say SGT Griffith took me at my (written) word that I would be there, just like he seems to have (mistakenly) taken the word of Fort Bragg's administrators that he would receive "equal support" for his event.

At any rate, I sincerely hope SGT Griffith is able to resurrect Rock Beyond Belief at a future date, and please be assured that I will do everything in my power to attend and perform. As we say in the hip-hop world: "word is bond".

Signed,

Baba Brinkman

The Rap Guide to Evolution

PS - if anyone does want to support SGT Griffith and the Foxhole Atheists by donating or writing in, here's how you do it.

Shows, Tours, Vids

2011-02-13T14:34:00.001Z

I'm just writing to give you a quick update, share a new music video, and put the word out about some upcoming gigs and tours, including Vancouver, California, and the Eastern USA.

First the update: we exceeded the Crowdfunder target with flying colours back in January, raising £12,588 from 304 funders in 60 days, a fantastic response! The video team in London is now putting these funds to good use on post-production, and we're hoping to have the videos ready for release by April or May, so standby for more!

Speaking of videos, here's a new one that was commissioned by Macmillan Dictionary, a battle between Canadian and British slang, pitting my own verbal skills against the inimitable Professor Elemental. It is an exercise in exalted silliness and was lots of fun to put together, with fine music by Mr Simmonds and visuals by Tommy Nagle who also did the video for Off That. Click here to watch it.

Elemental is an old friend and collaborator of mine and one of the finest MCs I've encountered in the UK. He has an upcoming tour of Eastern Canada and the USA in April and May, so if any of you know of a venue or event he could grace I think he still has dates to fill. Check out his website for more info and to get in touch with him.

Another friend with a great project is David Sloan Wilson, the author of Evolution for Everyone which was a major inspiration for the Rap Guide to Evolution (seriously, if you read it you'll be startled by how many of his ideas I adapted). One of David's best ideas was the Binghamton Neighborhood Project, a real-world application of evolutionary theory that is currently transforming his city for the better, and one of the project's initiatives, the Design Your Own Park Contest, was recently shortlisted for a major urban achievement award, but he needs your vote to win it! To learn more about the project in David's own words just click here, or go directly to the voting page to support him.

As for me, I'm hanging out in Vancouver until the next round of touring kicks off. I'll be performing the Rap Guide to Evolution as a fundraiser for CFI Vancouver on February 20th at the Railway Club, supported by Aaron Nazrul and Boom Booms, my last show in Vancouver before I decamp for New York, so please come if you can! Here's the Facebook event page and the CFI announcement.

Next I'll be performing my new-ish show Rapconteur at the Fresno Rogue Festival March 5-12, so if any of you know of a venue in California I could add to that tour, I could probably make it work in March.

Then in April I'm off to Fort Bragg in North Carolina to perform for the troops alongside Richard Dawkins and others at an event called Rock Beyond Belief, organized by some non-religious soldiers (who call themselves Foxhole Atheists!) as a response to an evangelical christian concert held on the base last year. It's not exactly a "counter-event", more of an attempt to celebrate critical thinking and foster community and solidarity among nonbelievers, especially ones who often feel like they are under siege from religious zealots. It's a pretty interesting backstory if you want to read about it.

After that it's off to New York for the big off-Broadway run, although I might have a few weeks free before rehearsals begin, so if any of you wants to organize a gig in early April just get in touch.

Two Weeks' Notice (Help!)

2011-01-08T00:04:00.004Z

Happy New Year!

It's the final two weeks of the Rap Guide to Evolution DVD Crowdfunder drive and we're only at 81%, which is much better than I had feared, but Crowdfunder's rules are strict. If we don't meet or exceed the £10,000 target in the 60 day timeframe everyone gets their money back and we're stuck with our original (highly stretched) budget. We can't let this happen! There are 13 days left as of today, so this is a call to arms. Please share the link below on facebook, twitter, blogs, and emails, and if you've been thinking of contributing, now is the time!

http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/investment/the-rap-guide-to-evolution-educational-dvd-58

And here's a recent post on BoingBoing.net that has given the pitch a nice boost, literally a 6% increase in the past 48 hours, thanks in part perhaps to the heated debates raging in the comments section, including a spat between myself and a semi-famous transexual blank-slatist over the scientific validity of evolutionary psychology: http://www.boingboing.net/2011/01/05/the-rap-guide-to-evo.html

Also, I'm accepting bookings through the Crowdfunder drive, and so far two different venues have secured bookings by contributing £1,000. Email me to check about possible dates and availability first, as this is currently the only way I'm booking events for 2011 due to the off-Broadway run that's scheduled to start in New York in March. So if you've been thinking of organizing a performance of the Rap Guide to Evolution or Rap Canterbury Tales this year, let's do it through Crowdfunder and put the money towards the DVD post-production costs!

Speaking of the upcoming off-Broadway run, Sharon Levy of Dovetail Productions is currently organizing the venue, hiring the team, and raising the crucial funds to make this happen, mostly through private investment. She needs to secure $300K (minimum $5-$10K units), standard for New York off-Broadway theatre, and she is open to investors from my network (that's y'all). Be warned that there is risk involved, but also possible financial reward (if you think I'm bankable prospect!) Let me know if you're seriously interested and I'll connect you with Sharon, but first read her Executive Summary with the pitch.

In other news, we have now finished all of the live filming for the music videos and the footage we have is amazing! We filmed a Galapagos beach party for "Worst Comes to Worst", a grimy snarling fire-in-a-barrel rudeboy video for "Survival of the Fittest", and a breakdance battle between Darwin, Sarah Palin, Michel Foucault, and *God* for "Survival of the Fittest". Check out the photos on the bottom of the Crowdfunder pitch page.

Next, crowdfunder willing, is the editing and post-production phase, and finally the release party, hopefully in early April to coincide with the off-Broadway run. One final push to make it happen!

Thanks for your support and continued efforts,

Baba

Epic Battle

2010-12-13T01:55:00.003Z

On Friday we filmed an epic breakdance battle with Darwin facing down his detractors, Michel Foucault (representing social constructivism), Sarah Palin (representing the christian right), and God (representing Himself, of course). It was a satirical reconstruction of the evolutionary culture wars on the dancefloor and Darwin reigned supreme! Check out the new photos posted to the pitch page, or view them on facebook here.

The videos are shaping up amazingly well and we have our final two days of shooting Monday and Tuesday this week, wrapping up Hynotize, Sexual Selection, and Worst Comes to Worst. Then we move into the post-production phase, which will rely hugely on crowdfunding support. We're now 1/3 of the way into our alloted time and we've almost hit 2/3 of our target, so the end is in sight, but this is no time to let it slip! If you have already contributed, please tell a friend, and if not, now is the time! Click here to help fund the project.

Also just announced: I will be performing my two new rap/comedy/storytelling shows, The Rap Guide to Human Nature and Rapconteur one last time in London on December 20th. Both of these shows were written in 2010 and both of them premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe to great acclaim, so we are filming a live DVD of both shows next Monday starting at 6:30pm at the Alley Cat in Soho, two 50 minute halves with a 15 minute intermission. Last chance to see these shows in England for some time! Click here to check out the facebook event page.

Gangbusters!

2010-12-07T04:59:00.002Z

The crowdfunding drive I started just over two weeks ago to increase the production value of our Rap Guide to Evolution DVD project is going gangbusters, with 143 individual funders so far, and the vast majority of them have chosen the vanity package: £30 for a pre-order copy of the DVD and the use of your picture somewhere in the animation. We're at 61% of our £10,000 target after just fifteen days!

It's awesome progress, but we're still a ways from the mark, so if you've been thinking about buying in but haven't gotten around to it, now is the time! Click here to check out the progress so far, or to buy your little slice of immortality.

By the way, if you're one of the 143 beautiful people who have already signed on, thank you! And if you're one of the extreme keeners who've written to ask me where to send the photo, or who just went ahead and emailed me your photo already, take it easy! I won't collect the images until we actually hit the target, because if we don't hit it within the 60 day time limit everyone gets their money back and no one's photo will be used, so please don't send me any more pics. It's not that you're not attractive, it's just that we'll do it all together with an upload page once we've reached the target : )

One of the most amazing things about the past two weeks is the degree to which blogs and social networking sites have taken up the cause. It's not yet a full-blown viral outbreak, but there are some promising early warning signs. The project was mentioned in David Sloan Wilson's Evolution for Everyone blog, as well as by New Humanist Magazine, by Andrew Potter writing for McLeans, on the Friendly Atheist blog, and in posts by Words of Science and Crowdsource Capital, so there is a fairly wide-range of interest. If you have connections to blogs or if you write one, please consider posting about this.

More news: here's an interview I did on the radio show and podcast Skeptically Speaking last weekend, which talks about the Crowdfunder drive and my new album The Rap Guide to Human Nature.

And if you want to see how I use rap to popularize science and science to help people understand rap in my live shows, check out the TEDx talk I did back in October.

As for me, I've just finished a series of college and high school performances in NJ, NY, and RI, and tomorrow I'm checking out Manhattan theatres and meeting with the team organizing the upcoming off-Broadway run, currently slated for March 2011. Then next week I'm back in the UK for more Wellcome Trust music video filming, plus Robin Ince's legendary Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People comedy showcase, followed by Christmas with the family in Vancouver and some well-deserved rest.

Thanks again everyone, and keep the crowdfunding momentum rolling!

Crowdfunding Evolution

2010-11-22T00:44:00.003Z

Friends,

As many of you know, the Wellcome Trust awarded me a grant earlier this year to make a series of music videos for the Rap Guide to Evolution, a project that is intended to "promote the public understanding of science" using a new medium. Well, over the past few weeks I've been working with a professional film crew in London to shoot these videos and the results have been really exciting. We are now on target to finish the live filming by the middle of December, with the editing to be completed by February, give or take. Click here to watch our trailer video with some preview clips.

The challenge we face now is finding additional funding to support this project. The Wellcome Trust grant is enough (barely) to film and edit the videos, but we want to take them to the next level by weaving in original animation, digital effects, and high-quality nature footage licensed from sources like the BBC. Imagine a four-minute short film, part Eminem-style rap music video, part David Attenborough-style nature documentary, illustrating themes such as the common descent of all human beings from African ancestors and the processes of natural and sexual selection that shaped our bodies and minds and the rest of nature. We are making twelve such videos, one for each song on the CD. My hope is that these videos will be used by Biology teachers the world over to make evolution accessible to their students, as well as offering an entertaining entry point into Darwin's theories for non-Scientists in general.

The solution? A new concept called "crowdfunding", which allows you to pre-buy the DVD we are making before we are finished making it, contributing to the production value and ultimately the potential impact of the finished product. Together with SPL Productions, I have partnered with a website called "Crowdfunder" to run a campaign to raise an additional £10,000 to increase the production value of these videos. If we can hit our target in 60 days, the end result will be something amazing. If we fail to hit the target, the money is all returned to the funders and we fall back on the Wellcome Trust grant, which will still be enough to complete a good finished product, just one with a lot less mojo.

To give you a sense of what this all means, we've created a lovely Crowdfunder pitch page that lays it all out. Click here to see it.

If you like the project and want to support it, there are various rewards attached to different levels of funding. £10 gets you a download of the finished videos, £20 gets you a DVD, and £30 buys you immortality: we will put your photo in one of the videos, representing a branch on the human family tree. You can also book me for a performance if you contribute enough (click the above link to find out my going rate, slightly discounted).

And if you haven't heard the songs yet, you can click here to download the Rap Guide to Evolution CD.

I hope you will help me take this project all the way, and if you know any science teachers or friends of evolution, please forward them the link.

Fringe Science

2010-09-17T20:07:00.003+01:00

Friends New and Old,

Well, the Edinburgh Fringe 2010 is concluded and I'm back in London, back on my grind, back on tour, reading and writing and gigging and muddling about. Sorry, that last bit was a post-partum pang.

How did it go? Exceptionally well! I performed over fifty shows in three and a half weeks and didn't die of exhaustion, or even lose my voice. My cavalier decision to list myself as part of the Edinburgh Comedy Festival (as opposed to "theatre") for the first time ever was vindicated by a five-star review in Chortle on the second-to-last day of the Fringe, an awesome (though scientifically very confused) write-up that helped me sell zero tickets but at least left me with a jolly after-glow. Click here to read it.

Even my little pet project, Rapconteur, got some love at the Fringe. The best review I got for it was a five-star praise-fest from Three Weeks, which you can view by clicking here.

Rapconteur was also my first foray into the Free Fringe, where the audience pays nothing and at the end of the show I stand by the door with a donation jar making puppy-dog eyes as they shuffle past, some paying and some avoiding my panhandling gaze. It was a bit of an experiment, and if you're curious to know how it went (financially and otherwise), I wrote up the results in one of my blogs for Whatsonstage.com.

I'm not just being ironic calling the Free Fringe an experiment either. After the show one day I was approached by some behavioral economists who are keen to experiment more formally with audience altruism and publish the quantified results, a prospect that makes me childishly excited, but more of that anon.

Speaking of experiments, in The Rap Guide to Human Nature I phoned my sister Dawn from the stage every single day for twenty six consecutive days, waking her up most mornings in the midst of her summer holiday (my Edinburgh show started at 7:45am Vancouver time). The point? I kept track of which days she answered the phone and which days I got voicemail and used the data at the end of the month to predict her ovulation cycle. If this makes no sense to you (hint: it's about evolutionary incest avoidance instincts), check out this article by Michael Shermer on the science behind the experiment:

And the results? Well, here's the calendar (used with Dawn's kind permission):

A very straightforward prediction follows from the Michael Shermer article. So how does that prediction square with her actual fertility cycle? I edited the results into a youtube video (the future of science outreach), which you can watch at the link below. Warning: this video contains information about my sister's fertility cycle. For educational use only! Click here to watch.

Hmm, how can I round out this highly eclectic newsletter? I know, with a link to a music video I made with some tree planter friends back in May, an ode to Canada's highly sheltered position (and policies) in regards to catastrophic climate change. It's like Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" crossed with the party at the end of Return of the Jedi. Get ready to travel down a path that may soon be very popular, the Road Northwest. Click to watch on Youtube.

Hasta la vista,

Baba

My Fringe Nightmare (Part Two)

2010-09-01T02:13:00.002+01:00

Back in London post-Fringe, feeling dizzy with the shock of not performing multiple times every day. So quiet, so calm. Cabin fever now contends with relief and exhaustion. The nuts and bolts are simple and satisfying: I performed 53 full-length one-hour shows over the course of 3.5 weeks, without losing my voice or getting ill, and once again the reviews and audience response were strong. But this fringe was more than just an adventure – for me it was also an experiment in risk-taking and genre-switching, and the word that haunted me throughout is: “comedy”.

In the months leading up to the Fringe, from the time I registered my (as yet unwritten) Rap Guide to Human Nature show pretty much up until the first Edinburgh performance, I was plagued by recurring dreams of disaster, dreams of arriving at my first show completely unprepared and utterly failing to entertain (see my previous blog). I was bemused (and motivated) by these dreams, since I have been doing the Fringe since 2004 and it’s never happened before, but then, I’ve never listed as comedy before, always theatre. The “Theatre” genre is a big tent, big enough for comedy and tragedy and everything in between, but it’s unspecialized. You can be a cook without knowing how to make certain dishes, just like you can be a performer without making people laugh. There are two ways to become specialized: training and trial by fire (I went for the second option). The problem is, I still don’t know how to make people laugh. I can do it, but I can’t explain the process or teach anyone else how to do it, (which seems like the basic criteria required to really “know” anything). This was probably the source of my anxiety.

But not all of the dreams were bad. I specifically remember a bizarre one from early April that turned my nightmare scenario on its head. It was very similar to the others in the beginning: I’m in Edinburgh on the first day of the Fringe, and the crowd is already forming outside my venue, mere minutes before the first show. Panicking, I realize that I have absolutely nothing to say, nothing prepared, no material, how did this happen? Then I run into Justin (he was my venue tech at the Adelaide Fringe) who says enthusiastically: “Hey Baba, I really love the new show! When you were here yesterday doing your tech rehearsal, I was laughing so hard! People are going to lap it up!” A moment of confusion is followed by a spark of realization as I grab Justin by the arm and drag him aside: “What, you’ve seen the new show?!?” He looks perplexed: “Of course, we did the tech run yesterday, it was great…” I’m nearly hysterical now, pulling out my note pad: “Tell me what’s in it!” Justin looks even more perplexed: “But, you wrote it, and you just performed it…” I’m trying to remain calm, shifting into crisis management mode: “Listen Justin, I must be suffering from acute amnesia because I can’t remember a single thing from the show; in fact as far as I can remember I haven’t written it yet, so you have to tell me what you saw yesterday.” Justin plays along, obviously suspecting a prank, but also sensing my desperation: “Well, you started off with this monologue about… and then you did this rap with a chorus that went… and then there was this character you played…” And as he rattled off the material from the show I kept scribbling away at my notebook, like: “Brilliant, that’s a great idea! Where do I come up with this stuff?!?” Then I brought my notebook on stage with me for reference, set it on the floor, and proceeded to kill it, getting huge laughs and thunderous applause, just as Justin predicted I would.

When I woke up I tried to write down everything I had said that was getting such big laughs in the dream, and trust me it’s all crap. Not a single joke or character ended up in the actual show, but the feeling I woke up with was golden: this is going to work out. I knew it because I had experienced it, even if I didn’t know yet how to pull it off. That’s pretty much how I feel right now. I can remember funny things I said and I know they were funny because I got some big laughs, but I’m still not sure why they were funny, or how I would do it again, except to just go on instinct. Jamie (aka Mr. Simmonds) got some big laughs too for that matter; he turned into a right performer over the past month, a comedy DJ. I proposed to him on stage twenty-four times and he turned me down every day except the last, when he unexpectedly accepted. What’s funny about that? I guess you had to be there.

On the second to last day of the Fringe Jamie and I got a parting gift in the form of a golden review: 5 stars in Chortle. For the uninitiated, Chortle is the UK’s top comedy-reviewing website. It isn’t widely known outside of the comedy circuit, but comics and fans of stand-up comics follow it avidly. The review was untimely in so far as it didn’t help us to sell any tickets, arriving so late, and it’s riddled with scientific errors (for instance, the reviewer refers to all of “ovulating” material in the show as “menstruating” material, a pretty significant oversight), but it’s the most tangible evidence I now have that the Fringe this year was not a dream. I really did three shows, we really did sell lots of tickets, and we really were funny.

Sorry to write such a solipsistic final blog. I also saw lots of great shows, and some disappointing ones, but like I said before, I’m not a reviewer. For me this year’s Fringe was a challenge, an experiment, and an adventure, and on all three counts I feel great. Next on the agenda: in two days we commence Rebel Cell rehearsals here in London for our big fall tour of the UK, which begins in Cornwall on September 17th. First thing’s first though: twelve hours’ sleep, hopefully with some instructive dreams. Carpe Noctem.

Free Fringe Finale

2010-08-29T20:40:00.002+01:00

On Friday I went back to the flat for a quick nap after Human Nature, feeling like a zombie after doing three shows a day all week, and managed to sleep through my alarm. I woke up with a gasp at 8:43pm – can’t remember what I was dreaming about – and realized with a sense of panic that Rapconteur was scheduled to start at 8:45. Now, it is a free fringe show, which means I can abridge it with no “value-for-money” issues, and I’m the last one in my venue, so nobody’s schedule would be thrown off terribly, but it was a horrible feeling to know that a room full of people was waiting to see my show on the other side of town and I was nowhere nearby. This situation very closely resembled another recurrent Fringe nightmare I have, the “can’t-get-to-my-venue-and-the-show-is-late” dream.

First I called a cab, then I started calling everyone I knew who might be at or near the venue, no answer, no answer, no answer, not there, can’t help you, sorry (and good luck). The mobile reception in Cabaret Voltaire is crap, so there was nothing for it. I arrived at 8:57 to find a crowded room waiting patiently for me to start. What happened? I had arranged to meet my brother Erik at 8:20 to set up for the show, and at 8:45 he made an announcement, telling the crowd: “Don’t worry, I just talked to Baba and he’s on his way, so we’ll be starting in a few minutes. Refunds are available for anyone who wants one.” I can’t imagine a more admirable lie, and I even finished the show on time. Capital guy, my brother.

Yesterday was the final Rapconteur show and the venue was rammed. I was sad to see the end of that show, at least at the Cab Vol Speakeasy (an awesome venue), but I am now home from my two-show day, well fed, and after writing this blog I can take an hour nap with no fear of letting anyone down terribly, myself included. Tonight is the Free Fringe wrap party (right after my nap), but I know everyone reading this must be wondering: how did it go? I said at the beginning that the Free Fringe was an experiment, my first time at it anyway, and to quantify it I kept meticulous records. The feel-good answer to “how did it go?” would have something to do with the amazing time I had, the thrill of performing, the smashing reviews (five stars in Three Weeks!), the great venue staff, and the general positive audience response. Hooray! But why beat around the bush? You are all thinking “Yeah, but the show was free, so did you make any money?!?”

This is essentially a question about human altruism, which we are all inherently (and perhaps rightly) skeptical about, not because it doesn’t exist but because it is difficult to predict and therefore difficult to count on. At the same time, our daily social interactions are constantly governed by (conscious and unconscious) attempts to predict the trustworthiness, generosity, and integrity of other people, so any information about what makes us tick is a public benefit. Participating in the Free Fringe took a leap of faith, because like you I wondered beforehand: Is it a sucker’s game? Or is it a beacon in the darkness of cynical, acquisitive human nature? Judge for yourself.

Shows performed: 19
Production overhead: £600 (give or take a few quid)
Total audience donations: £1358
Daily donation average: £71.47
Total CD sales: £640
Daily average gross income: £104.16
Net income: £1398

* The missing data here is the daily average number of punters, which I would estimate at around 40-45, but we didn’t do a daily headcount. It was difficult because the venue is a bar and people were coming and going a lot.

Would I do it again? Hell yes.

Tragedy Averted

2010-08-24T03:07:00.001+01:00

Keep calm and carry on. The fringe has an odd way of subtly adjusting my threshold of what is and isn't worth reporting, so hopefully this blog isn't miscalibrated. On Friday I began what is certainly the most extreme fringe regime I've ever undertaken, performing three shows per day, the Rap Guide to Evolution at 12:30, the Rap Guide to Human Nature at 3:45, and Rapconteur at 8.45, each of them one hour long and each of them alike in that they consist of me running a constant monologue mixing rap and comedy and infotainment. Exhausting as that sounds (for me, not the crowds, smart-ass), I've still been finishing the last show with energy to spare and have been out dancing and watching comedy shows for the past few nights. It's a bit surreal and I keep expecting something to sideswiped me, but so far so robust, and my voice is solid. Piece of piss, as they say around here.

Hmm, what else? On Sunday morning at 11am I arrived at C Central for an event called the Naked Brunch, which is exactly what it was. Food was served, cabaret entertainment was in effect, a mix of burlesque and comedy (and evolutionary rap), and the performers (a dozen or so of us) and audience (about a hundred of them) were all 100% nude. This was one of those "sign up for something crazy to test my own limits" initiatives, but when I stepped onto that stage in front of a room full of naked strangers I didn't feel the least bit intimidated, even in spite of my awareness that the cool Scottish morning air was shriveling my endowment, credit crunch style. I just worked the word "shrinkage" into the freestyle section of "Performance, Feedback, Revision" (rhyming it with "Brinkman" and "delinquents"), kept calm and carried on (got a huge naked cheer too), then hustled out of there for my Evolution show at half twelve.

What else? A number of smashing reviews came out over the past few days: for Rapconteur I got a five star review from Three Weeks (which isn't yet online), a four star review from the Scotsman, and another really nice one from the Stage (they don't do stars), so that show has been really full lately. And for the Rap Guide to Human Nature we got four stars from Whatsonstage and four stars from Broadway Baby. Smooth sailing.

Today was my day off, but the main event was the Gospel at Colonus at the Playhouse Theatre with the Blind Boys of Alabama and a cast of about forty African American gospel singers reinterpreting Oedipus as a Southern Baptist revival. The music was incredible and moving, but the surreal part for me was reflecting that just before the show I was meeting with its New York producer, Sharon Levy, whose next project now that Gospel at Colonus' sell out run at the Edinburgh International Festival is finished is to bring the Rap Guide to Evolution to New York for an off-Broadway run. I can't imagine two more different shows stylistically; today she's producing a show with forty black people singing amazing harmonies about trusting in god, and her next show will be one white guy rapping about Darwin. But on reflection I guess rap Darwin and gospel Sophocles are not such distant artistic cousins, and I figure any producer willing to make that transition has to be pretty cool.

So tomorrow I start the final week of the fringe, feeling good, with good reviews and good crowds and in good spirits, upbeat and ready for the mere 19 shows (give or take) that I have left to perform. I almost wish i had something more edgy and calamitous to report, because I am aware of how saccharine this post is coming across. But screw it. This may be the calm before the storm or it may just be a calm stretch with no disaster on the horizon, but either way I plan to keep calm and carry on, and leave the tragedy to Oedipus.

The Burlesque Brouhaha

2010-08-20T03:49:00.004+01:00

I’ve seen some shows I really didn’t enjoy over the past few days, but I’m not going to write about them. As far as I’m concerned, ostracism from all discourse is sufficient punishment for the crime of failure to entertain, but of course I’m not a professional critic or reviewer, and sometimes I’m thankful for that fact.

Yesterday I read with amusement Sally Stott’s utterly scathing Scotsman review of the Edinburgh burlesque scene. She reviews six shows in one mighty article, giving two of them three stars (equivalent to summary dismissal) and three of them two stars (equivalent to summary dismissal coupled with a poke in the eye), and the one she gives four stars to is credited with this distinction: “Out of all the burlesque acts I've seen, the ones that didn't involve women stripping were the best.” So is Sally just a prude? Is this like tut-tutting at women who wear revealing clothes on the street? Is she unfairly venting her spleen on Edinburgh’s fun-loving dancing girls, perhaps out of lingering frustration at the pay-gap between male and female Scotsman critics? I doubt it.

I haven’t seen any of the shows she reviewed, so I can’t say whether I agree with her critique or not, but I have met Sally a few times over the years and have been closely reading her Scotsman reviews for three consecutive Fringes now and I can say – in my esteem – that she usually has excellent judgment. That’s why I think her article is so brave. She must have known that she was about to draw the ire not only of a performer or two, but of a whole community, the dreaded burlesque community. When I read the article yesterday I just thought to myself “good job for taking a stand”, and I don’t mean a stand again burlesque (which I think is wonderful, as a whole), but a stand for the integrity of the reviewing profession, which is based on a (usually very subjective) combined emotional and intellectual response to a performance, articulated solely for the purpose of guiding the uninitiated through the chaos of the Fringe (because face it, you can’t see everything).

Sure enough, today in the Scotsman a second-page news feature (not even in the arts section) reported a planned protest by the burlesque community: “Burlesque dancers to hold demo at Scotsman office over harsh Fringe review”. The reason for the semi-naked protest (besides publicity)? The burlesque dancers are offended at Sally’s portrayal of their art form as demeaning to women. Her article begins “A woman with an expression somewhere between a crack addict and a blown-up sex doll takes off her bra and drops it on the floor.” And from there it gets harsher. But when I showed the article to a friend of mine who works at the Gilded Balloon, who is herself a burlesque performer, she read Sally’s description and said “Oh, well that just sounds like tacky burlesque”. Here’s why I find this situation so fascinating. Sally has obviously done her homework. She has read numerous books both for and against the new burlesque movement as a form of female empowerment (the article refers to a few of them). She went to see for herself, and she found the experience depressing rather than uplifting, and then she admirably did her job as a reviewer. I say, bad luck for the Edinburgh burlesque community, but it hardly settles the debate, and it’s hardly proof of bias, or grounds for a protest.

I can imagine a parallel universe in which there isn’t one evolutionary rap artist at the Fringe, but rather a half dozen or so, each spinning various aspects of hip-hop culture into humorous evolutionary parables. The Scotsman reviews us all as a package, and utterly savages our hip-hop skills and evolutionary knowledge, not to mention the overall poor entertainment value. It would be very easy to rally a protest claiming the review was ideological, that the reviewer was either a creationist or a racist (since the fear of a black planet seems to ironically extend into a fear of white rappers as well). Evolutionary rappers unite! But how would we be able to tell whether the reviewer had a grudge against rap, or evolution, or just against our particular take on these concepts? You can’t please everybody, but you can accuse everyone who dislikes you of being unfair and ideological. It’s a great self-esteem booster actually – you should try it.

And what do I think of the burlesque debate? I think the question of whether or not it’s empowering for women to get (mostly) naked in public is a debate best had by women. I’ve spent some time with the burlesque community in Vancouver and I genuinely think they’re doing it for the right reasons, for artistic self-expression and for the pure joy of it, the thrill, rather than for male visual gratification and easy money. Of course, the question of whether or not it would still be a thrill if there were no male visual gratification involved is one for evolutionary psychology to tackle. I released a rap song about this exact debate last year, weighing in from the (biased) perspective of a male voyeur (featuring Vancouver burlesque legend Miss Cherry OnTop). You can listen to the song here.

Oh yeah, and speaking of Scotsman features, here’s mine.

Extremophiles

2010-08-16T02:41:00.003+01:00

Today’s Human Nature gig was the best yet by far, despite technical glitches and an aborted ending. Sometimes the laughs just flow like wine, other times they just coagulate. Yesterday’s was pretty fun too. A family of six sat in the front row, two parents and four kids, boys of about 7 and 9, girls of about 13 and 15 (they were warned in advance about the profanity in the show and said it was no problem). Of course the parents got clowned about their fecundity, and queried about whether the mom was on the pill when they first hooked up (She’s Ovulating!) But the best part was during the intro to The Evolution of Gayness when I talked about homophobia in both hip-hop culture and in conservative religious circles, the latter version based on the biblical injunction of Leviticus (20:13) which says men having sex with men is an abomination punishable by death. But since the bible also prescribes very specific criteria for the correct method of selling your daughter into slavery (Exodus 21:7), it’s a pretty flimsy document as a basis for morality. That was my point: hate gays and sell your children, or find a different moral compass and do neither.

Since I had parents with daughters in the front row I decided to get them involved: “So, ma’am, if you should decide to sell one of your lovely daughters here into slavery, the important thing is to sell her to a member of your own nation, not a foreigner. Where are you from? England?” To which she replied: “We’re from Israel”. “Perfect!” I said, “the nation was only hypothetical before, but it turns our they are literally from the nation! So, according to your ancestors’ holy writ you can only sell your daughters to other Israelites. Do we have any other Israelites in the house? Any potential buyers?” The unexpectedness of it had the audience in hysterics.

I’m beginning to wonder if I’m even capable of doing comedy about non-taboo subjects. Last night Jamie and I did our first late-night drunken comedy gig at the Axis of Awesome and Friends. That is, the audience was drunk and rowdy (Jamie was a bit tipsy but fully functional). I was stone sober, and a bundle of nerves. Bugs on Me went down a storm, and then as a closer we did the Human Nature freestyle piece that ends our show everyday. So last night at 12:40am I asked the audience (about 160 of them) for three aspects of human nature to freestyle about, and the three they shouted out were “Homosexuality!” “Self-Awareness!” and “Abortion!” Gulp. Before I launched into the freestyle I asked them to reflect on the absurdity of the situation. When I started out as a hip-hop artist over a decade ago, I certainly never pictured myself performing for a drunken crowd at a comedy club in Scotland, and especially not a three-and-a-half-minute-long improvised rap about homosexuality, abortion, and self-awareness. Oh yeah, and make it funny.

Rest assured my self-awareness level was extremely high on that stage, but that gave me a jumping off point to launch into the evolutionary theories linked to these phenomenon, self-monitoring as a facilitator of social adaptation, the links between abortion and infanticide and parental investment theory, the bi-product and social-lubricant theories of same-sex mating, etc. And somehow I made it funny enough keep them laughing all the way through (it was a freestyle so don’t ask me what I said). I now realize that I have found my niche: I am an extremophile, an organism that thrives in hostile or potentially lethal environments. Or maybe I just got lucky. At the very least, I am learning to thrive in environments high in skepticism (my own and others’), which can be much like heat and ph and radiation in its effect on fragile egos. What a surreal night, but that’s why I love the Fringe.

Rewind the Tape

2010-08-13T03:34:00.003+01:00

Stephen J. Gould was fond of pointing out that if you were to rewind the tape of evolution and play it again, there is little chance that humans would make the scene. If this poisonous slug had been eaten by that bird rather than this mammalian ancestor, or if that asteroid had collided with earth a few kilometers to the West, well, it might have been a canid rather than a hominid that achieved hyper-intelligence and world domination, or maybe even a reptile, who knows? Of course, if you believe in physical determinism, in physical causes leading to consequential physical effects, then a universe in a certain state of molecular position and motion four billion years ago should play itself out the exact same way no matter how many times you rewound the tape, so long as everything was literally the same each time you started. But this is not a friendly thought to us conscious entities, laboring under the illusion of free will, so we will leave it.

The point? I am fairly confidant that Gould’s notion, whether or not it is true of biological evolution writ large, is definitely true of the Fringe, and the main reason is the reviewers. Reviewers have the power to kill a great show and they have the power to uplift a mediocre one, perhaps even to give a mediocre show enough buoyancy and confidence to make it great (provided the problem was with the performance and not the material). I thought ENRON was one of the best plays I had seen in years when I watched it in London last fall, and yet its transfer to New York this Spring was scuttled by bad reviews.

Maybe a bad review for ENRON coming from a publication headquartered so close to Wall Street is akin to a bad review of the Rap Guide to Evolution coming from the Discovery Institute, but here in Edinburgh it’s much harder to dismiss reviews as ideological, mainly because they seem so arbitrary. The Scotsman gave Gyles Brandreth five stars, while Fest magazine panned him with one star (no question which review is going on the poster). Rachel Rose Reid was faulted in a three star review for misspelling the name of her show on the ticket (even though it was a box-office mistake). I haven’t seen her show yet, but come on. Yesterday we watched Jonno Katz perform his amazing show “Cactus, The Seduction”, the same day as his four star “Hot Show” review came out in the Scotsman. Kate Copstick raves about Jonno in the review, praising him up and down, while every other critic had been underwhelmed (I’m with her).

So if reviews are arbitrary, then what’s the point? Like so many areas of science, the truth emerges from a meta-analysis. One publication might give one star while another gives five, but a survey of five or six review will show which of those is the outlier. I have only seen about five shows so far at the Fringe (Mark Watson was brilliant tonight, and the Barber Shoppera were sublime on Saturday), but with such a cacophony of performers competing for my attention, it’s reviews, cumulative reviews, both in the form of publications and conversational buzz, that draw my attention to one show over another. Because let’s face it, time is short, and every choice is a sacrifice. So take heart, little neglected talents struggling for recognition at the Fringe. It might seem as arbitrary as a random person’s uninformed opinion, but opinions add up over time, just like other forms of data; it just usually takes longer than we hope, a lot longer. People still reject the truth of evolution, so you shouldn't be surprised if they don't appreciate your talents. Shame about ENRON though. That show would have been good medicine for New York.

My Fringe Nightmare (Part One)

2010-08-07T02:19:00.001+01:00

In early April I woke up from a familiar nightmare. I’ve been having the same recurring dream pretty much since Fringe registration closed back in March, a dream with varying specifics, but always the same scenario. In some versions it’s the first day of the Fringe, I’m walking through the streets of Edinburgh, taking things in, checking out the posters and familiar sights, and then it hits me: I don’t have a show! My poster is up, it’s advertising The Rap Guide to Human Nature in bold letters, plastered with positive reviews from last year, but as I search myself I realize with mounting horror that I haven’t written a word in preparation. I’m going to have to just step on stage on day one and wing it. What am I supposed to be talking about again? Evolutionary psychology? That’s heavy stuff. Oh man, I am going to die on my ass! In other versions of the dream I’m actually backstage, just about to step in front of a big crowd for my first show, and the same realization dawns, with the same sense of panic. And in yet other versions I’m performing, rapping and cracking jokes about human nature, fully aware that I’ve blown it and have no script. Then I wake up, look at my phone for the time, and the date, and breathe a sigh of mingling relief and anxiety: four months left to write it, no worries.

The squeeze that induces these dreams is the strange situation where venues will sign up known acts without seeing a script. I used to have to submit my material in advance (which meant the writing deadline was the registration deadline), but not anymore. Now I can just say: “I have a new show” and submit the reviews from my previous show, and viola, my name in lights (or at least in the Fringe catalogue). Of course, I didn’t actually have a new show until the past few weeks. The first words of Human Nature were written on the coach on the way home from Glastonbury back in July, and the last words were written about ten days ago, and that’s the just the fixed, scripted lyrics of the songs (about two thirds of the show). The rest of it is improvised. I detailed the reason for this late start in a previous post, and it has to do with my strange genre, which mixes comedy with science and rap, each of which have their own time demands (researching and recording).

Well, on day one of the Fringe, Wednesday, there were moments that resembled the dream and moments that diverged. Obviously I actually do have a script, but there were definitely awkward moments and moments where I was fraffing away while thinking “shit, what’s the next section again?” Good thing I have a great DJ on stage with me who holds me down like a rock. Jamie cues the records when I’m losing my way, and even tells me “Mate, you talk too much” when I talk too much, which I definitely do sometimes (plus it gets a laugh). The first show was ramshackle, but stepping off stage I at least felt assured that it was not going to be like my nightmare, that I did have a lot of great material in the show, and that I would not be stranded alone in front of a hostile crowd (thanks in no small part to Jamie on the decks). The shows were not very professional, but they were a good basis to build from, revising daily (performance, feedback, revision). And in today’s show we finally hit our stride, but I’ll save that for the next post, which will also include the most fascinating variations on the dream, the rare ones in which I’m kicking ass, even thought I have no material. These represent the El Dorado of dreams, but for now it’s late and I have my first Rapconteur show tomorrow, so I’d rather go prospecting than keep writing. The Fringe is getting good.

The Rap Guide to Human Nature

2010-08-04T02:51:00.004+01:00

Greetings from Edinburgh!

It's 2am on the eve of the world's biggest arts festival, and I can't sleep. Actually for the past three consecutive nights it has been the same, wired until 4 in the morning, then wake up at 7:30 or 8, racing with nervous energy. Given that this is my sixth (!) time performing at the Edinburgh Fringe, you might ask yourself why on earth I would be nervous. The short answer is that I have never been so uncertain of how the show will go, since this is the first time I have ever brought a show to the Fringe that has never been performed before. And tomorrow is the world premiere.

Sure, I have tested out some bits and pieces of new material, ten or fifteen minute excerpts, but never with the live DJ and slide show as an integrated one-hour whole, volume two of my "Rap Guide" series, The Rap Guide to Human Nature. And this year the show has a significant freestyle component, which is designed to draw audience feedback seamlessly into the experience. We shall see.

The main reason I feel so ill-prepared, however, is also the exciting reason I am writing to you at this very moment: I have a new album to share with you! For the past six weeks I have spent the majority of my time crashing as a house-guest of one of the UK's most talented hip-hop producers, Mr. Simmonds (Jamie to his friends), and together we obsessively crafted a hip-hop record with an ambitious scope. It is an introduction to evolutionary psychology and the science of human behaviour, but the record is not only about the scientific study of human nature, it's also about the various alternative explanations of why humans are the way we are (creationism, spiritualism, social-constructivism, etc), and about how these explanations differ, and what each of them has to say about the violence and misogyny in rap music and hip-hop culture, and how they each square up to the evidence.

As I said, ambitious. But once again I have taken care to get my work scientifically peer-reviewed, and in case anyone doubted me last time, this time I actually integrated the peer-review process into the album, with some hilarious results. Anyway, enough preamble. I am extremely proud of this record musically and lyrically and conceptually, and I hope you will give it a good listen. You can now download The Rap Guide to Human Nature for free (pay what you like), just click here.

I put the album online two days ago and without any promotion it has already been linked in a number of blogs and even been reviewed! Here's my favorite quote: "It's actually a great album. Not an attempt at parody or a tribute, it's an inspired, groove heavy, high production values record with a wonderful lyrical touch." MindHacks.com

I also have a new music video to share, a David Attenborough BBC nature documentary-style interpretation of the nightclub scene, entitled "Short-Term Mating Dance". If you've never heard the sound of a female elephant seal squealing in coital ecstasy, mixed with dance music, here's your chance (by the way, the video features me dancing and making a fool of myself in the club six years ago at the Edinburgh Fringe, filmed by my brother on a handycam). Click here to watch it.

And if you haven't heard my new storytelling album, Rapconteur, you can also download it for free at the link below. Rapconteur features new hip-hop adaptations of Beowulf, Gilgamesh, Kalevala, Poe's Raven, and a new Canterbury Tale with an evolutionary psychology twist, and I'll also be performing it here at the Fringe at 8:45pm daily starting on Friday. Check it out just for the amazing artwork by Sean Dove.

Finally, if you are interested in the story of how the adventure unfolds for Jamie and I over the next three and a half weeks, I am blogging the Fringe again this year at whatsonstage.com, Wish us luck, and have fun with Human Nature, the most gangster album I have ever made by a long shot.

Troy

2010-08-01T16:04:00.002+01:00

From my whatsonstage.com blog "Darwin on the Fringe":

Riding the train up to Edinburgh and the only way I can think to describe the mounting sense of anticipation I feel right now is with military metaphors. None of your clattering Saving Private Ryan carnage though, this is more like a sea voyage to Troy. The difference between the two wars says a lot about the relationship I have with this festival. For one thing, I still subscribe to the belief that the Fringe represents an oasis of meritocracy in a world beset by various forms of nepotism and arbitrariness. Your odds of surviving D-day as a foot soldier were virtually the same as playing Russian Roulette with several chambers loaded. On the other hand the siege of Troy was primarily a skills competition, at least if Homer is to be believed. Achilles and Hector don’t end up facing each other by accident; it’s because they both defeated every adversary up until that point. Isn’t that how we all want the world to be? Not a battleground, but a place where ability counts for more than class, race, gender, etc, and especially more than luck. Even people who are low in skill should want this. For instance, I can’t play the piano, but I’d rather listen to piano players who have gained recognition by practicing and performing and refining their skills, rather than players who were promoted by more arbitrary or Machiavellian means.

At the beginning of the Fringe, reputation is one of the only assets shows have (apart from the latent quality of the production, which on its own is not enough to get people in). Reputation will bring punters in to at least check out Jim Jeffries and Robin Ince and the Pajama Men. But if they haven’t put the work in to capitalize on their reputations, then the story will be a Busta Rhymes-esque “Legend of the Fall Off”. On the other hand, Edinburgh loves an underdog success story, the show with no reputation at the start of the festival, and a sell-out buzz by the end. Perhaps it’s the closest thing in the British Isles to the American Dream, the dream of prosperity as a direct result of effort and ability, rather than heredity. Unfortunately that was my story in 2004 when I came to the Fringe unknown with the Rap Canterbury Tales. Now I’m about to embark on my sixth Fringe, so reputation will sell me some tickets, just enough for judgment to be passed, but no more. I’m no Jim Jeffries (Achilles? Leonidas?), more of a self-styled Odysseus type, the trickster, a bit too clever for his own good (judging by the critical response last year). Not enough of a rep to strike fear into an adversary’s heart, but enough to give him (or her) pause, a flicker of recognition. The train speeds past Durham, the warrior with a middling reputation crouches in the hull of the Greek ship, feeling the sea spray and imagining the battle to come. Of course, when I get there it won’t be battle, it will be moving into the flat, grocery shopping, sorting out internet, doing my tech-in, admin meetings, blah, the pitching of tents on the Trojan beach. Here’s to glory!

My Crash Course in Evolutionary Psychology

2010-07-31T23:08:00.004+01:00

From my whatsonstage.com blog "Darwin on the Fringe":

In four days the Edinburgh Fringe previews commence and I’m not ready! A few hours ago I did my first full rehearsal of the Rap Guide to Human Nature with a director friend and it was chaotic as hell, not the material but the structure (okay, the material was a bit chaotic too). What happened?

I conceived of doing a new comedy rap show about Evolutionary Psychology (EP) at last year’s Fringe, while I was in the midst of performing The Rap Guide to Evolution daily at the Gilded Balloon. Actually it wasn’t my idea; David Buss suggested it to me. He’s the professor who wrote the EP textbook that’s used in most college courses on the subject, and apparently someone gave him a copy of my Evolution CD which prompted him to write me this endearing email message (verbatim): “This is one of the coolist [sic] things I've ever heard! I've passed it on to all of my evolutionary psychology colleagues. You should consider doing one exclusively on EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY! So many cool topics to cover. If interested, I'd like to send you a copy of my Evolutionary Psychology text.” I probably shouldn’t make fun of him for misspelling ‘coolest’ in an email, since I’m prone to such gaffs myself, but I just thought it was funny considering the number of books and peer-reviewed journal articles he’s published. Call me a geek but I was proud to have induced a geek-out in such an alpha geek.

So anyway, send me his textbook is exactly what he did, by mail after the Fringe, and I have spent roughly the past ten months working my way through it and about a dozen other books on the subject. Why? Because if you’re presumptuous enough to try to say something of merit on the subject of human nature, you’d better do your homework. But how much homework? Well, that depends on how much time you think you’ll need to write the show. Research for too long and you end up with a pile of notes and nothing coherent to say. Research too little and what you end up saying is either wrong or inane. It’s like an intellectual game of chicken: who will swerve first, me or the Fringe? Of course I swerved first, but the Fringe is a punishing deadline. You don’t just have to swerve first, you have to swerve well enough in advance to regain your balance and mount a steady assault.

So I started writing the Human Nature text about six weeks ago, and finished it about two weeks ago. But if I’ve been finished for two weeks, why am I still in such a shambles when it comes to the live performance, why haven’t I sharpened it to a razor edge yet? Because of the strange niche I inhabit, the niche of rap comedy theatre, in that order. For the past six weeks while writing the show I’ve been crashing on the sofa of one of Britain’s most talented hip-hop producers, Jamie aka “Mr. Simmonds”, recording and editing music daily, and the day before yesterday we finally put the finishing touches on the album version of The Rap Guide to Human Nature.

Unfortunately, having a new full-length CD (that sounds awesome by the way) is not a triumph either Jamie or I can savor, because no sooner did we finish the master than our gaze shifted from the myopic chiseling process required to craft a quality recording to the broader horizon of the looming fringe, where we will be on stage daily performing the material. Swerve!

Getting things into shape for our first performance on Wednesday is going to be manic, but either way the record is dope. However shambolic the live show turns out to be, that’s how dope the CD is. Every critic who points out a flaw in the show, every audience member who scratches their head in bewilderment at something incoherent I babble about on stage, I’m going to picture each of them nodding their heads to those luscious beats and think “it was worth it”. That’s the beauty of hip-hop, the head-nodding doubles as appreciation and affirmation, regardless of the question (danger!).

Actually, that’s how I’m going to console myself when adversity rears its petty head, but in the meantime Jamie and I will spend the next four days rehearsing like convicts with a chance to sing for their freedom. And here’s the best part. You can download the CD right now, for free (or rather, name your price). Do it! If you like it, you can picture me making a fool of myself on stage next week and think, “it was worth it”. If you don’t like it, well, then you probably wouldn’t like the live show anyway. Warning: it's not for the faint-hearted or faint-minded!

Okay, here it is:
http://bababrinkman.bandcamp.com/album/the-rap-guide-to-human-nature

Rapconteur

2010-07-21T00:53:00.005+01:00

Friends,

I'd like to introduce you to my newest offspring: "Rapconteur". The album follows on from the Rap Canterbury Tales, and includes five new rap adaptations of great literature, oral epics mostly, but also some newer pieces, and some that I simply stumbled onto. The album was recorded and scored by Brighton-based producer Mr. Simmonds (aka Jamie), who is a fountain of musical inspiration, and who will also be performing with me at the Fringe.

Rapconteur contains hip-hop storytelling adaptations of the Epic of Gilgamesh (the world's oldest written narrative), Kalevala (Finland's national epic), Beowulf (the masterwork of Old English), The Merchant's Tale (from the Canterbury Tales), and the wild-card of the bunch, an adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven that I wrote when I was seventeen and have now set to Jamie's amazing music. In the spirit of sharing, and as a weary acknowledgment of the changing face of the music industry, I am offering Rapconteur as a free download on a pay-what-you-like plan. The album represents months of musical and lyrical composition from Jamie and I, so if you enjoy it please do contribute. Click here to get it.

As for me, I have been in the thick of it working on my other (!) new show/CD, The Rap Guide to Human Nature, which will also be released soon as a full-length record. Last night I put the final vocals down at 4:30 in the morning, finished editing them, and headed straight to Heathrow airport for a quick jaunt home, so I am now writing from lovely Vancouver! This is a brief visit for a friend's wedding and for a preview show in Nelson, then it's back to the fray, with the Edinburgh Fringe kicking off in precisely two weeks. I will be performing both shows every day (except Mondays) for the duration of the Fringe, an epic challenge for an epic set of stories.

Here's a link to the Edinburgh listing, but since Rapconteur is on the Free Fringe you can't buy tickets, first come first served!

More to come...

The hip-hop Richard Dawkins?

2010-06-21T20:17:00.008+01:00

That's the title of a review article in the current issue of Trends in Ecology and Evolution (TREE), the highest-cited peer-reviewed science journal in evolutionary biology. The review was written by the journal's editor, Dr. Paul Craze, who just emailed me to say that the review is now the number one most-downloaded article on the TREE website. I was going to post a link and invite you all to read it, but like most science journals they charge by the article and if you aren't a subscriber it would cost you $31.50 to download the pdf! So here's the full text, which I have extracted for purely educational purposes. I like to joke in my show about how it's the first-ever scientifically peer-reviewed rap, but up until now that was a pretty tongue-in-cheek statement. Now it's literally true. Enjoy!

The hip-hop Richard Dawkins?
Paul G. Craze
Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Volume 25, Issue 7, July 2010

Evolutionary biology and poetry might not seem remotely suited to each other but nonetheless, some have experimented with bringing them together. Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the more famous Charles, famously wrote his work on the transmutation of species in the form of verse [1] and much more recently, in the days before impact factors gathered enough tyrannical power to put a damper on anything the least bit quirky, this very journal re-published some of the evolution-inspired poems written by friends and colleagues of J.B.S. Haldane to mark his 60th birthday [2]. Sufﬁce it to say, both works are of more note for their intrinsic interest than their literary merits.

Perhaps this just shows that evolutionary biologists are not much good at poetry and poets don’t see anything in evolution to inspire them. The first of those sentiments might well be true but the second has now been comprehensively disproved. Canadian rapper Baba Brinkman’s The Rap Guide to Evolution is an intelligent, lyrical, witty collection of performance poetry that also manages to be an accurate, popular-science discussion of modern evolutionary theory and its wider implications. Those of you with an aversion to rap music bear with me; this is not rap as you might know it. This is rap with an intelligent twinkle in its eye. It is rap with warmth and humanity, far removed from the stereotype of the style as aggressive, violent and divisive. It is also rap that doesn’t simply use its subject matter of evolution as an amusing gimmick but rather draws on modern Darwinism with accuracy and insight. The accuracy is ensured by instigator of the project Mark Pallen, Professor of Microbial Genomics at the University of Birmingham, author of The Rough Guide to Evolution [3], making this the first rap album ever to be peer reviewed (as Brinkman is justly fond of telling his audiences). The insight I’m sure is Brinkman’s own, particularly when he becomes self-referential and cleverly uses the process of writing and performing rap as an example of the evolutionary process on Performance, Feedback, Revision or of sexual selection on Hypnotise.

In common with many works of popular evolutionary biology, there is a bias towards those topics that appeal directly to our primate brains (Hypnotise, Sexual Selection and Sexual Selection Theory all exploiting that obvious, perennial primate favourite, for example). But given the wide and unusual audience the music is likely to reach, that can hardly be a criticism, particularly when the material is handled by someone with the wit and humanity of Baba Brinkman. For example, in Brinkman’s hands a rap inspired by a song promoting Black Nationalism (Dead Prez’s I’m A African) becomes a plea to recognize the unity of our common descent: genetically we are all Africans, which, in Brinkman’s words, makes I’m A African the most ironically inclusive song ever written. What makes this much more than well-intentioned humanism is the frequent reference to the scientiﬁc evidence. To continue with I’m A African, there is reference to the fossil and mitochondrial evidence for the Out Of Africa theory, all in rhyme and with a rhythmical beat. And again in Group Selection there is no vague philosophizing but instead the sometimes difﬁcult ideas about altruism and cooperative behaviour are faced head on with exuberant openness. Find me another rap album that references endosymbiosis, the evolution of multicellularity, Dictyostelium and cheater detection, let alone one that uses this evidence to such high-minded effect or includes suggestions of further reading in the sleeve notes.

I have just two criticisms. Once or twice there seems to be an equating of ﬁtness with physical strength. It would be a pity if such an insigniﬁcant part were quoted out of context, especially since Brinkman eloquently describes the complexities of ﬁtness elsewhere on the album. My second criticism is not strictly a criticism at all. I wonder if the Rap Guide will remain something enjoyed by those of us in the know, those who already get all the jokes, the allusions to evolutionary theory and the references to biologists. As Brinkman himself regrets with a knowing wink in Sexual Selection; while educated, thinking, older women wait to talk to him after his performances, their daughters and granddaughters are at gangsta rap gigs, being exposed to a very different set of views. There is an opportunity here to communicate good science to those who might never think of it as having anything to do with them. Fortunately, Brinkman seems well aware of this and is working tirelessly to promote the work as widely as possible.

I will leave you with some thoughts on the album’s last track, Darwin’s Acid, in which Brinkman argues against the claim that an acceptance of evolution means an end to compassion and personal morality. It is quite the opposite, his rapping tells us over a gentle musical background: the choices we make directly inﬂuence the evolution of culture, current biological ﬁtness and the composition of future generations. In Brinkman’s vision, Darwinism becomes the ultimate argument for personal and democratic morality and his humanistic version of directed reproduction means that "refusing to sleep with mean people" gives us a good shot at utopia. While the complexities of inheritance and human mate choice make this less simple in practice, such a sincere argument for a Darwinian morality at least points to the absurdity of claiming that an evolution-based worldview means the collapse of society into violence, selﬁshness and greed. To Brinkman, this personal responsibility combined with unity of common descent is the grandeur Darwin saw in the evolutionary view of life. With humility, Brinkman leaves the last word to Darwin with a reading by Richard Dawkins of the famous last sentence of The Origin of Species, in which there is grandeur and the evolution of endless forms most beautiful [4]: perhaps the one sentence above all others that shows evolutionary biologists might know a thing or two about poetry after all.

References

1 Darwin, E. (1803) The Temple of Nature, J. Johnson
2 Maynard Smith, J. (2001) Cautionary tales for aspiring species or the beast’s book of blunders. Trends Ecol. Evol. 16, 717–720
3 Pallen, M. (2009) The Rough Guide to Evolution, Rough Guides
4 Darwin, C. (1859) On the Origin of Species, John Murray

1,046,105!

2010-06-02T06:06:00.004+01:00

Whew,

So when the review by Olivia Judson came out a few weeks ago in the New York Times, one of the main points of contention in the comments section was over my claim (in my online bio) that I have personally planted over one million trees. A number of commentators cried foul (starting at comment #13 and precipitating from there), liberally exercising their cheater-detection instincts by opining that such a thing was impossible and I had clearly blown my credibility by making outlandish claims. The truth is I had indeed made the claim without knowing the exact number of trees I had planted, so yes, it was a rough estimate. All I knew for sure was that I planted for seven full seasons and six partial season and I was pretty fast with a shovel back in the day (my best day was 4400). I knew it was pretty damn close to a million, but what if I had claimed "over a million" and it turned out to be a few thousand shy? The shame would have been unbearable.

So today I went to the head office of Brinkman & Associates Reforestation in New Westminster to sit in on a meeting there, and I asked the head of payroll, a dear old family friend named Kitty Ypma and an excellent accountant and book-keeper, if she would be so kind as to pull my employee files going all the way back to when I planted my first tree at the age of 15 in 1994, and tally up my yearly totals to see whether or not I was full of it. Well, I just got the email from Kitty a few minutes ago confirming that my total trees planted from 1994 - 2010 is precisely 1,046,105, so thankfully I do not owe the New York Times or anyone else a contrite retraction, (though I admit I was holding my breath!)

Speaking of planting, I had been planting with my brother's crew for the past few weeks, but I left a week ago to fly to New York for my appearance on the Rachel Maddow Show last Friday, and when I returned Erik informed me that there was a truck broken down and he needed to lay someone off until it was fixed, so I volunteered. So I've been holed up in Vancouver for the past couple of days working on my Beowulf adaptation for the Edinburgh Fringe and writing video treatments for the Wellcome Trust Rap Guide to Evolution videos, but tomorrow I'm heading back out to camp for another week or so of planting before I fly to the UK for the summer festival circuit.

By the way, at the camp party ten days ago we filmed a music video with Smoky Tiger for our song "The Road Northwest" so look out for that on my youtube channel in a few weeks, directed by Syd Woodward at getgrounded.tv. If you aren't familiar with Canadian tree-planting sub-culture, check out the video for Smoky Tiger's anthem "The Tree Planter's Waltz" which we filmed last year in camp. 'Til next time, stay vigilant!

Baba

Darwin Got It Going On

2010-05-13T22:49:00.002+01:00

New York, New York, big city of dreams...

Well, the day before yesterday I returned from my first off-Broadway run, landed in Vancouver, and promptly came down with a wretched case of strep throat. My friend Dodd from NY wrote me a message to say "New York done broke you down!" and I wrote back to say "Yeah, well I stole the fire, so the NY gods had to punish me". Stole the fire? That's a little megalomaniacal isn't it? Judge for yourself.

The first show I did on Tuesday last week had an audience of 35 in a venue that seats 300, and although it was a good show, things weren't exactly looking good for making my mark. But like Perseus overcoming adversity with the help of Athena, a science demigoddess reached down from above to bestow a few gifts on me at just the right time (I didn't say I stole the fire unaided). The helper-spirit in this case was the biologist Olivia Judson, author of "Dr. Titania's Sex Advice to All Creation", who was the opening speaker at my show two weeks ago in Barnstaple, North Devon. Olivia also happens to be a columnist for the New York Times, and she went on to write the most gushingly positive review I have had yet, even going so far as to refer to me as "brilliant" and "burly" in consecutive paragraphs (evidently she was aiming to win me more than just an audience). Her review was soon at the top of the front page of nytimes.com, and was the number four most-emailed link of the day last Wednesday. Here's the link if you want to read it yourself: click here.

If you have time, take a moment to check out the comments, especially the hilarious debate about whether or not I've blown my credibility by claiming in my bio that I have personally planted over a million trees. Commentators with varying degrees of knowledge about the process of tree-planting weigh in as to whether it's possible (including myself, at the bottom of page one). The New York Times editorial staff also highlight their favorite comments, and here's one of the ones they selected (from Brazil, on page four): "It seems that every religion has the music it deserves. Christianity has Palestrina, Bach, Handel and Mozart; the new faith of evolutionism has Baba Brinkman rapping about Darwin." Ouch! I'd be offended if I weren't so tickled by the guy's wit, although I would add that every system of thought also has the intellectuals it deserves.

And the outcome? My website crashed from the traffic surge and I was glutted with an onslaught of approximately five hundred emails in three days, many of them from people downloading the CD or asking to join the mailing list (welcome aboard!) and many others from people inviting me to perform in sundry lands, my absolute favorite kind of onslaught. Other outcomes were that after Thursday we sold out the whole rest of the run, with capacity crowds on Friday and Saturday, and even the extra show we added on Sunday. Furthermore, I was invited to speak/perform at TEDxEast, the regional TED conference that took place in New York last weekend, where I got to meet Richard Saul Wurman, the founder of TED talks, as well as a score of other inspiring individuals. I even ended up on the main page of conservapedia.com (the right-wing propaganda version of wikipedia) which accused me of "promoting evolutionary nonsense". There were other outcomes as well, even more tantalizing ones, but without inked agreements I will refrain from announcing anything prematurely. Suffice to say, I expect to be spending a lot more time in New York before too long.

So now I'm in Merritt, BC, where I'll be tree-planting with my brother's crew for the next few weeks, while also sorting through my email glut and working on new material for Edinburgh. Then in June I'm back in England for Glastonbury and other gigs, but the first order of business when I get to London, I'm sure you'll all agree, is to take Olivia Judson out to dinner to thank her. If you haven't read Dr. Titania yet I highly recommend it, and no, that isn't just reciprocal altruism talking. All the best from the Rocky Mountains,

Baba

First We Take Manhattan...

2010-04-25T23:55:00.003+01:00

Dear Friends with Friends in New York,

Because let’s face it, everyone knows someone who lives or recently lived in New York. In less than two weeks The Rap Guide to Evolution will be doing its first off-Broadway run at the Bleecker Street Theatre, with performances May 4, 6, 7 & 8. The venue is large and the city is bustling, so our challenge is to get the word out to all and sundry, especially theatre people, science people, education people, and hip-hop people. I say “especially” because those are the people most likely to pass on the invitation to their networks as well, even though the show really is for everyone with opposable thumbs, bipedal locomotion, language use, an enlarged cranium, African ancestors, a sense of humour, or any number of other traits that unite us as Homo sapiens.

The New Yorker recently emailed me asking for an exclusive quote to add to their listing (apparently they don’t stoop to quoting press releases) and I gave them this:

“Having performed The Rap Guide to Evolution in England, Scotland, Australia, Hong Kong, Canada and the USA, I’ve decided I need to focus my efforts on performing in the States. Why? Because it seems like everywhere else I’m preaching to the converted, but in America evolution is – bafflingly – still controversial. We’ll see how they feel when I get through with them.”

Hubris aside, my aim is to use this off-Broadway run as a showcase to attract a professional booking agent who will help me set up a major tour of the USA in 2011, because I do sincerely feel like that’s where the show will have the greatest impact and get the most passionate response, positive or negative. So I would be sincerely grateful if you would pass on the invitation to anyone you know who might like to come see it, or who might know someone who might like to come see it, since this is something of a make-or-break endeavor! The e-flyer is attached, and here’s the event listing on Facebook.

And what else have I been up to? I’ve been in England doing some gigs and also writing and recording lyrics for my two (count them!) new shows/albums which I’m currently writing for Edinburgh this year. The first is a sequel show entitled “The Rap Guide to Human Nature” about the scientific study of human behaviour, and the second is a follow up to the Chaucer show, which I’m calling “Rapconteur”. So far I have written and recorded rap adaptations of the Finnish Kalevala and the Epic of Gilgamesh, and I will be adding several more oral epics to the collection over the next few months (my end target is five in total). So get set for some seriously mind-blowing scientific and literary comedy rap this summer (oops, there’s that hubris again, just think of it as the cerebral equivalent of hip-hop swagger).

For those of you in London, I’ll be performing the Rap Guide to Evolution at the Greenwich Theatre Monday April 26th, so please come see the show if you can (we’ll be filming it for the Wellcome Trust videos). Here’s the link.

Or if you’re not on Facebook here’s the venue link.

And for those of you in Devon (South West England), I’ll be performing there this week as well. Click here for the listing.

And for those of you thinking: “yeah, great, but what about your trip to the Middle East?!?”, well, Egypt and Palestine really were the most exhilarating and challenging places we’ve performed the Rebel Cell to date, and I have written a few blog entries about it and will write more when I have a moment. Suffice to say, doing a politically-themed show for politically-engaged audiences in a politically-tumultuous part of the world is bound to be a complicated experience. Here’s what I’ve written so far, and bear with me for the rest.

The Rebel Cell in the Middle East (Part 2)

2010-04-24T19:39:00.005+01:00

Continued from Part 1

We arrived in Cairo a few days before our show and took some time to check out the city and go over our material. We were staying in a hotel just a few blocks from the Culturewheel venue, which was built in the concrete space beneath an overpass (what the British call a “flyover”) leading to a nearby bridge over the Nile. Large posters adorned the pillars and walls around the venue with our pictures and the heading: “Rebell Cell – British Hip-hop Band”. This may have been a “lost in translation” moment or it may have been a deliberate strategy by the venue to try to pull a crowd with the promise of a concert, but either way the result was misleading since the Rebel Cell is definitely a theatrical performance. Rehearsing the show in our hotel room the day before the gig with the Islamic call to prayer lilting through the window, the familiar material we had performed so many times in England and Scotland felt freshly provocative and alien, the outcome uncertain.

The Rebel Cell is a kaleidoscope of satirical Anglocentric cultural references, complex lyricism, and overt calls for political and creative freedom. Its political debate is not left vs right, more like left vs further left, liberal vs libertarian. How would it be received in an Arabic-speaking country with a record of dodgy democracy and human rights abuses and a socially conservative Muslim population? Our anxieties turned out to be misplaced, for the most part. At the request of venue management we had to make several adjustments including censoring the (two) curse words in the script, and Dizraeli’s freedom-invoking naked dance was done in a t-shirt and shorts instead of his usual birthday suit. This was yet another example of “phenotypic plasticity”, or the necessity of adapting to one’s environment (see my previous post about performing The Rap Guide to Evolution in the American South). It felt ironic that the political content turned out to be less controversial than the profanity and Dizraeli’s naked torso, but it also felt like an apt compromise, since swearing and stripping are luxuries when compared to voting and speaking your mind. Or, to put it another way, government oppression is a more pernicious problem in the world than simple prudishness.

And the political content of the play was very well received. The turnout was low, about 40 or so people in a venue that held over 200, but the comments afterwards revealed an engaged and politically astute audience, keenly interested in the different strategies of resistance articulated by the play. One woman said she loved our arguments but couldn’t bear to watch Dizraeli’s character limping around the stage after being beaten by police for his political activism, since she had experienced that herself. It was clear from their restlessness (and garish hip-hop attire) that some people sitting in the audience had come expecting a rap concert only to find a couple of white guys on stage having a Socratic debate in rhyme, but at least one of them stepped to us after the show (yo!) and said he was really disappointed at first but that we won him over and he really loved it by the end.

With a free day the next day we went to see the pyramids (complete with sphinx-side cypher) and the plan was to leave the following morning for Israel by bus in order to be in Tel Aviv that night for the Seder, the Jewish feast marking the first day of Passover. Noa was in Tel Aviv for the holiday and had invited us to stay at her mother’s place and join the ritual family feed, but Dizraeli and Billy (his documentary-making companion) had dropped their laundry off at a local place without checking when it opened the next morning, and it soon became clear that they would either have to ditch their clothes or miss the bus and spend an extra day in Cairo (they chose the latter).

Even though I had done all of my travel by air up until that point, I was intending to join in the overland adventure just for the Egypt/Israel portion of the trip. This was partly out of team solidarity with Dizraeli and partly to get a different view of the terrain and partly for the adventure but definitely not because I think consumer boycotts of air travel offer a viable solution to climate change. I agree that flying should be avoided when overland travel is a proportionate option, but in this case I was utterly unwilling to be held hostage and miss the Seder feast because of their laundry cock-up, so when the reality of the situation sank in I explained my position to Dizraeli and Billy (with regrets to the loss of solidarity) and hastily booked a plane, arriving in Tel Aviv the next day in time for lunch. In the spirit of his unplaned project, Dizraeli pointed out later that I wasn't really hostage to his laundry, that I could have taken the bus on my own and still made it there by dinner, and he's right. So the bottom line is that I flew for the same reason everyone does: because it was easier and faster and I didn't need the hassle.

Next: I get stuffed at the Seder feast and do my one performance in Israel, and we experience both Israeli and Palestinian hip-hop, float in the Dead Sea, and perform the Rebel Cell in the West Bank.

To be continued…

The Rebel Cell in the Middle East (Part 1)

2010-04-21T15:09:00.001+01:00

Salaam/Shalom,

Two weeks ago I touched down in the UK after twelve days in the Middle East, including Rebel Cell performances in Egypt and Palestine, and a visit to Tel Aviv, and my impressions of the trip have been percolating constantly ever since, trying to find a smooth exit, but it's mostly been gridlock. However, the further I get from the experience the less of it I am likely to capture with any lucidity, so I'm going to try to piece it together.

The trip was originally initiated by a grant from the UK Economic and Social Research Council, which has a fund for promoting cultural exchanges with Egypt, especially ones with a political or democratic slant, and the play Dizraeli and I co-wrote in 2008 apparently qualifies. The play is about the politics of resistance and progressive change, set in a totalitarian future dystopia, and it takes the form of a Socratic dialogue between two ideological adversaries. Dizraeli’s character argues for the collectivist anarchist model of direct action and my character argues for participatory democracy and the social contract. At the root of this debate is the question of whether “the system” (ie capitalism and liberal democracy) is inherently exploitive and requires an overhaul (or overthrow), or whether it provides collective net benefits and only needs to be regulated and fine-tuned to correct specific abuses and injustices. This question is largely academic in England and Canada, since there are very few people here who would endorse an armed revolution (hence the dystopian future setting), but in Egypt and Palestine, where the right to vote, freely travel, peaceably assemble, and speak your mind are routinely suppressed with state violence, the question of “revolution vs reform” weighs much more heavily.

We were booked to perform the Rebel Cell at the El Sawy Culturewheel in Cairo on March 27th and had our travel and fees covered from the UK and back by the ESRC, just for a single performance, so naturally we decided to cast our net a bit wider. We reached out to contacts in both Israel and Palestine, hoping we could arrange performances of the Rebel Cell on “both sides of the fence”. Our rationale was that the subject matter of the play is highly relevant to both Palestinians under occupation and conscientious Israelis who oppose the occupation, and it would foster dialogue and possibly provide a small means to “reach across the divide”, etc, since that is essentially what the play is about: the importance of respectful debate and of friendships that cross ideological boundaries. If our motives sound naïve, I should add that Dizraeli and I are not particularly well versed in the politics of the region, nor did we really do our homework before embarking on this trip. My only excuse is that I’ve been too busy over the past few months, but busy is always relative. In retrospect I feel a bit like a kid who has been skipping through a field, oblivious to the sign nearby that says “Danger! Landmines!” Why does the child miss the sign, because he is merely engrossed in his thoughts, or because he has a psychological incentive to overlook it? And why do I suspect there is something quintessentially Canadian about this feeling? In the case of this trip, the sign said: “Danger! Cultural Boycott!”

Our first clear glimpse of the danger sign came when we were planning the dates of our trip: should we try to go to Israel/Palestine before Egypt or after? When we floated this idea to Dr. Caroline Rooney, the Zimbabwean professor of post-colonial studies who secured the funds and coordinated everything for us, she said it wouldn’t be possible to get us flights to Israel because of the cultural and academic boycott (ie: as an academic she would play no part in arranging this or funding it). So we had to get our flights in and out of Cairo and travel to Israel in between. Actually at this point I should mention that when I say “our flights into and out of Cairo” I am only referring to myself and the Rebel Cell DJ, but not Dizraeli. This is because Dizraeli undertook his journey to the Middle East entirely overland with a documentary filmmaker in tow, taking trains and buses from England through Europe, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, and finally to Egypt, ten days in each direction, as a form of climate change activism. The concordance between our travel decisions and the arguments of our characters in the play is uncanny and could inspire an entire doctoral thesis, but for now I will treat this as a tangent, since the bottom line is that we had to arrange to be in the same place at the same time, one way or another, in order to do the play. If you want to learn more about Dizraeli’s overland adventure and its purported political significance, check out UnPlaned.com.

So what to do about this boycott question? When we heard the news from Dr. Rooney about our travel funding restrictions Dizraeli and I had a conversation: should we perform in Israel? What if we get offered gigs in Israel but not Palestine? What if we get offered gigs in both, by a peace-building NGO, but the funding all comes from Israel? What if the Palestinian venues won’t host us after playing in Israel? The two closest friends I have who are knowledgeable about the area are Daniel, a British MC living in Israel, who is also one-half of a Jewish/Muslim hip-hop group (the Jewish half), and Noa, an Israeli living in England, and both of them advised us to play both sides, essentially to ignore the boycott for the reasons cited above, ie to “keep artistic dialogue open despite possible disagreements”. Let's call this the "Leonard Cohen approach", since he recently played a concert near Tel Aviv, and answered the boycott call by attempting to set up a gig in Ramallah to "balance" the Israeli one (sound familiar?), which fell through in the face of strong opposition from the boycott campaign. He then offered the proceeds from his Israel concert to support peace-building efforts through a fund that was to be administered by Amnesty International, but Amnesty also divested in the face of boycott pressure, so the funds instead went to a charity called Parents Circle. However, Daniel was at the concert and he tells me Leonard Cohen made repeated calls for peace from the stage, calls for both Palestinians and Israelis to respect the suffering and humanity of the other side, and in his view this was a positive event that brought peace closer.

Noa and Daniel also both pointed out that when it comes to boycotting oppressive regimes, it would be pretty inconsistent to play Egypt (a politically-closed society with widespread censorship) but not Israel (a politically-open and self-critical society). So we decided to keep our options open and see whether any offers came through, but to use our discretion in terms of who was funding the gigs, venues, etc.

When the British film director Ken Loach (The Wind that Shakes the Barley) pulled his most recent film out of the Melbourne Film Festival because the festival was partially funded by the Israeli government, he and his co-producers defended their decision in the Guardian by saying “Israeli film-makers are not the target. State involvement is”. This was essentially our position as well: how could we reach out to individual Israeli citizens without providing support in any way for the state of Israel?

However, with our Cairo performance only ten days away we still hadn’t been offered any gigs in either Israel or Palestine, so the entire debate was beginning to look, once again, academic. Since we had already booked our trains and planes and committed to the dates it was starting to look like we would end up doing the tourist thing after all, visiting Israel and Palestine but not performing in either, and since you get to Palestine via Israel from Egypt anyway there seemed to be very little controversy. But then we got word from a contact of Dizraeli’s, Baha, that we would be performing the Rebel Cell at two different venues in the West Bank, in Beit Sahour (near Bethlehem) and Ramallah April 1st and 3rd.

I had read some arguments for and against the cultural boycott online in the run-up to our trip, but my instinct in such cases is to suspend judgment until I’ve seen for myself what is at stake. In the next installment, I’ll try to explain what I saw, and how it has affected my views on this quintessential question: what is the best way to promote justice?

To be continued...

20,000 Views!

2010-03-28T23:57:00.002+01:00

Hey y'all - my new rationalist anthem "Off That" is a blatant rip-off of my favorite song on Jay-Z's latest album, but since I'm not selling it or profiting from it in any way, he can't touch me! The song is basically about moving on, out with the old and in with the new, only Hova's version is about fashions and mine is about ideas. Out with superstition, in with science, out with faith, in with reason, etc. If you haven't seen it yet, check it out here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAYVY2eLMck

So the big news is that it just passed 20,000 views on Youtube after just 8 days online! There is also a very lively debate going on with over a hundred comments, most of them positive, but some pretty negative, so obviously something in the song has struck a chord. It's meant to be provocative so as far as I'm concerned mission accomplished, but that doesn't mean I don't stand behind the message of the song. I mean it 100%, but I don't always phrase my views as strongly. It's kind of refreshing.

If you don't have a strong opinion about it either way then I hope you enjoy the top-notch production and visuals, but if you do have a strong opinion, please leave a comment and join the debate!

All the best from Cairo,

Baba

Off That

2010-03-24T03:28:00.003Z

Friends,

Two pieces of news, both exciting, but I'll start with the really incendiary one. A few months ago I was approached by a science-themed UK music festival called Geek Pop, who asked if I would create some original pro-science content, so I wrote a rap song, a kind of "rationalist anthem" putting the flames to pseudo-science in its more pernicious modern guises. Once the song was finished (produced by the mighty Mr. Simmonds), Geek Pop put me in touch with an amazingly talented video designer called Tommy Nagle, and he created original animations and graphics, resulting in a stunning music video. It went live just three days ago and already it has over 5,000 views on youtube, and some enthusiastic (and not-so-enthusiastic) comments. Part of this exposure is due to the fact that New Scientist Magazine hosted a link to the video on their home page. Here it is (breathe deep): Click here to watch.

I understand that many of you won't share my views on this subject, and probably some of you will absolutely loathe this video, especially if I've gone after any of your sacred cows, but if that is the case the least I can ask is that you follow up on the links provided in the end credits. Everything in the song is based on something I read and was persuaded by, and based on the principle that rational free inquiry is worth defending against those who would tear it down. This philosophy of science and its insights into the nature of the universe is shared by many who call themselves skeptics, atheists, rationalists, secular humanists, etc. In fact, New Humanist Magazine put the video in their blog with this review: "From now on when someone asks us what we stand for, we might just tell them to start by watching this." So it seems I have become a spokesman for my intellectual kin, and I'm okay with that. At the very least it has given me the chance to connect and work with some inspiring and creative people. If you want to see Tommy's animation in all of its high definition glory, try watching it on facebook.

So now for the less-incendiary bit of news: tomorrow I'm on my way to Egypt for a series of performances! The trip is part of a UK initiative to bring politically-engaged drama to Egypt, which means the hip-hop play I co-wrote with Dizraeli a few years ago, The Rebel Cell, is about to have its Middle Eastern and African debut. Tomorrow morning Mr Simmonds and I will fly to Cairo for our show there on Saturday, and the following week we'll be doing the tourist thing in Israel. If this is the first you've heard of the Rebel Cell then you must be new to my newsletters, since we performed it at the Edinburgh Fringe in both 2008 and 2009, won several awards, and this September we'll be launching an eight-week tour of UK theatres with the show. Here's some more info if you're curious: Click Here.

One of the most interesting twists in the ongoing saga of the Rebel Cell is not that we've got a gig coming up in Egypt, but that Dizraeli has undertaken to do the tour without flying as a form of climate change activism. We've had discussions in the past about performing in North America, Australia, etc, but his refusal to fly has so far restricted our performances to the UK and Ireland (to my occasional frustration, I admit). This time, however, he mapped out an overland course and recruited a documentary film-maker friend to join him, and they are making a film about the consequences of having an environmental conscience if you're a performing artist, taking trains and buses on a ten-day journey each way. Last I heard they were in Istanbul, so they must be nearing Syria by now.

And what about me? Don't I have an environmental conscience? Of course I do, but I choose to fly because I find it necessary for the advancement of my career, and because life is short and the world is large (and before you judge, ask yourself what you are willing to personally sacrifice for your environmental conscience). I also fly because my political philosophy is more towards institutionalized solutions, participatory democracy, cap-and-trade agreements, carbon taxes, etc, and less towards individual activism, especially when it comes to collective-action problems on the scale of global warming. What's interesting is that this precise philosophical debate is the subject of the book The Rebel Sell by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, which itself was partially the inspiration for the writing of the Rebel Cell, and in the play Dizraeli's character and my character fight the debate out in several rounds of politically-charged rap battling. But in the play we play ourselves five years in the future, with frequent flash-backs to the semi-autobiographical present, which means the play continually absorbs and mirrors the real trajectories of our parallel hip-hop careers, as art imitates life imitating art.

At this point, however, I have flown from Vancouver to Hawaii to Vancouver to London to Vancouver to Sydney to Adelaide to Canberra to Vancouver to London and tomorrow to Cairo, and that's just in 2010! So I wouldn't be surprised if this little episode and its points of contention end up in the next re-write of the play : )

In the meantime, wish us luck in the cradle of civilization. I'm going to see the pyramids!

Poets vs MCs

2010-02-22T15:34:00.003Z

I'm often asked, what's the difference between a spoken word poet and a rapper? Or, to put it differently, why did you choose to be a rapper instead of a spoken word poet? Well, in January I had a chance to compete in an amazing event in Brighton called "Poets vs MCs" in which the hip-hop community and the spoken word community come out to represent their respective camps and talk some (good-humoured) trash about one another, so I took that opportunity to write a new rap/poem spelling out the difference as I see it. Brighton has an amazingly cohesive hip-hop scene and a parallel but equally cohesive spoken word scene and I don't know another city that could pull of an event like this with so much firepower yet also with such a good rapport on all sides year after year (it was the seventh annual!).

I was representing for the MCs, needless to say, and I got to spark things off in round one, but if you follow the youtube link you can watch the whole thing, round by round, and I have also posted the lyrics of my piece below. This one is dedicated to Shane Koyczan, who got more exposure for spoken word than any poet ever has before when he performed in the opening ceremony of the Vancouver Olympics with more than 3 billion people watching on television worldwide. Long live rap and poetry both, and viva la difference!

Click here to watch the video on youtube.

Poets vs MCs

Rappers are so obnoxious! Even the most incompetent
And most impoverished of us pose like we pimp hoes for profits
It’s simply implicit when we grip our own crotches
So excuse me for exposing the obvious
But poets are fascinated with self-flagellation
With exaggerated emotions and vocal masturbation
With layer after layer of phony fashion statements
Folded into their words – the proper verb is “invagination”
“In•vag•in•a•tion: the folding of a membrane or surface
In on itself to create a pocket or pouch”
But rappers are obsessed with form and function
With the intricate syllable structures of words
And the juxtapositions amongst them
For rappers, rhyme patterns are like sign-language instructions
Like computer hackers programming the crowd to have eruptions
But for poets that’s disgusting, pathetic approval-seeking
Poetry is supposed to be about truth speaking
About exposing your soul and letting go of control like the beats did
At the Nuyorican; it’s not about the response you’re receiving
But for rappers that’s exactly what it’s about
If you’re not in it to win it then get the fuck out
And if the shit that you’ve written isn’t sufficient to uplift the crowd
Then go recite the shit to yourself
But wait, isn’t that just the same old artistic debate
Over whether our creations come from a strange mystical place
That gives them an intrinsic weight that we can separate
From any attempt to measure them in a functionalist way?
Exactly! Poets indulge in rank mysticism
Rappers recognize the direct connection
Between effort and discipline and getting recognition
Poets want to be exorcists instead of physicians
That’s the essential difference between rappers and poets
We’re all entertainers, but MCs just happen to know it
But, didn't I just re-define a “poet” as an “uncharismatic showman”?
Yes, so now it’s time for a diplomatic moment
When it comes down to battles and gets pushy
I can generalize, like: “rappers are arrogant rookies
They act like dicks, and poets are all just big pussies”
But up close, this definition isn’t so good looking
I mean, how can I speak with so much certainty
When my whole analysis is stolen from Team America World Police?
And why am I so determined to give the third degree
To my brethren who get their bread like me, from the words they speak
Here’s the reason we need poets and rappers to be contrasted
We need to understand our differences if we want to combat them
So here’s a definite to help with your thought patterns:
All rappers are poets, but all poets are not rappers
Rap is a sub-category, a sub-class of poetry
We both have talents with metaphors and allegory
But when it comes to rhyme and rhythm, rappers simply have authority
And as for hip-hop culture? Well, that’s another story
Life is bigger than hip-hop, and hip-hop is bigger than rap
And rap is bigger than poetry, if you measure it by its impact
But if rap is a limb of poetry, then poetry’s bigger than that
So pick a branch and swing from it, as long as you get ‘em to clap
But if you can’t get applause in spite of your metaphors
Or if it’s lukewarm instead of uproarious because you hit writer’s block
Or creative menopause, then just get off the stage
In this regard, poetry and hip-hop’s the same
Ninety nine percent of all contenders get washed away
So whether you claim gangster or you’re in the conscious vein
There’s a direct line of descent from Dr. Faustus to Dr. Dre
And there was a time when poets made history, but it’s not today

Phenotypic Plasticity

2010-02-09T11:53:00.006Z

Fellow Bipeds,

Last week I did my first tour of the Southern USA with the Rap Guide to Evolution, performing in Houston, Texas and Springfield, Missouri. Brace yourselves. Controversy was brewing from the start when I got a "conditional" invitation to perform at Missouri State University, co-sponsored by the departments of Biology, Psychology, and Bio-medicine. The condition was that I had to "tone down the creationist jabs", and it was imposed by the head of the Biology dept, who felt it would be a turn off for the non-science audience if their beliefs were attacked from the outset. The primary offending material was of course the chorus of the song Natural Selection: "The weak and the strong, Darwin got it goin' on / Creationism is dead wrong!", plus the song's third verse with the line: "If there is a personal god, then he's been jerkin' off".

I must admit I was a bit indignant about this at first. I didn't mind dropping the third verse from the song, which I often do for the sake of pithiness anyway, but the chorus? How could a Biology dept not stand behind the statement that creationism is dead wrong? Was it my presentation that was controversial, or evolution itself? And even if they disagree, isn't it condescending to sanitize it for them? To see how the British react to the song, check out this video from the Cambridge Darwin Festival last July (a soft audience, I concede).

So here's what set me straight. My first stop of the tour was in Texas, where I did two different lunchtime shows at two campuses of Houston Community College. For the first show I did a mix of Canterbury Tales and Evolution, omitting the song Natural Selection along with a few other chapters as a necessary abridgement, and the show was an unmitigated success. Then on my second day in Houston I stepped to the stage in front of a packed crowd of over a hundred college students and bit the bullet. My cries of "creationism is dead wrong!" were met with incredulous (and mostly hostile) stares, and the call and response part at the end: "When I say 'creationism is...' you say 'dead wrong!" was virtually all call and no response. The half dozen or so brave souls who joined in at first quickly realized that a hundred of their peers were staring them down and their weak cries of "dead wrong..." quickly tapered off. In comedy parlance I "died on my ass", and then spent the next hour clawing my way back from oblivion.

To my credit and theirs, by the end of the show I had won them back and got a hearty round of applause, and I even got respect after the show from a few avowed fundamentalist Christians for the gutsy freestyle part of Performance, Feedback, Revision, in which I mocked: "My friends at home were all skeptics / Like: 'You're rapping about evolution in Texas? / You must have a death wish / Man, you're gonna get lynched!' / Why? No religions get disrespected / Unless they're specifically un-scientific." But talking to a number of the students after the show, the common theme was "great performance, but you almost lost me with that opening piece". Even more to the point is the fact that I did lose quite a few of them, since about fifteen people indignantly walked out in the first ten minutes.

Contrast that once again with the response I get in England. For instance, here's a version of Performance, Feedback, Revision that I did in front of 3500 skeptics at the Hammersmith Apollo in December, part of Robin Ince's comedy variety show "Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People" which was recently aired on BBC4. Click here to watch it.

So what did I do in Missouri? I decided that the "condition" imposed on my show was actually a pretty sensible adjustment, but what should I do with the song? Skip it? Water it down to something vague like "alternative theories are dead wrong"? Like a good academic I opted for strategic obscurantism, substituting specific individuals for the debunked theory as a whole. The Missouri State University students were treated to the first ever performance of Natural Selection where the chorus went: "The weak and the strong, Darwin got it goin' on / William Paley was dead wrong... Richard Owen was dead wrong... Etc". To my mind this preserves the strength of the statement without foreclosing on my opportunities to raise consciousness in the ensuing hour, and only the most historically astute creationists will get the dig. Think of it as a form of phenotypic plasticity, allowing the show to adapt to diverse environments rather than face local extinction. At least, that's what I told myself. What do you all think: sell-out or gracious compromise?

Oh, and by the way, the Missouri show was better received than I had imagined at my most optimistic. They even had me autographing CDs and flyers afterward! I fear the South no more.

Tonight I fly to Australia for twenty seven performances of the Rap Guide to Evolution at the Adelaide Fringe Festival, starting Friday. And yes, those Aussie festival-goers will be getting the wild-type, with extra vigor. All my best,

Baba

PS - If any of you have friends in Australia, please direct them my way, or send them to the Facebook event.

A Valediction: For Bidding Mourning

2010-01-20T23:25:00.004Z

Val•e•dic•tion from the Latin words for "farewell" and "speech". And who or what am I saying goodbye to? My home city of Vancouver, for one, and my friends and family, though no girlfriend this time around. Where am I going? On tour, to London to perform the Rebel Cell, which will be touring the UK throughout 2010. In fact, I'm writing this on the plane en route. If you're in London, come see us at the Greenwich Theatre this weekend. Click here for details.

This "leaving on a jet plane" lifestyle of mine is also the subject of my new music video, which I'd like to invite you to watch. "Valediction" is a work of creative non-fiction dramatizing the impact these constant tours have had on my past relationships (actually one in particular, but it's a recurrent theme). Of course, the subtext is clear: if the relationship was really working, would I have been so keen to go on tour? But how can a relationship grow and thrive when one is always on the move? It's a catch-22 I have come to accept, and the music video is my best attempt to capture it. So if this is a "recurrent theme" you must be wondering: is it me or is it them? Lack of chemistry or lack of will? Ask yourself that question often, all you singletons, and let me know if you discover an answer.

The video was directed by Syd Woodward and features Aaron Nazrul on vocals, with Lin Gardiner's usual star production. I hope you like it. (If it doesn't embed then click here.)

In other glorious news, this morning I got email confirmation that my grant application to the Wellcome Trust has been approved, which means I now have funding to create a series of professional music videos for the Rap Guide to Evolution CD. The mandate of the grant is to promote the "Public Understanding of Science" and it is my hope that the videos will be used in Biology classrooms around the world to provide an accessible introduction to evolutionary theory. And of course they will be available online for the general public as well, so I hope you will all help me spread them (once we've actually made them that is). This is going to be an awesome project for 2010, one that I am seriously looking forward to. If you don't know about the Wellcome Trust, you should check them out. It's the largest charity in the UK, spending hundreds of millions of pounds per year funding projects like life-saving biomedical research and the human genome project (and the occasional rap music video). Click here for more info.

If you haven't heard my Rap Guide to Evolution CD yet, you can download it by donation from my website. Have a listen and let your visual imagination roam.

And if you like the song "Valediction" and want to get yourself a digital download, click here.

Off to the races,

Baba

Evolutionary Retrospective

2010-01-01T01:56:00.004Z

Neo-simians,

In the final hours of 2009, let us take a moment to reflect on this: up until 150 years ago, no one had the faintest idea why we look like we do, why we act like we do, or where we came from. Now we know, and we have Charles Darwin to thank. Three cheers!

So what do we do with this knowledge? Well, each of us reacts differently, but for my part I've spent most of the past year trying to celebrate and demystify the implications of Darwin's insights, and I must admit I've been having a blast. I met some of my intellectual heroes along the way (ie Dan Dennett, David Sloan Wilson, Sarah Hrdy, Richard Dawkins). A troubled African American teenager declared her newfound passion for science after seeing my performance; in Edinburgh they gave me an award for my troubles, and wonder of wonders I actually made a living with it. So why stop?

In August I got an email from David Buss, co-author of the recent book "Why Women Have Sex", suggesting I do a sequel specifically about Evolutionary Psychology (he also wrote the EP textbook), and I thought that sounded like a fine idea. So right now I'm in the reading phase, including Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate" and Matt Ridley's "Nature Via Nurture" next. So if you were to do a rap album and hip-hop comedy show about human behaviour, what would the required reading be? I'm open to suggestions, insights, dialogue, etc, but not dissuasion. It's too late for that.

Why? Because the truth is too exhilarating to reveal. For instance, I recently had the privilege of performing with Dawkins, Robin Ince, Ben Goldacre, and many others at a truly inspiring variety night called "Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People", a rationalist celebration of Christmas. Now for those of you in the process of clenching up, rest assured it was more about celebrating science than bashing religion. Picture 3,500 people in the sold-out Hammersmith Apollo Theatre in London declaring in unison: "I'm a African!" Click here to read a review from the comedy website Chortle (see paragraph twelve).

Why else? Because misconceptions about evolution are rife. For instance, I was recently the subject of a spurious article on the Discovery Institute's (intelligent design) website entitled "How Darwin Leads People to Eventually Say, 'Hitler Was O.K.'" What I actually said was that if our sex lives were like the sex lives of praying mantises (where the females eat the males during sex), then that's what our religions would be moralizing and our pop songs would be romanticizing ("She refuses to eat me / Cry me a river" etc). It's what comedians call a "joke" and philosophers call an "intuition pump", but according to the article what I said is an example of the "moral relativism" that leads to Nazism. Never mind the fact that Hitler himself was far from a moral relativist and indeed believed he was following God's will, the hysteria found in this article is the last bastion of the desperate, groping for an "objective" basis of morality while failing to imagine any conceivable alternative to divine injunction. As Robin Ince points out in one of his comedy sets: if Darwin leads to Hitler, then Newton leads to falling injuries (stupid gravity!) and Pythagoras leads to Toblerone. Follow this link for an exercise in intellectual cowardice and fallacious argument, from a History professor no less.

It's claptrap like this that reminds me of the need for clear voices amidst the gloom, and in the words of Michael Franti: "If I don't have enemies I'm not doin' my job". Not that I'm necessarily the clearest of voices, but I've gotten pretty good at paraphrasing : ) So my plan for 2010, besides creating a new show, is to tour The Rap Guide to Evolution extensively and keep spreading laughter and light. If you have any ideas or suggestions of places I could do this, please get in touch, and in the mean time I wish you all peace and prosperity in the new year. Sincerely,

Baba

PS - here's a brief overview of my touring plans for 2010, in case you're curious: UK in late January, American South in early February, Australia in February/March, UK in April, New York in early May, Western Canada in May/June (tree planting), England in June/July, Edinburgh in August, UK Rebel Cell tour in September/October/November.

Mission Accomplished

2009-11-16T20:27:00.003Z

November 16 2009

Bio-Brethren,

This USA tour has recently provided me with some great reminders of why the Rap Guide to Evolution is a worthy project, even if I do sometimes get accused of being an "evangelical" for Darwin or a "scientific fundamentalist" etc. Last weekend at the Concert for Darwin my performance got a standing ovation from the evolution-defenders who fought the Dover Intelligent Design trial back in 2004. I include this detail not to self-aggrandize (a doubtful disclaimer, admittedly), but to make the general point that out of more than fifty performances of the Rap Guide in the UK this summer I didn't get this response once. The last time I got a standing O was in March in central California. I attribute the difference not to British reserve, but to their acceptance of Darwin's theory as common knowledge, an open-and-shut case. In many areas of the States, on the other hand, Darwin is either the subject of outright hostility or defensive apologetic support, but rarely of exuberant celebration.

Speaking of exuberant celebration, I got the most amazing response yesterday from a teacher in Binghamton, NY. Carolyn Wilczynski teaches a group of "at risk" 9th and 10th graders at Binghamton High School, students who were put into the program because of behavioural problems or poor academic performance. She affectionately calls them her "stray cats" and at first they were not invited to the performance at the High School on Friday afternoon, a short 30 minutes "sampler" of the Rap Guide, but she lobbied to have them included on promises of good behaviour (they were fine). The most remarkable outcome was that one of her students, a 15 year old African American girl named Kadeidra, was the only one to come to the full performance at the University that evening of her own accord, even though I pitched it to the hundred or so regular students in attendance. They were a tough-looking bunch of kids too, so I was happy just to win them over, but having one of Carolyn's bunch attend out of sheer interest felt a bit like a breakthrough.

Below is the email I just got from Carolyn, which provides me with more steam than any ovation from any audience, standing or otherwise. Read it and try not to weep.

on 11/13/09 7:14 PM, Carolyn Wilczynski at ladyfern@mac.com wrote:

Hi Baba

I really enjoyed your performances today, and was especially glad that I was able to take some of my stray cats. When I saw the math teacher that I work with right after you left, he said "I heard that the performance was great". The kids told him. He said that they were all talking about it. But that you inspired Kadeidra to want to go to the University performance is something extraordinary. She is a stray cat in the true sense of the word - she's not bad to the bone, but has never bought into school. I have struggled with getting her motivated and until recently, haven't meet very much success. But she wanted to go to the university - and so I offered to take her.

But the most amazing thing is what she told me on the way home. She told me how much she enjoyed both performances and that she learned something too. That part is perhaps not all something that you haven't heard before. But THE most amazing part is that she said "I see science in a whole new way now - it's actually kinda fun". You accomplished that in an hour! I've been working at it for months! I wish I could buy you a beer!

Carolyn

The Devil in Dover

2009-11-07T22:50:00.003Z

November 6 2009

Science Fans,

Greetings from York Haven, Pennsylvania (about six miles from Dover). The title of this message is also the title of a book by Lauri Lebo, the journalist who reported on the Dover Intelligent Design Trial for the local papers back in 2004. I'm writing from her living room sofa right now as she prepares food for a party, the annual reunion of the plaintiffs, lawyers, and expert witnesses who joined forces to block the teaching of "intelligent design" as an alternative to Darwin's theory of natural selection in local high school science classes. For those of you unfamiliar with intelligent design as a concept, it's basically a fancy name for the biblical creation myth (tempered by some strategic deception), and likewise it has no scientific basis.

This is a remarkable story, and Lauri's book tells it better than I ever could, but here's an overview. In 2004 a group of fundamentalist Christians on the Dover school board began arguing at public meetings that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in science classes in the district. However, teaching "creation science" had already been banned by the US Supreme Court as a violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution prohibiting the state establishment of religion, so under the advice of their lawyers the school board members changed their strategy (and their story) and began advocating instead for the teaching of intelligent design. They also claimed that they had never said "creationism" even though over 100 witnesses heard them and one of them was filmed by Fox News saying it. They ordered the Biology teachers to read out a statement to students that evolution is a theory and not a fact, while encouraging students to look into intelligent design as an alternative "explanation of the origins of life", so a group of parents sued the school board.

During the trial the school board continued to claim under oath that they had never said "creationism", and that their advocacy of intelligent design was motivated by scientific rigor and not religion. Evolutionary Biologists testified at the trial, outlining the evidence for Darwin's theory, and one biochemistry professor, Michael Behe, testified in support of intelligent design. However, to justify the inclusion of intelligent design within the category of "science", Behe also advocated changing the definition of science so that it would include astrology, and under cross-examination he conceded that intelligent design actually offers no alternative explanations. If you want to learn more about Behe, here's Richard Dawkins' very sharp NY Times review of his latest book (his whole career really) click here.

At the end of the trial, the Bush-appointed Republican federal judge ruled that the school board had acted with "breathtaking inanity" (translation: they were total morons) and called their claims of secular purpose "disingenuous" (translation: they were lying for Jesus). Intelligent design was banned from the classroom. It was a grand slam.

So what does this have to do with me? Very little, except that one beautiful outcome of the trial was that the parents, biologists, journalists, and lawyers involved in defending evolution from this cynical religious assault all became fast friends, and they now hold an annual reunion celebrating their win. I met Lauri Lebo and Cyndi Sneath (one of the parents) in England on our Darwin Day tour back in February, and they invited me to perform at the reunion, which is now beingi re-imagined as a Darwin-themed concert featuring readings, lectures, songs, and of course the Rap Guide. The story of how these people came together is truly inspiring to me, so it's a real privilege to be part of the celebration.

This is officially stop number four on my twelve-city USA tour celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species, and the next two weeks will see me traveling all over NY, MA, PA, and CA bringing Darwin to the American masses (who, according to recent surveys, badly need it). However, you'll note that my stops are mostly in "Darwin-friendly" states (central PA being a possible exception), which is something I regret, but of course I can only go where I'm invited. So when do I get to perform "The Rap Guide to Evolution" in the American South? I repeat, all I need is an invitation...

All the best from god's country,

Baba

The Tree Planter's Waltz

2009-10-15T18:29:00.002+01:00

October 15 2009

Tree People,

Many of you have heard about the phenomenon of Canadian tree planting culture, but for some of you it will be a completely alien concept. For those who know it as intimately as I do, this video is for you, a little rush of nostalgia for the wilderness life. But for those of you who know nothing of the tree planting existence, this video is especially for you, because it will provide you with a window into a realm of raw experience that will surprise and enthrall you. Plus, you get to see me rapping shirtless in the woods, exciting!

The people in the opening scenes of the video (filmed in 1976, not 1977) are my parents and aunts and uncles and their circle of close friends, and the people in the scenes shot in 2009 are my brother and sister and I and our circle of close friends, so tree planting is very much in our blood. If you're curious about the company and the history of tree planting in Canada, visit check out the website of my dad's company, Brinkman & Associates Reforestation.

Smoky Tiger is the latest artist to join my Lit Fuse Records label, and his debut album "Smoky Tiger and the Seven Doors" was released in September, along with my new record "Apocalyptic Utopian Dreams in the Western Wilderness". Smoky Tiger and I worked together planting trees this Spring in my brother's camp near Merritt, BC, which is where we filmed the video for "The Tree Planter's Waltz" (Have you watched it yet? You're missing out!). Both of our records are now available from CD Baby, so please take a moment to buy them if you feel so inclined.

Here are some other platforms where you can watch the video: Facebook, Vimeo, Youtube.

Hope you enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed making it!

Baba

Fringe First!

2009-08-25T11:51:00.002+01:00

August 21 2009

Friends,

Today I won a Scotsman Fringe First Award for the Rap Guide to Evolution, which is a prize given each year to the best new writing for the stage at the Edinburgh Fringe. This is literally the most coveted theatre prize at the festival (it's officially a big deal), so it really is a great acknowledgement of the show and a great boost for the rest of the run (ten more days to go!), and for life after the Fringe. Last year the Rebel Cell was nominated for a Fringe First but we didn't make it through the final round of judging. This year I guess I passed the bar, so call it a birthday present to Darwin. Click here to read the announcement.

Speaking of life after the Fringe, I am now on the lookout for gig opportunities for October (UK), November (USA) and February - April 2010 (Australia), and if you have another place or another time in mind I'm open to any possibility. Please get in touch. If you want to know about availability I put all of my confirmed gigs on my Google Calendar.

If you haven't heard the Rap Guide to Evolution yet, you can download the CD by clicking here.

And if you want to read more about my Edinburgh experience this year, check
out my "Darwin on the Fringe" blog for Whatsonstage.com.

Love and fecundity,

Baba

Darwin on the Fringe

2009-08-16T00:42:00.002+01:00

August 15 2009

Meme Pools,

The launch of the Edinburgh Fringe was one week ago, and I just finished performing my 25th show of the festival. Yes, with previews last week and both the Rap Guide to Evolution and the Rebel Cell on every single day, plus cabaret spots at night, it adds up quickly. There is so much to tell that I'm not even going to try to elaborate in an email, except to say that the highlights have been constant and consistently stimulating, and I'm blogging them regularly.

Yes, if you want to know more about the details of my experience here, I am writing a regular blog called "Darwin on the Fringe" for Whatsonstage.com, a Darwinian analysis of the strange phenomenon that is the world's largest arts festival. The most recent entry about performers-cum-producers and the phenomenon of human menopause is particularly entertaining. Here's a link to read it, and catch up on the past week: Darwin on the Fringe Blog.

The other interesting development is that we've been on the telly quite a lot lately. Dizraeli and I performed live on both BBC Breakfast Television and GMTV last week, which went out to literally millions across the UK, and the BBC rap was picked up by BBC News 24 and run worldwide (!) every hour that day, so a lot of random people in Australia, Europe, etc, have written to say they saw us, quite surreal. Here's the link to the BBC feature.

And here's the link to the GMTV feature.

And the reviews? So far we have only been reviewed once for the Rebel Cell, quite positively, and I have been reviewed four times for the Rap Guide to Evolution, two three star reviews and two four star ones. The three star reviews have faulted me for speaking too fast and trying to cram too much into an hour, and for coming across too much like a lecture and not enough like theatre. The best (ie most interesting) review so far was from BroadwayBaby.com, and ought to be read in its entirety, since the critic really did pick up on some of the most important elements of the show. Click here to read it.

Regardless of the reviews, the crowds have been having a great time, and we've been playing to full (if not yet sold out) houses. I have also had some great responses on my Rap Guide to Evolution CD giveaway, including plugs on both RichardDawkins.net and PZ Myers' legendary Pharyngula blog, which called it "not bad" (shivers!). Click here to check it out, along with some of the
twaddle.

Onward and upward!

Baba

The Rap Guide to Evolution: Free Music Download!

2009-08-01T14:32:00.002+01:00

August 1 2009

Human Tribespeople,

Tomorrow I depart for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and possibly the greatest creative adventure of my life to date (I know, I always say that). Starting next week I will be performing the Rap Guide to Evolution and the Rebel Cell (with the ever-talented MC Dizraeli), both every day until August 31st, and to get things launched I want to share my newest opus with you: The Rap Guide to Evolution LP!

This album was recorded in between rehearsals and tours over the past six weeks, in collaboration with some amazing UK artists, and one Turkish one. Infinite Potential, Tom Caruana, and Nokz from Tehdit all provide the beats, Mr. Simmonds did mixes, cuts, and the final master, Dizraeli and Noa Bodner provided chorus vocals, and my uncle Simon Kendall provided the keyboard magic to give it a powerful musical score. The whole thing can now be download from my website for free as a special Fringe promotion for August only! Click Here.

Please download it and give it a serious listen and pass it on to friends if you think they would like it (or if you think they would hate it, but need to hear it).

This album is for anyone who has ever wondered: what's the big deal about Darwin? The album explores Darwin's place in history, what he taught us, why it matters, what is being done with his theory today, what it says about the human animal and our place in the universe, why his theory is so threatening to so many people, and why it is so inspiring to so many others. Besides the philosophical aspect, the album also gives a fairly comprehensive and scientifically-accurate overview of modern evolutionary biology, which means it can also be used for educational purposes (my devious hidden agenda). And did I mention that it's also quite funny?

If any of you know of video editors or producers (students welcome) who might be interested in helping me to create video treatments for the songs, I am very keen to make this a reality.

If you want to hear what the live Fringe show sounds like, a Podcast called "The Naked Scientist" recently posted a complete recording of one of my Cambridge Darwin Festival performances, just click here to download.

And while we're on the free music tip, Dizraeli just released his first single, "Reach Out", which can be downloaded for free from his website. Give it a listen, you'll love it! Click here.

Wish us luck on the Fringe!

Baba

PS - here's a link to my Edinburgh press release, with details, if you know anyone who will be there. Click here.

Cambridge Darwin Festival

2009-07-13T16:22:00.005+01:00

July 13 2009

Reciprocal Altruists,

Yesterday I returned from the Cambridge Darwin Festival, after six days of evolutionary bliss. Every day consisted of morning and afternoon sessions featuring top evolutionary biologists discussing various aspects of Darwin's legacy and contemporary evolutionary biology. And every evening consisted of entertainment events and ceremonies, including a healthy dose of Darwinian rapping. I performed "The Rap Guide to Evolution" four times over the course of the festival, including shows at both the opening night party and the closing ceremony dinner, which meant I was literally entertaining the poshest of the posh, and some of the most inspiring minds of our time.

Some highlights for me were:

1. Performing a freestyle rap on the lawn of King's College at the closing night ceremony dinner, with David Attenborough in the crowd (not to mention a few other heavyweights). Did I meet him? No I did not, since he was one of several hundred people there and was surrounded by acolytes the entire time, but he did witness the performance and I did give him a shout-out in
my verse. Here's a video ably shot by my friend Irene (if you can't see it click here):

2. Meeting Richard Dawkins and talking to him about the potential of rap to rally people and bring evolutionary ideas to a wider audience. He didn't get to see me perform, but I did give him a CD of my song "Natural Selection" which features his voice reading from the "Origin", and he was delighted by my description of the opening night ceremony, where I had all of the champagne-sipping dignitaries shouting "Creationism is dead wrong!" along with me on the chorus. You can download the song and watch a video of the performance on my website.

3. Following the fascinating debates about the intersections of evolution with culture, and especially religion. Dan Dennett argued that religion was a meme or cultural parasite similar to a lancet fluke, which high-jacks the brains of those who are infected, causing them to behave in bizarre ways that benefit only the meme and not the carrier, while others, notably David Sloan Wilson, argued that religion was an adaptation with high "secular utility", allowing people to cooperate in communities that function like beehives or like integrated organisms with a common purpose. Others argued that religion itself isn't even a valid subject of study, because it contains so many unrelated spheres of human activity, which have been promoted as a whole by institutions designed to take advantage of these evolved "modules" of human psychology. Click here to read Dennett's hilarious report of the festival's infestation by loopy "religious apologists".

4. David Sloan Wilson sitting in the front row of my performance on Tuesday night. Wilson's books "Evolution for Everyone" and "Darwin's Cathedral" were a big influence on the writing of the "Rap Guide" and although his concept of "Group Selection" was occasionally derided by nay-sayers at the festival, I didn't hear a single person explain what was logically or empirically wrong with it. I even heard Dawkins admit that Darwin's example of group selection was valid, ie the propagation of cooperative ancestral tribes over ones with severe infighting. That's pretty much the whole gist of Wilson's theory, which I personally find quite convincing, and I have a whole chapter of my show dedicated to it. Afterward I asked him for his feedback and he said the rap gave an accurate (and entertaining) account of the theory, and invited me to come and perform at Binghampton University where he teaches. Mission accomplished!

5. Sitting next to Sarah Hrdy at the celebration dinner, while listening to David Attenborough give a majestic speech on Darwin and evolution as "the most important theory and view about mankind and his place in the world that has been enunciated in historical time". Well put. Sarah is also possibly the sweetest sociobiologists I've ever met (she had lost her voice so we chatted all night with her writing on scraps of paper), and her book "Mother Nature" about the central role of the female sex in evolution and the natural world is definitely going to merit a chapter in the "Rap Guide".

6. Chatting with Dan Dennett about meme theory (or memetics), which he came very close to completely redeeming. The problem I've always had with the concept is that it lacks a clear unit of selection, treating a religion as a meme, but also a word, a song, a story, a dance craze, a style of dress, anything that can be copied (mimicked) from person to person, undergoing differential selection. But the copying is usually "analogue" and highly malleable, more Lamarckian than Darwinian, which means there is very low fidelity and no direct mechanism for the kind of adaptation that drives biological evolution. In his talk, and our conversation, Dennett emphasized "digital" memes like words, which sound different in different dialects, and look different in different fonts, but which our minds instinctively correct to a norm, much like the copying fidelity mechanisms of DNA replication. Conclusion: the theory of memetics is still alive and well, if still in its infancy.

Now I'm back in London working on recording the "Rap Guide" to a CD format, and rehearsing the Rebel Cell all week in preparation for our debut at Latitude Festival on Friday. I hope you are all having a great summer, and please take a moment to send some digital memes my way if you like.

Love,

Baba

Apocalyptic Utopian Dreams...

2009-06-21T12:05:00.005+01:00

June 16 2009

... in the Western Wilderness is where I've been for the past month, living in a tent and planting trees near Merritt, BC. And "Apocalyptic Utopian Dreams in the Western Wilderness" also happens to be the title of my new hip-hop album, which is now finished, mastered, and... still some time from being released. But since I have the final master in my hands, I wanted to give you all a little preview. For a limited time, you can download the whole record in Mp3 format by clinking this link.

Why am I giving it away, you ask? Because this is the modern era of music downloads, where independent artists such as myself face a conundrum. Sell it to a few people, or give it away to a lot of people? In this case you are my front lines, my ice-breakers and taste-makers, who get the record for free, for now, in the hopes that more people will hear about it through you and give it the momentum it needs to reach the elusive masses (and in the hopes that you will like it so much you will buy a physical copy when you see me next, or buy it online when it's available). If you want to stream songs a bit quicker, I have the entire album on my Facebook page and select songs on my Myspace page.

And what's up with that title? Well, as you will find when you listen to the record it's complex, but I have found there is something about the Pacific Northwest, something about Vancouver, BC, that inspires thoughts about the end of the world, or at least the end of civilization and technology, and about how that wouldn't be such a bad thing for everyone, perhaps ridiculous thoughts. These thoughts are not exclusive to that area, but they are rife there, perhaps because one's proximity to the geographical end of civilization inspires notions of its temporal end, or maybe for other reasons (extensive colonization by hippies and draft-dodgers etc), but it's a phenomenon I wanted to explore lyrically and musically. How ludicrous are those thoughts? How parochial and selfish? How realistic? Where do they come from and how can they be turned towards constructive ends? This has been my preoccupation for the past six months, between various tours and performances.

Sonically the record was crafted by the incomparable Lin G, who co-executive produced it with me and brought her signature quality standards and production talents to every track. Musically I have collaborated with some extremely gifted artists on this record, mostly producers from London and Brighton, and mostly singers from Vancouver or based there, Tia Brazda and Chantel Upshaw and Erica Dee and Aaron Nazrul. I also recently signed a new artist to Lit Fuse Records called "Smoky Tiger" who is featured on "The Road Northwest", which captures the album's theme perfectly. Smoky Tiger's debut album will be coming out on Lit Fuse Records before long as well, but I'll preview that one to you in another email.

As for me, I'm now in England with Dizraeli rehearsing and re-writing "The Rebel Cell," and tomorrow we visit our first music festival as Mud Sun, bringing our live hip-hop sound to the English Bacchanalia. There is a lot more to tell about this summer as well, with upcoming performances at Glastonbury, Latitude, Secret Garden, Edinburgh, and the prestigious Cambridge Darwin Festival, but I'll share those as they unfold.

In the meantime, please take the time to download the album and give it a listen and provide me with feedback. It took several months to craft and several years to formulate, and I am deeply chuffed with the result.

Good things to you all from Bristol,

Baba

Gary Goodyear, Please Come to the Rap Guide to Evolution!

2009-03-24T07:44:00.002Z

March 24 2009

Open Letter to Gary Goodyear, Canada's Minister for Science and Technology

Dear Minister Goodyear,

I will be performing a show called "The Rap Guide to Evolution" as part of the Vancouver Evolution Festival in a few weeks, and I would like to invite you to come to the performance free of charge. Allow me to explain.

I have read with interest the recent articles in the Globe and Mail about your misgivings towards Charles Darwin's theory of evolution ("Science minister won't confirm belief in evolution", March 17th). The Globe and Mail interviewer was very misleading when she asked whether you "believe in evolution", a question clearly designed to misrepresent Darwin's theory as a matter of personal belief rather than a scientific fact based on solid evidence. Hence, when you answered her question by saying "I don't think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate", you were only following her disingenuous lead.

However, your follow-up interview with CTV, ("'Of course' I believe in evolution", March 18th), suggests that the problem is a lack of comprehension rather than a lack of belief. Your chosen example of "evolution" was the ability to adapt by "walking on cement versus anything else, whether it is running shoes or high heels, of course we are evolving to our environment." By this measure, Mr. Goodyear, you are doing an excellent job of evolving your responses under the intense environmental pressure of media scrutiny. But you clearly don't understand Charles Darwin's theory.

However, I think your error is quite common and I have a simple solution: come see my show! I have spent the past few months researching and developing "The Rap Guide to Evolution", which explains and explores modern evolutionary theory through remixes, comedy storytelling, and rap poetry, making the theory simple, accessible, interesting, and fun to learn. The show was commissioned by Dr. Mark Pallen, a Microbiologist from England, who has consulted extensively on the scientific accuracy of the raps. Once you have nodded your head to the beat and laughed out loud at some of evolution's bizarre implications, you will have no reason to fear or avoid Darwin's ingenious theory any longer.

Here is what Science Magazine said about the show: "With lyrics that were sometimes sly, often hilarious, and always smart and thought-provoking, Brinkman married the fast, complex, literate delivery of Eminem with the evolutionary expertise and confrontational manner of Dawkins."
Click here to read the full review.

The Rap Guide to Evolution is presented by the Vancouver Evolution Festival (venues and details are below). I sincerely hope to see you there, both for the sake of your job security and Canada's international reputation, not to mention the reassurance of our scientific community.

Yours truly,

Baba Brinkman

Vancouver Evolution Festival Presents:

"The Rap Guide to Evolution" by Baba Brinkman

Public Performances
Friday 10th & Saturday 11th April, 8pm, Aisle 45 in Gastown (45 W Hastings at Abbott), doors at 7:30pm, running time 1hr.
Tickets $10 ($5 concession)

UBC Student Show
Thursday 9th April, 4pm, The Norm Theatre, SUB (Student Union Building)
Free entry

SFU Student Show
Monday 30th March, 2:30pm, IRMACS Theatre, SFU (Burnaby Mountain Campus)
Free entry

Click Here for Facebook Event Listing

Click Here for Additional Information

Hate It or Love It

2009-03-13T07:42:00.004Z

March 7 2009

Symbionts,

Greetings from the Fresno Rogue Festival. I have now performed "The Rap Guide to Evolution" a total of nine times, and the results are in: people love/hate it! No parent could be prouder than I am of the amounts of kudos and vehemence this show has already generated in equal measure.

The love started early, at the premier performance of the Rap Guide at Cambridge University on February 9th, part of a four-city UK tour to celebrate Darwin’s birthday. The performance was a double-header featuring myself and Lauri Lebo, author of a book called “The Devil in Dover” which chronicles the recent creationism-in-schools court battle in Dover, Pennsylvania. Science Magazine wrote a glowing review of the show complete with extensive quotations and video links, and even published an excerpt in the “Newsmakers” section of their print edition! Please click here to have a read.

By the way, the quotes are mostly from my song “Natural Selection” featuring Richard Dawkins, which can be downloaded from this link: Natural_Selection.mp3

So there’s the love, but as for the hate, my second show here in Fresno is where it all went down. First, the show was very nearly sold out (over a hundred in attendance), so there was a good buzz in the crowd. Second, the lights blew about ten minutes into the show, so the house lights had to be brought up, which means the show was very intimate, lit kind of like a living room. Third, the show got its first standing ovation, which was very overwhelming and humbling, since I’ve been pouring my heart into it for months and wasn’t sure how it would be received. Finally, I have a section in the show where I encourage the audience to give me feedback afterward, so that I can continue to revise and adapt it like an evolving organism.

The feedback was mostly very positive, but at one point I was accosted by two women who said they were very offended by the show, which they found deeply misogynist; they suggested I focus on the “long view” of evolutionary history instead of trying to apply evolution to “short term” subjects like understanding human mating strategies. They said they thought my take on evolutionary psychology was “the equivalent of social darwinism”, and used the example of breast augmentation, which evolutionary psychologists might designate an attention-getting strategy rather than a sad example of female objectification. To this I responded that un-augmented breasts themselves were already an attention-getting strategy, since all other primates have flat breasts that only swell during lactation, whereas human female breasts (and buttocks) have evolved through sexual selection to store fat deposits, making them a prominent mechanism for appraising the fitness (ie youth & fertility) of mates, which was not a popular answer (although technically it was an answer from comparative anatomy rather than evolutionary psych). I found out later that I was speaking to a professor of Women’s Studies from the local university.

Well the whole time we were having this conversation in the lobby after the show, a man was standing nearby listening in, and he finally stepped forward and introduced himself as Dr. Rick Zechman, the head of the Biology Department of CSU Fresno, the same university as my detractors (where the Biology and Women’s Studies Departments are apparently sometimes at odds). When I asked if he had any feedback to add to their feedback, he said “My feedback is that I don’t agree with their feedback”. He then invited me to perform at the university, which I did today, co-sponsored by the Biology Department and the Psychology Department. The Dean of Science was in attendance at the show, as well as about a hundred and forty students, and once again some were very enthusiastic and some not so much, but the response from the scientific community so far has been amazing.

I should add that part of the deal when Dr. Pallen commissioned this show for the Darwin Tour was that he had to vet the script for scientific rigor. So all through January I sent him drafts of the lyrics and he sent me back amendments to ensure that the content was based on the current state of evolutionary biology, and to ensure that I didn’t misrepresent any of the core concepts of his discipline (the part about breast evolution is from The Mating Mind by Geoffrey Miller). This of course gives me a solid foundation when it comes to answering critics, since the show and current evolutionary science supposedly speak with one voice (although I try to represent both sides of certain controversies within evolutionary biology, such as the question of group selection). One reviewer who posted on the Rogue Festival website was unimpressed with my claims of scientific rigor; apparently the show made her feel “disgusted” and “sick to her stomach”, and she found it “racist, sexist, and offensive”. I disagree with this review, but it’s definitely interesting to experience such a range of responses.

In other news, I will be back in Vancouver soon to work on my next solo rap CD, due out in May or June. I am also working with the Vancouver Evolution Festival to get a venue for the Rap Guide in early April, possibly over Easter weekend. How sweet would that be? Darwin rises from the dead and busts a rhyme!

Yours, once again, from the trenches,

Baba

Descending from Darwin

2009-02-11T00:37:00.005Z

February 7 2009

H. Sapiens,

Hello from Cambridge! I've just returned from the Sanger Institute, and one of the most inspiring conferences I've ever been privileged to attend, so I thought I'd share. The conference, "Evolving Words" brought together performance poets and evolutionary biologists to exchange ideas and expertise, in order to increase public appreciation of Darwin's work and legacy. The poets were each paired with a scientist, and we each had to learn the other's bio and interests and introduce them to the group. My counterpart for that exercise was none other than Randal Keynes, Charles Darwin's great-great-grandson!

In the evening we were privy to performances from the other poets, including the legendary beat poet Michael Horovitz, and I even previewed a few scenes from the "Rap Guide to Evolution" which one biologist described as "surprisingly accurate, for a rap". Later we had a chance to participate in a roundtable discussion with the institute's leading geneticists and experts in human evolution, such as Dr. Chris Tyler-Smith, who talked about the current state of scientific knowledge on the questions of whence, wherefore, and whither. Later we were taken on a tour of the DNA sequencing labs and supercomputers used to process the information (ever heard of a petabyte?). Here's a link to their website if you want to learn more: click here.

The Sanger Institute, by the way, is where approximately 40% of the Human Genome Project was completed, in a race to map the human genetic code and put it into public domain on the web before private interests had a chance to copyright and trademark (!) the code for commercial purposes. It was a great triumph of the public good over narrow profit-motives, and now the institute is on the cutting edge of genetic medicine. It was mind-boggling to hear of the progress made in the past fifteen years in terms of sheer capacity. For instance, it originally took twelve years to map the genome of a single person. Now they process the equivalent of 40 full genomes per day!

So now I'm spending the weekend in Cambridge preparing for the first full performance of the "Rap Guide to Evolution" on Monday. The show was recently thrown for a loop when the other rapper, Greydon Square, discovered he couldn't travel due to parole restrictions. It was supposed to be a two-man, one-hour production, but suddenly I now find it's all on me. It's a shame, because Greydon is a pretty fascinating guy and I was looking forward to the collaboration. If you want to check out some of his stuff and imagine what could have been, here's the link: click here.

And if any of you are in the UK and want to catch the show in its current primitive form, the tour schedule is posted on my website (but please do RSVP because space is limited): In the meantime, don't forget to raise a toast to Charles Darwin on Thursday (his birthday). I don't think anyone in history has taught us more about who we are and where we come from collectively.

Yours in appreciation,

Baba

The Perfect Storm

2009-01-20T18:37:00.006Z

January 20 2009

The Perfect Storm

A Fond Farewell to the 43rd President of the United States

This is truth and reconciliation day
I got up to watch the inauguration at eight
This morning and felt the tension of eight years of anxious
Worry evaporate from my neural matrix storage
Eight years of wasted wars, eight years of official
Statements distorting the truth, and hastily-awarded
Contracts, and secret compacts, and danger-courting
And total incompetence, coupled with amazing sources
Of confidence, such as the conservative base supporting
This is a day for healing and faith-restoring
Obama even commissioned an award-winning scholar
A poet of great worth, to perform that ancient service
Of composing a piece of occasional verse
To celebrate his inauguration with ornate words
Now there’s an honest day’s work
But this? I can’t even say his name – it hurts!
I guess now I know my place on this earth
Not the herald of great heroes who deserve our respect
No, more like the chronicler of regret
The reminder of those we’d prefer to forget
Is there no alcoholic remedy to erase
Recovered alcoholics from your memory banks?
No cure for bitterness in a time for giving thanks?
Guilty tyrant, thy offense is rank!
It stinks to high heaven! And yet this blank
Expression on your face betrays no hint of angst
Placid incomprehension instead of dripping fangs
Or at least contrition for the dead civilian ranks
It takes a big man to admit mistakes
Well, he still stands on midget legs
But at least we saw growth in all fifty states
When they picked his replacement on election day
Obama’s already been embraced by every nation
His inauguration is finished, and the last administration
Has nothing left for it but victim impact statements

And rest assured, there’s plenty of eloquent critics
Ready and willing to give them hell every minute
And never let them settle into a quiet
Respectable retirement; certain individuals
In the legal profession believe there’s sufficient evidence
To see them imprisoned in the federal penal system
For deliberate breeches of the Geneva Convention
Not to even mention the fact that their people listened
In on civilians without judicially seeking permission
But hey, that’s strictly a legal decision
Nothing to do with me; my specialty is lyricism
I would’ve cheered when the impeachment was issued
Sure, but I prefer not to give these people attention
Unless that attention will get them neatly arrested
Or at least convince the electorate to completely reject them
I mean, they certainly don’t need me to accept them
Besides, I’d rather keep it effervescent
The USA has an incredible president
A sensible man, conscientious and intelligent
A person with principles and effortless eloquence
So why am I wasting my intricate syllables
Protesting the criminal offenses of a pathetic
Ex-president, a Crawford, Texas resident
Instead of just adding him to a list of irrelevant
Idiots, and forgetting him, period?

Why? Because my benevolent ex-professor requested it
Better yet, my friend requested it
And when I’m ‘friend requested’ I tend to accept it
Even when it leads to endless unsolicited messages
Such as the ones you’re presently getting peppered with
Not every job is empty of unpleasantness
Someone’s job is to collect effluence
From the sewer system and test it for potential infections
In order to prevent the spread of pestilence
My job is to catalogue the thick-headedness
Of the former Commander-in-Chief of speech impediments
And despite his recent attempts to claim the best intentions
My ambition is to ensure that his name is never mentioned
Again, at least not in the same breath as
Anything inspiring, hopeful, or progressive
Only as a cautionary tale, a haunting presence
For future generations learning important lessons
I can’t imagine a more impressive example
Of how oppression leads directly to rebellion
Or how to weaken a nation’s defenses
And subjugate their safety to political interests
And sell out the public good to private business
I don’t know how he gets 20% in the census
Except to say that some people really are senseless
That’s why I called him a ‘symptom’

But I won’t call him evil; even though
He caused the unnecessary deaths of a lot of people
And his powers of perception were often feeble
(Which isn’t a problem unless you happen to be in control
Of launching rockets and watching the economy grow)
I simply see it as the unchecked growth of the common ego
Bad decisions? We’ve all made them before
Sometimes responsibilities get laid at your door
And there’s even justifications for the waging of war
In certain cases, as a last resort
When your safety is at stake, and for staying the course
And making tough decisions and taking calculated risks
Even if your kids may end up paying for it
What’s the metaphor I’m searching for?
When it comes to personal shortcomings, intelligence
Deficits, hubris, etc, he wasn’t just dirt poor
He was the perfect storm

And now, with the storm clouds lifted
After being pushed to the outer limits by a White House
Filled with cowards and nitwits pretending to represent
The national interest while devouring endless resources
And burning thousands of bridges; after listening
To the countless insipid pronouncements issuing
From beneath those beady eyes and prominent brow ridges
After cringing as they trotted out false witnesses
In support of ever more twisted selfishness
Their military prowess directed at houses and villages
With rushing limbic systems defending their callousness
Driven by apocalyptic visions that sound religious
When really they were just out for riches
Now, with the storm clouds lifted
With the hurricane passed and the base of power shifted
We have to get up off the ground and shake out the splinters
And let go of the anger and the feeling of helplessness
It’s time to finally get down to business
And deal with this world as it is, without bitterness

This isn’t to say that it wasn’t outrageous
We may indeed be at the end of a dark age
In a time of salvation, or just an about-face
But I’m done with foul language, no sour grapes
Let them take him away to pay for his proud ways
Or just leave him alone to live out his days
Either way, he’s nothing without his job title
Except a mascot, a neo-con pop idol
As for the rest of us, let’s just feel the buzz
Like this is Endor after the Death Star self-destructs
Into clouds of dust; give the cowboy his open range
Today my attention is focused on hope and change
On the present path, and on the future instead of the past
Let’s change what we can, and accept what we can’t
And direct our energy into the next president’s tasks

© Baba Brinkman, January 20th 2009

The Week in Rap

2009-01-12T23:18:00.003Z

January 12 2009

For the past year or so I've been working with a company called Flocabulary based in New York, a very creative group of people who produce educational hip-hop content for schools. I've written songs for their teaching projects, and more recently recorded an episode of their weekly hip-hop newscast: "The Week in Rap". If you want to check out Flocabulary, you can find them online at www.flocabulary.com.

Here's the video for my rap newscast:

The Week in Rap 01-09-09 from Week in Rap on Vimeo.

You can check out more episodes of The Week in Rap at: www.theweekinrap.com

2009: The Illusion of Design

2009-01-12T23:00:00.003Z

January 8 2009

Friends and Naysayers,

New year's resolutions are the personal equivalent of financial projections and business plans for companies, forever subject to the unpredictable crashes and booms of outrageous fortune. I will not succumb to anything as delusional as a resolution, but I will project my year as clearly as I can see it from here, and perhaps the illusion of design will adapt it to the projection, or at least provide some entertainment value in retrospect.

Why would I burden you with a year in preview? Because I would like to solicit input on new projects I am undertaking, and solicit gigs from those of you who are interested in my projects, be they Chaucerian, Orwellian, or Darwinian.

January I will spend here in Vancouver working on my new show, "The Rap Guide to Evolution", which was commissioned recently by the Bioscience Department of the University of Birmingham. One of the professors there, Dr. Mark Pallen (a bacterial geneticist), asked me if I would be willing to "do for Darwin what I did for Chaucer" and I responded that it would be an honour.

So in February I will travel to England for a ten day tour of Darwin-related events and venues organized by Dr. Pallen and his team. February marks the Charles Darwin Bicentennial and universities and natural history museums around the world will be celebrating the patron saint of biology. The show is currently undergoing the murky embryological process by which compositions are formed, so if any of you have any thoughts on the subject of evolution, I'm all ears (for the next three weeks or so). I'm currently trying to make sense of it from as many angles as possible.

March and April will consist of school touring in the USA, mostly with the Rap Canterbury Tales, but also with the North American debut of the Rap Guide at the Fresno Rogue Festival. If any of you know of a college, high school, or any venue at all where I could spin a yarn or two in the States in March or April, my RCT program information is online, just click here.

Oh yes, and in late April I will travel to Hong Kong for the Hong Kong Microfest (a theatre festival), my first trip to the far East!

May and early June will about one thing and one thing only: treeplanting. Nuff said.

Then in June I will return to the UK to reunite with Dizraeli for another season of performing "The Rebel Cell" (think 8-Mile meets 1984). A production company from London, SPL Productions, is taking on the show for 2009, re-working it for a larger audience, and orchestrating a tour of UK
festivals, a return to the Edinburgh Fringe in August, and finally a West End run at a theatre in London in September/October. The details have yet to be worked out, but the tour is confirmed and we are very excited to be working with these guys to resurrect our Orwellian hip-hop parable.

Since nothing is finalized for the post-August portion of 2009 I will stop there for now, and reveal more only as it is revealed to me.

And what else is new? Aaron Nazrul's song "When the Night" will be featured on the new Beverly Hills 90210 airing on CBS network TV on January 13th. He and the band are currently on tour in Central America, and have been creating video blogs along the way, so if you're curious to see what's up with them check the Myspace page.

Looking forward to hopefully seeing many of you during my travels in 2009, and a happy and prosperous new year to you all,

Baba

When the Night

2008-10-16T21:22:00.002+01:00

Aaron Nazrul just released his first video, "When the Night" from the album Butterfly Man, which is out on my Lit Fuse Records label. This is the quintessential East Vancouver block party! Check out the Youtube link:

Two Weeks' Notice

2008-10-05T03:15:00.003+01:00

October 1 2008

Friends – how strongly can I possibly urge you to become engaged citizens and strategic voters? I find the current antipathy towards strategic voting completely baffling. Human beings do everything strategically, if it carries risk. Try crossing the street non-strategically, or taking something out of the oven non-strategically, or navigating non-strategically to get to a destination when you’re running late. Work with the world as it is, while continuing to envision the world as it could be.

In two weeks Canada has a chance to strategically say goodbye to Stephen “Neo-con” Harper, and yet the polls say he is heading for another win. Remember that feeling of revulsion and confusion after the 2004 US elections when Bush was re-elected and the entire world had a collective gag reflex like WTF!?! I’m dreading that feeling on October 15th, but I don’t think it’s too late. Stéphane Dion is a very courageous and principled and intelligent politician, and yet Canadians seems to be turning their backs on him, why? Because he looks like a wimp? Are we that shallow and masochistic? I very badly want to have Dion as our next Prime Minister in two weeks, and for those of you who are quibbling between the three parties of the left, you must realize that there are only two choices for Prime Minister. That said, Stéphane Dion has clearly come out in support of electoral reform. That means if he wins, we could soon have a much more fairly representative system for electing MPs in this heavily left-leaning country with its heavily right-leaning current leadership.

And if you are in the Lower Mainland, I can tell you right now that Vancouver Quadra (pretty much everything West of Granville) faces a close race between the Liberal candidate, my mom, and the Conservative candidate, who is a UBC law professor currently salivating at the prospect of putting 14-year-olds in jail for life. If you have free time, my mom’s campaign needs volunteers, people to distribute flyers and knock on doors and make phone calls, and especially people to volunteer on Election Day. If you want to help, please go to her website and follow the links to volunteer: http://www.joycemurray.ca . She won the bi-election in March by only 151 votes, so here is a perfect example of where your individual effort will make the difference between one party and another taking the prize.

Finally, if you haven’t heard it yet, I recently wrote and recorded a rap song about the election, called “Bounce”, which I invite you to listen to now. If nothing else, it’s definitely good for a laugh. Here’s the link to download it: http://www.babasword.com/audio/bounce/Bounce.mp3

To Arms!

Baba

Credits Due

2008-09-14T21:39:00.006+01:00

September 6 2008

Friends and Voyeurs,

Back from Holland, back from Ireland, back from Scotland, back in England with the rain on the cobblestones outside the (free Wi-Fi) pub window, and in a few days back to Canada to count my lucky stars.

How many stars? My stars, so many stars! In the end "The Rebel Cell" was reviewed seven times at the Edinburgh Fringe by various magazines, newspapers, and websites, which resulted in six four-star reviews and one five-star review, as well as two award nominations, one of which we won! The Rebel Cell won a "Spirit of the Fringe Award" for being one of the most ground-breaking shows at the Fringe in 2008, and, as the award presenter put it, for "bridging the rap generation gap". If you want to read up on the critical effusion, the reviews are all posted on my website under the "Rebel Cell" link.

Another interesting development is that we've caught the attention of Andrew Potter, one of the co-authors of "The Rebel Sell", a book of cultural criticism which argues that rebellion (rather than conformity) is one of the main driving forces of modern capitalism. If you're interested in the book, I highly recommend it. Click here to check it out.

This book was definitely one of our inspirations when writing "The Rebel Cell", and I contacted Andrew Potter earlier this year to inform him of our plans. Well, in one of his recent blog entries for Maclean's Magazine Online he gave us a shout out, including the disclaimer: "I should emphasize that, apart from being extremely flattered, neither I nor Joe Heath had anything to do with the production — the success is Baba’s and Baba’s alone." The only comment on his blog entry so far is an indignant one from Dizraeli, claiming his due credit as a co-writer of the show. Click here to see it.

Although we are flattered by the attention, Dizraeli and I would like to emphasize that neither of us had anything to do with the writing of "The Rebel Sell" (which has been translated into three languages so far) — the success of the book is Andrew Potter's and Andrew Potter's alone.

Other interesting people whose attention we caught in Edinburgh were a film producer intent on making a feature-length movie of "The Rebel Cell", and a theatre producer intent on developing it into a full production in the West End of London next year. But those are only discussions at the moment, and I am not one to pin my hopes on mere words; hence, more of that anon.

And what's next? Well, in a few days I'm heading back to Vancouver for my brother's wedding (he met his beautiful bride at the Edinburgh Fringe last summer), and then in October I'll be back to England again for the Canterbury Festival and the Times Cheltenham Literature Festival. And then... USA here I come.

I found out just a few days ago that my application for a performer's visa to the USA has been accepted, so I am once again taking "The Rap Canterbury Tales" on the college campus touring circuit State-side in November and in early 2009. If any of you know of a college, high school, club, community centre, theatre, or other venue in the US that might be interested, you know where to find me (referrals make the world go round).

'Til next time,

baba

Reviewing the Reviewers

2008-08-21T03:09:00.003+01:00

August 18 2008

Punters and Quarterbacks,

Greetings from the Edinburgh Fringe! As of today we have performed the Rebel Cell 19 times and we have just 8 shows left before it all packs up. I had planned to write earlier, but you know what Robbie Burns says about the best laid plans (they gang aft agley). Our plans for "The Rebel Cell" on the other hand have been coming to glorious fruition, with strong sales (only one total sell-out crowd so far though) and amazing reviews. So far we haven't gotten a review with less than four stars out of five and we are officially nominated for a Fringe First Award from the Scotsman, one of the major festival awards here for best new writing.

But instead of just trumpeting, I thought I'd turn my critical eye to the reviews being written and the degree to which they “got it”, and if so, managed to communicate it. Check out the highs and lows:

The Scotsman: 4 Stars
View Online

Highlight: "Like listening to a cross between Shakespeare and Mike Skinner...a joyful experience"

Lowlight: Hints at a mysterious alternate version of the review that's written all in rhyme, which we may never get to read! Hard to criticize this one; it's the best of the bunch.

Fest Magazine: 4 Stars
View Online

Highlight: “High-octane lyrical content...a cerebral, savvy production that explores our modern social contract with vivacity and zeal.”

Lowlight: It’s also a very cerebral review, which can be a tough one to quote from and use as a selling point when flyering, like: “hey, come see our show; it’s really...cerebral!” Overall this was probably the review that best matched the tone of the show itself though.

FringeReview.com: 4 Stars
View Online

Highlight: “[A] brilliant dramatic final coup-de-theatre...it is clear that these performers are masters of their art.”

Lowlight: Mixing up a peace sign with a “V for Victory sign” which led to confusion, and the awkward rhyming lines in the last paragraph of the review, such as: “They compel, they impel, they use words well and they can spell.” We had to be careful not to quote any of these rhymes on our flyers, or else we would have had to accompany each flyer with a disclaimer, like “yeah, the show is in rhyme, but not like that...”

Three Weeks: 5 Stars
View Online

Highlight: “These two astounding lyricists transcend common perceptions of what hip-hop can achieve...Powerfully intelligent and awe-inspiringly eloquent, these guys are the saviors of hip-hop.”

Lowlight: It sounds pretty over-the-top, dubious even, but I have to admit I love the enthusiasm, and all of our flyers now say “Awe-inspiringly eloquent” on them, a very quotable accolade.

The List: 4 Stars
View Online

Highlight: “Extraordinary”

Lowlight: Grossly over-simplifies the premise of the show, but not by summarizing or being concise, just by stating baldly that the premise of the show is simple, which it most certainly is not. Also, the only remotely quotable phrase “extraordinary freestyle poetry” isn’t really usable, because the whole script is memorized as opposed to improvised, so it categorically isn’t freestyle. A review full of unfocussed and often mistaken criticism, which nonetheless gave us four stars, so who are we to complain?

The Stage: (no star system)
View Online

Highlight: “The Rebel Cell is a rare and inventive experiment...Both performers contribute great energy and panache...ingenious rhymes and brilliantly subtle delivery”

Lowlight: This is the only review so far to divide up our talents rather than discussing us as a harmonious whole. The “ingenious” quote actually applies only to me, and appears right after the observation that Dizraeli is a much better actor than I am. What is she trying to do, start a fight?

The Guardian: Feature Article (no stars)
View Online

Highlight: “Thrilling rap drama”

Lowlight: It actually calls the show a “Scattershot and occasionally thrilling rap drama” but that’s the beauty of strategic quotation. They’ve recently passed a new law here in Scotland that the quotations used for publicity have to be in keeping with the intended meaning of the review, so it is now illegal to take a review like this: "A tedious and clichéd piece of theatre that is played with incredible awkwardness by its cast. If it were well acted, it might have had a chance, but as it stands, this was a turkey.” And then put on your flyers: “Incredible!...Well acted!” What do you think, am I in danger of breaking the law?

Otherwise, we have just been performing the show every day, with additional spoken word gigs and hip-hop gigs at after-hours venues on an almost-daily basis. We have literally been averaging about twelve to fifteen gigs a week for the past two and half weeks, handing out flyers every day and meeting so many people and going to some really amazing shows, comedy, theatre, performances of every kind, as well as staying up until the wee hours most nights, ‘cause that’s what you do here. There is barely a week left to go now and of course I don’t want it to end, although I am completely exhausted. After this we will make our way to Ireland for the Electric Picnic Festival, and from there, well, more places too numerous to mention. The next time I write, it will be an Edinburgh retrospective, and I hope to have exciting news to share. Now to try to generate some...

If you want to set up a gig near you, either of the Rebel Cell or the Rap Canterbury Tales or the live hip-hop experience that is Mud Sun, just ask.

The new music video from the Rebel Cell is on youtube now:
View Online

All the best from the greatest festival in the world.

Baba

The Rebel Cell - Free Music Download

2008-07-31T14:04:00.003+01:00

July 28 2008

Hello People,

Thanks for all the great feedback on my Fly on the Wall episode, and now this one is about the next chapter. Yesterday Dizraeli and I performed our first show at the Edinburgh Fringe, the World Premier of "The Rebel Cell", to an audience of about 50 people at the Pleasance Dome, and the reaction was everything we could have hoped for. Exactly four years ago I premiered "The Rap Canterbury Tales" here and the reverberations are still being felt, not the least by me.

Well, The Rebel Cell, in my humble opinion, is better - it's funnier, crisper, more topical, and in many ways a perfect inheritor to the Lit-Hop mission I began with the Tales, although its content is more Orwellian than Chaucerian. I sincerely hope the reverberations of this project go even further; although, tragically, not everyone can make it to the Fringe!

Never fear. Just like with the Tales, we've recorded The Rebel Cell as a full-length rap storytelling album, and it is now available for free download from my website. Free?!? Yes, that seems to be the nature of the beast these days. Everyone with a bit of web savvy will be able to get it for free soon anyway, so why not follow in the footsteps of Radiohead and beat them to the punch? At least that way we can raise the buzz to a fever pitch and hopefully have a successful run at the world's biggest arts festival. So please, tell your friends!

Of course, if you want to order a physical CD in the mail that's still an option, and if you want to support us there is also the option to donate £5 ($10) to the cause of a couple of recording artists doing good things, but either way you can start listening to The Rebel Cell right now, no strings attached, just click on the "Rebel Cell" link to see download and streaming options.

http://www.babasword.com

All the best from the 'burgh,

Baba

Fly on the Wall

2008-07-23T14:03:00.002+01:00

July 23 2008

Hi Lights,

In the midst of all of the intended fanfare around “The Rebel Cell”, which premiers in Edinburgh in one week, with the corresponding album release coming up on the weekend, I thought I’d take a moment to share a quick Chaucer-related story, bizarre and hysterical as a Canterbury Tale. Yesterday I returned from performing at the New Chaucer Society conference in Swansea, Wales, where over three hundred of the world’s top medieval professors had congregated for four days to give papers and round-tables and plenary speeches on the subject of history’s favourite storyteller. I was scheduled to be the entertainment at the pub night at the end of the conference, but I asked if I could also come for the day to attend some of the lectures and get caught up on the state of global Chaucer studies. I was especially keen since I recognized many of the featured speakers from the bibliography of my Masters thesis, so I was looking forward to putting some faces to the quotations I used.

The first session I attended was a fierce debate about “New Formalism vs New Historicism”, the question of whether the study of literature is best guided by a close reading of each text as a semi-autonomous work of art, or whether it’s generally better to understand texts as a product of their historical and cultural circumstances. As with many debates, it was only the most radical applications of these two approaches that were really under attack, and both of the speakers actually seemed to fall somewhere in the middle, although they did a fine job of misrepresenting each other as ideologues.

The second session produced an incident that was so surreal I’m sure I will never forget it. It was a round-table discussion on “Teaching Chaucer” featuring short presentations from six professors (actually five professors and one high school teacher) who all shared their varied experiences with teaching The Canterbury Tales at their respective schools. I had quietly taken a seat near the back of the lecture hall before the session started and was curious to hear if any of what was said could be brought to bear on my own work in schools with the Rap Canterbury Tales. Little did I know that the intensity of the “New Formalism vs New Historicism” debate was shortly going to be eclipsed by the intensity of the “pro-Baba Brinkman vs anti-Baba Brinkman” debate.

I was mentioned probably half a dozen times in the various presentations, with the first speaker coming out strongly against me, cautioning against over-reliance on superficial pop-culture adaptations of Chaucer, from the TV dramatizations to parallels with South Park and Family Guy to the notorious Rap Canterbury Tales, which was now being put to use in a dangerously high number of classrooms. She argued that these students would be left with no memory of the actual curriculum material or of Chaucer himself, only the “cool stuff” it was compared to in class, like rap. Other professors came to my defense, saying they were skeptical at first about a white Canadian co-opting a black art form in order to disrupt the sanctity of medieval studies, but that after seeing the show performed and hearing about my work in inner city schools, they were convinced that I was a valuable resource for capturing the attention of young people who would otherwise never give Chaucer a chance. Still others argued that it was a bad idea to use the rap as an ice-breaker, because it would unduly influence the students’ interpretation of the Tales, but that they had found it effective as an incentive, as in: “at the end of the Chaucer section, if you study hard, you’ll get to hear the rap as a reward”.

As this debate transpired I kept sliding down lower in my seat trying not to be noticed, since they were clearly oblivious to my presence. Ever wondered what it would be like to be a fly on the wall at your own funeral? Well, as it turned out one person had noticed me coming in, and it happened to be the session moderator, Dr Helen Cooper from Cambridge, whose job was to open the floor for questions after the initial talks. So the first thing she said was: “A fascinating debate about modern vs traditional approaches to teaching Chaucer! Rapping and YouTube and Television, what exactly is their place in medieval studies? It may come as a surprise to many of you, but we are lucky enough to have Baba Brinkman in the room right now, and I’m hoping he’ll be willing to comment on the ongoing discussion of his work.” A hundred and fifty bespectacled professors’ heads swiveled around in surprise to stare directly at me as I gave them a nervous wave, “hi everybody”.

So I said: “It’s pretty surreal for me to hear you all debating the merits of my rap adaptation as a pedagogical tool, especially since that’s definitely not the purpose that I wrote it for. I’m happy that it’s found a home in the classroom and that some teachers have found it useful, but my original motivation when writing The Rap Canterbury Tales wasn’t to help you to teach Chaucer; it was to wrest Chaucer away from you people and bring him to a wider audience outside the classroom. That’s why I brought the show to the Edinburgh Festival and to dozens of other festivals around the world. I thought it was a tragedy that The Canterbury Tales was only being enjoyed by people with a medieval studies education, when the Tales have a universal appeal and deserve to have a universal audience. So, use the rap version at your own risk, and please judge it on its own merit after listening for yourself, instead of through the lens of your prejudice about rap, and keep in mind that from performing this show to tens of thousands of people around the world over the past five years, I am now the face of Chaucer, not you all. I think the tales should be studied because they are loved, not loved because they are studied, and I’m trying to make people love the Tales again. So come see the show tonight and you’ll see how I do that.”

That night I got to perform the rap in a crowded room full of the world’s most eminent (beer-drinking) Chaucerians, and from the response I got (both to my comments and to the performance) I have a feeling that the “anti-Baba Brinkman” faction has been all but vanquished from the field of Chaucer Studies. However, the “New Formalism vs New Historicism” debate rages on.

Yours from the trenches,

baba

Performance Therapy

2008-07-17T13:48:00.003+01:00

July 17 2008

Two weeks is an unforgivable hiatus when it comes to blogging, not in a moral sense, but just for the fact that anyone who might have been paying attention prior to the sabbatical will likely have lost interest and found ample entertainment elsewhere, which for an entertainer is an unforgivable transgression. Loss of audience is loss of lifeblood.

Wait! I'm still here, and still putting everything I've got into this creative monster dubbed Lit-Hop. For the past two weeks I was holed up in Brighton, in a spare room at Dizraeli's house, in a frenzy of preparation, rehearsal, and recording. Several landmarks were passed, including the first performance of the Rebel Cell last Thursday at the Brighton Komedia, part of the "Hammer & Tongue" night at the Rising Styles Hip-hop Festival. The day before we were anxiously rehearsing, fine-tuning our scripts and music and lighting cues etc, feeling the mounting thrill and also worry around the first performance of a show we have worked on for about eight months now. Up until that point, we had only done run-throughs in private, in Dizraeli's living room, or in a borrowed rehearsal space about a pub in Brighton. The big questions still loomed: would it work? would it be funny? would people relate?

Thursday's show was pure catharsis in this regard. The house was packed, mostly with people we knew but also with many we didn't, a large space with well over a hundred people seated cabaret style with drinks at tables. Long story short, the show went down a storm, got huge laughs, and we had the overwhelming experience of greeting people in the foyer afterwards and having many spontaneous hugs and handshakes from people expressing a range of emotions about the experience, of which disdain was not one. Even the hip-hop heads were with it, which for us was the highest compliment we could have gotten.

The other thing Diz & I have been up to over the past few weeks is putting the finishing touches on the album version of the show, spending endless twelve-hour sessions holed up in the studio with Mr. Simmonds, the producer, engineer, and general mastermind of the musical side of "The Rebel Cell" LP. Amazingly, I only met Mr. Simmonds six weeks ago when I first arrived in England, although I had heard his beats on the Gentleman's Club myspace page and was well impressed. Well, Mr. Simmonds turned out to be a fan of the Rebel Cell concept as well, and agreed to do some beats for us, and then he did some more, and in the end he has produced eleven out of the twenty tracks on the album, including The Fallout, which is currently up on our Mud Sun myspace page for your listening pleasure.

Improbably, we now have a twenty-track album version of the Rebel Cell completed, recorded and produced entirely over the past six weeks, and all that remains now is the mixing and mastering and manufacture, which I have left in Mr. Simmonds' capable hands. Yesterday we finished the last track, arrangement and recording wise, and I struck out for London, packing my life once again into the suitcase for another round of touring of rural England. The album will be released no later than the end of the month, perhaps with a launch date on the 30th to correspond with our first preview in Edinburgh. But as soon as I have a final master I will add it to the discography on my website so that people can experience this futuristic fantasy in all its glory.

Last night we performed The Rebel Cell for the second time only, and the show is definitely getting more fun to perform each go. We sold out the Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden (no mean feat with a capacity of 50) and the response was, once again, quite intense. But then, the show is quite intense and very personal, allowing us both to go to places that sometimes don't even feel safe in conversation, never mind in front of a crowd. That's entertainment I guess, and it's also therapeutic. Sacred cows are better mocked than worshiped in my view, or perhaps both, but certainly not the latter on its own.

Speaking of sacred cows, I'm departing for Cambridge in a few hours to return to more familiar ground with the Rap Canterbury Tales. A program called "The Oxbridge Experience" brings American and International high school students to England to absorb British culture through a series of field trips, and before they embark on their pilgrimage to Canterbury the students will be treated to the Canadian bastardization of Chaucer's Tales. And in the news, Canterbury is currently a place where still more sacred cows are being debated, what with the Anglican flap over women bishops and homosexual bishops, naturally a turn of events that is morally opposed by misogynists and homophobes. To paraphrase Bill Hicks: "Women priests? Great, so now there are priests of both sexes I don't listen to, big deal! Show me a hermaphrodite priest with three titties and trunk, now there's a sermon I'll attend..." Amen.

Three Weeks Edinburgh Quick Quiz

2008-07-03T09:30:00.001+01:00

July 3 2008

1. What is your 2008 show all about?

It's about politics, civil rights, capitalism, freedom of speech, democracy, tyranny, civil disobedience, revolution, terrorism, activism, dissidence, and everything important that most people take for granted.

2. Why should we come and see it?

Because it's wickedly clever and very funny, and because the dialogue is all done in an Eminem rapping style. It's like nothing else out there really. Attendance is guaranteed to make you smarter.

3. If your show was an olympic sport, what would it be and why?

It would be a poetry contest. Poetry was an Olympic sport in ancient Rome, with the winner receiving a laurel crown (hence "poet laureate"). This show is a battle of wits and world-views between two lyrical heavyweights.

4. What are you most looking forward to about this year's Festival?

Randomness, late night debauchery, surprisingly talented performers, the pleasure of being surrounded by people who are "up for it".

5. What are you least looking forward to about this year's Festival?

The hangover.

6. What advice would you have for someone trying to navigate the Fringe?

Don't bother with GPS, just use venues as landmarks and wander into everything.

7. What advice would you have for someone trying to survive the Fringe?

Don't worry too much about the aftermath while you're there, just be present every day and have a great time, then sort out what happened later.

8. Describe your show in three words

"8-Mile meets 1984"

The Rebel Cell
Pleasance Dome – 10Dome
1 Bristo Square, Edinburgh
30 Jul - 25 Aug, 5.40 pm (1 hr)
www.pleasance.co.uk/edinburgh
Press: info@babasword.com

Tawdry Travelogues

2008-06-24T21:30:00.006+01:00

June 24 2008

Attention Seekers,

Name dropping is so tawdry, but so are most things that instantly capture our complete attention. Twenty minutes ago I bid goodnight to my dinner companions, a group of five including the legendary English actor and playwright Steven Berkoff, theatre dynamo and James Bond villain extraordinaire. Steven regaled us with tales of theatre productions in the 60's when he shared the stage with a 24 year old Ian McKellan, and I reciprocated with a command performance of The Wife of Bath's Tale. It turns out he's also directing a play at the Pleasance Dome in Edinburgh this year, so we'll soon be sharing a venue. When I told him that we'd be performing 27 consecutive shows in Edinburgh, he retorted: "I have a tour of Australia coming up in September with 36 consecutive performances, two hours per night!" Nothing like a little healthy competition among playwrights...

If you don't know who Steven Berkoff is, then you've never seen Beverly Hills Cop. Check him out: http://www.stevenberkoff.com

I'm writing from the Lowdham Book festival in Nottinghamshire, where I have three days of performances and workshops in schools to keep me busy. Today I performed The Rap Canterbury Tales in five consecutive one-hour sessions starting at 9 a.m., for groups of students ranging in age from 11 to 18. Ouch, I can hear some of you wincing. Cool, I can hear others enthusing. Yeah, a bit of both, I concede. On the one hand, it leaves me completely wiped out, rapping for hours on end, repeating the same stories. On the other hand, every new audience brings new appreciation, and I get $1000 a day when I'm gigging.

The only thing more tawdry than name dropping is talking about how much money you're making, ugh. Whatever. Independently mounting a full production at the Edinburgh Fringe is an expensive endeavor, and this is how I'm financing it. Speaking of which, Dizraeli and I finished writing the script for the Rebel Cell the other day and have done a few test runs, smoothing out the kinks. We're also pressing ahead with the album version of the show, and we'll have advance copies ready in time for the Fringe, barring any unforeseen disasters. We recently completed the first track, "The Fallout", in which we break up like the Fugees in true dramatic fashion. The preview is now on myspace if you want to give it a listen: http://www.myspace.com/mudsun

Last week I was in Stoke-on-Trent, (which the locals call Choke-on-Stench), an industrial town not far from here that couldn't be more different (Lowdham's demographic is more than 70% millionaires, according to the cab driver). I spent three days performing at Staffordshire schools and teaching workshops to kids who definitely don't see outsiders much, lovely as they were. Some of them came up with very clever raps. Most bemusing was the fact that they mistook me for a celeb and had me signing dozens of autographs, which they seemed to think might be worth money someday. But I can't imagine even Eminem's autograph is worth anything on a scrap of paper (autographed large glossy photos go for about $5 on Ebay). If it were otherwise, he could just stay home scribbling his name all day instead of making records. Of course, no one is a celebrity except in so far as people mistake them for one.

Hold me back. In two days I depart for the notorious Glastonbury Festival, headlined by Jay-Z, Amy Winehouse, and Lenhard Cohen. I'm performing on three different stages over the course of the weekend, a mixed bag including both hip-hop gigs with Mud Sun and solo spoken word gigs. I've heard the legends for years and I'm finally going to see for myself, and under the exact circumstances I had most hoped to do so. After just over three weeks in England the cuts and scrapes on my limbs from a month of treeplanting have finally healed and I've completed my seasonal metamorphosis from a beast of burden into a purveyor of linguistic animal magic.

If you're curious about what our new Edinburgh show is going to be like, take a moment to read about "The Rebel Cell" at this link: http://www.babasword.com/press/Rebel-Cell-PR.pdf

During the current run up to the Fringe (barely a month to go) is when the publicity drive kicks into gear, so any press contacts or suggestions for getting the word out are always appreciated.

Wish me luck at the mother of all music festivals!

baba

CD Baby

2008-06-17T21:09:00.003+01:00

June 17 2008

Email to me from Derek Sivers, founder of CD Baby:

Hi Baba -

If this sounds like you, please let me know:

* - You've had a pretty good success doing music. (You've been a professional: made a living doing it.)

* - You enjoyed it. You'd recommend it to others.

* - You're ready to spend more paid time helping other musicians be successful, now.

I'm working on an idea for already-successful musicians to help the future-successful musicians of the world.

If you're interested in helping, please reply to my personal email and tell me your story about how those above three points apply to you.

Thanks!

--
Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby

My response:

Derek - you must spend your entire life answering emails. Okay, here's the brief version:

I have had pretty good success with music in that I have had no "day job" since 2003 and have been managing to pay my bills by performing and recording since then. The qualifier is: the music I do is rap, which some people don't consider music at all. I'm sure you're not one of those, but I do feel a bit odd identifying myself as a "musician" when I can't play any instrument nor can I carry a tune in a bucket as a singer. Like many others in my field I collaborate with producers who provide the instrumentals and I just recite my rhymes over the beat, and somehow the result is music. All I can say is thank god rap exists, because if it didn't there would be a world full of wordsmiths like myself who would have no part of the music business.

Other qualifiers/points of interest: I make a good portion of my living performing for students in schools and running workshops with young people teaching them the lyrical techniques that rappers use. It's a mixed bag for me of festivals, schools, clubs, colleges, etc, plus selling CDs after gigs and on the internet.

Final point of interest: my biggest success so far is "The Rap Canterbury Tales" which is an album-length adaptation of the 14th century stories by Geoffrey Chaucer. My story as a professional artist is unusual (unique actually) in this regard. I did a masters in English Literature, graduated in 2003, and immediately went flat-out as an entrepreneurial rap artist, touring my Rap Canterbury Tales performance around the world (on my own dollar at first and then later by invitation at festivals, colleges, etc) while recording and independently releasing my own highly literary brand of rap, which I call "Lit-Hop" (also the title of my third album). I recently started a record label and signed some other artists and released their music etc, so things are moving, although it's a boom and bust life. I'm currently on tour in the UK, and in ten days I'll be playing the Glastonbury Festival.

Some artists/entrepreneurs/musicians try to compete in a saturated market by doing what everyone else is doing, just better, faster, stronger, harder (to paraphrase Kanye). Me, I have been managing to avoid competition by literally inventing my own genre and carving out my own niche. Of course, I am aware that avoiding competition is just another competitive strategy, but it is a strategy that has so far served me well, and if my insight or consultation could help others succeed in the same way, then I'd be happy to sell that service.

If you want to know more about me or my projects, the website is: www.babasword.com

All the best from Stoke-on-Trent, England,

Baba Brinkman

The Curtain

2008-06-13T19:27:00.003+01:00

June 13 2008

This is my favorite time. Last night Dizraeli and I finished the script for the Rebel Cell, the first draft at least, and gave it our first test-reading to clock the time and flow: 51 minutes. This is my favorite time because he and I are agreed that it's some of our best work, cutting edge and funny, and very hard hitting, but at this juncture only he and I have been exposed to it. Actually that's not entirely true. We're also working on recording the show into a storytelling album along the lines of the Rap Canterbury Tales, and have the first track nearly finished. So a few close friends have heard the rough version of that one song, called "The Fallout". I wish I could post it for everyone to listen to already, but that will have to wait a few days. I remember when I finished writing my rap version of the Miller's Tale, I read it over to myself and thought "this is going to make a lot of people laugh and a lot of people look at both rap and Chaucer differently" and I remember feeling the excitement of knowing that it had yet to be unveiled. It's the inventor's thrill before he pulls the curtain on his new gizmo. Well, I think the Rebel Cell is going to make a lot of people laugh and also make them think about politics differently, both how things can change and also what we ought to appreciate that we already have. Of course, it may not get as much mileage as the Canterbury Tales has, but then again it might get more. That's part of the excitement.

Yesterday I also performed my first gigs of this UK tour, at a couple of High Schools in Nottingham. It was my job to introduce the students to Chaucer using the rap tales as a hook, and also to teach them how to rap in creative writing workshops afterwards. These kids were described by one of the teachers as having come from "households in the poorest 5 percent of English society", but when it came to writing rhymes they had some real talent, and some clever couplets, like: "I catch you hangin' out late nights at Vic Centre / Your mum's so old she's got dementia." They also had a lot to say about drugs and knife crime and sex in their lyrics, but luckily it's not my job to censor them, just to channel their commentary into a creative context. Some of them did this by taking the piss out of their teachers as well, which the teachers luckily had a pretty good sense of humour about. My favourite line was: "Mr Hobbs never comes to school with matching socks / Probably because his sock drawer is full of hatching frogs".

Now I'm back in Brighton for the weekend, set to work on the show and get some recording done with two producers here who have signed on to provide beats for the Rebel Cell album. That's one thing I love about Brighton: high concentration of talent, low concentration of projects with deadlines. Soon I'll have demos for curious ears, but for now I get to smile behind the curtain, and wait.

Londonium

2008-06-02T02:21:00.002+01:00

June 1 2008

Ironies abound. Back in treeplanting camp in Merritt, the river was rising throughout May with the spring runoff and some planters had to move their tents because the ground flooded. The river was swollen and rough and brown, and at one point it ran onto a sandbar in front of my tent, so that I had water on all sides, though the tent was high and dry. Then I left for England, with the ambitious plan to depart on May 29th, arrive at 6 a.m. on the 30th, dump my bags in London, and head straight to the Sunrise Celebration Music Festival in Somerset, with the first Mud Sun performance schedule for that night at 9 p.m. But when I arrived at Heathrow Friday morning, there was a message waiting for me that the Sunrise Celebration was canceled due to flooding! The river had jumped its banks, apparently, and the whole field was underwater. My agent and Sunrise organizer, Yasmin, has been stranded there evacuating people and equipment over the weekend, and I have been stranded somewhere a bit less isolated: London.

Luckily a friend loaned me his flat for the weekend while he's out of town, so for the past few days I've just been catching up on correspondence and preparation for Edinburgh, in the form of both promotions and compositions. The script for "The Rebel Cell" is about 80% finished, and tomorrow I head to Brighton to meet up with Dizraeli and get to the final parts, and then the polishing. I've also been busy customizing our Pleasance page, which you can view at this link: http://www.pleasancepages.co.uk/the_rebel_cell

Today I met up with a friend and took in Portobello market in West London, had bangers and mash for lunch, and mingled with the dazed clubbers still bouncing from the night before. Admittedly, I've been a bit dazed myself the last few days, not so much from jet lag or culture shock as from the change of daily routine, from driving trucks and planting trees and working within a strict daily routine to suddenly having a whole weekend with no plans, just a city to explore and a computer full of tasks to attend to. Soon my touring schedule gets busier, but for the next few weeks job one is to get the show finished and the soundtrack arrangement started, and maybe record some of it in the form of sneak-preview tracks. I'm just trying to enjoy the calm before the storm, while in Somerset, they're mopping up its aftermath. Here's to the Sunrise Celebration, may it come back in all it's glory next year...

The Summer of Mud and Sun

2008-05-29T22:38:00.001+01:00

May 29 2008

Friends and Neighbours,

With great fanfare and measured pride I announce the launch of my new website. I built it myself over the last few months using Dreamweaver (self-taught). New features include: an mp3 player that allows streaming of all of my albums, built-in google calendar link to keep track of upcoming gigs, the complete introduction to my book in easily readable form, and a blog feed on the front page which I will try to update more often than I send these magical group missives out.

Now it's time for the great Spring migration, which goes a little something like this:

A month ago I ended my winter of hibernation in Vancouver with a one-month stint in treeplanting camp, a brief return to the lifestyle I abandoned four years ago for the path of the troubadour. It was bliss, actually.

On Sunday I was planting trees on a steep 45 degree slope overlooking glacier mountains outside of Merritt BC, a very clear and breezy day. I dislodged a large rock and watched it careen down the mountainside gaining speed, throwing up broken branches and sticks as it went. Primitive pleasure.

On Sunday night we had the night off party in treeplanting camp, with a wrestling theme, complete with a wrestling ring and spandex-clad planters doused in canola oil struggling to pin each other. I fought Steve and made him tap out after three exhausting rounds, waking up the next morning to find my feet and knees were badly scraped from the sand on the tarp that formed the makeshift ring. A fine send off for the rapping bushman.

Tuesday I flew to Ottawa, and for the past few days I've been visiting my mom here, taking in the intricacies of Canadian Parliamentary Democracy. Yesterday I observed question period in the House of Commons from the Opposition Gallery (all about the Bernier resignation scandal), then afterwards we had dinner with Michael Ignatieff. Many of you will have heard the news, but for those who haven't, my mother was elected as the MP for Vancouver Quadra back in March. In this matter my pride is less measured. I had a great conversation with Ken Dryden last night about polysyllabic rhyme.

In a few hours I will board a plane for London England for the next round of touring in the UK, a Summer festival tour with my newly-formed hip-hop group Mud Sun. Thanks to the strength of our first record, we have been invited to perform at some great music festivals, including Glastonbury (which I have heard is already a mud/sun mecca). Check out the recent review of our album:
http://www.anevibe.com/music-reviews/mud-sun-mine-the-gap.html

In August Dizraeli and I will bring our new show "The Rebel Cell" to the Pleasance Dome at the Edinburgh Fringe, my fourth trip to Edinburgh but the first time doing something other than the ever-popular Rap Canterbury Tales. I'll tell you more about the new show later, but for now it's time for my now-familiar plea for assistance.

We need accommodation in Edinburgh for the month of August and haven't been able to find an affordable place yet, so if any of you know of someone in Edinburgh who has a flat for rent, please let me know. I am also in the process of organizing a tour of the USA for November, and I'm open to perform anywhere there is interest.

In the meantime, I look forward to seeing some of you soon in the UK. This is more of an informative than an expressive letter I know, but I have a plane to catch and much information to convey.

Good things to you all,

baba

The Elements

2008-05-18T01:54:00.000+01:00

May 17 2008

As it turns out, I didn't get integrated into another crew after the training was finished, instead I was given a crew of my own, promoted so to speak, so now I am a foreman. Inevitable cries of "nepotism" must be laid to rest by the fact that I have more experience than any other planter out here except my brother, who is the supervisor. Besides, nepotism is for nephews. This is fraternalism. How did I plant for ten years and never get a chance to crew-boss? Lack of aptitude some might snidely offer, but it was also a case of seniority. On my former crew, the average number of years experience was somewhere around fifteen, which put me behind most of my co-workers in line for a promotion. On this crew, the average is probably closer to fifteen weeks experience, considering the fact that half are greeners, so I suddenly find myself a perch among guppies.

Well, aptitude comes with experience, and I am gaining it daily. Besides a few setbacks, a forgotten map one day, a cache of trees left on the block another day, things have generally been running pretty smoothly on Baba's crew. Last week we got to the block at 8:15 a.m. to find it buried under two inches of fresh snow. Another crew working up the same road drove by saying they were heading back to town to drink beer and have some of the fun that snow days usually entail. I'd like to say I cracked the whip, but actually I just polled the crew and no one seemed to want to flounder around in the snow, so we started driving back down the mountain. But half a km from the block one of the planters ventured the opinion that we should have given it a try, so I promptly hit the breaks and turned around and we went for it. I wasn't about to force anyone to work, but I didn't want to take away the option either. We screefed the snow away and planted in it all morning, fingers frozen, and by the afternoon it had completely melted away.

The next day there was snow in the air instead of on the ground, nine hours of horizontal sleet, freezing wind and rain, and we worked through that too. Treeplanting has always carried something of a mythological quality for me, a feeling of participating in something epic. It truly pits the human body and strength of will against the elements, constantly daring you to fold. It's the closest I and any of my friends have come to serving in the army. Everything hurts, you spend much of your day questioning your own sanity for even signing up, and yet you know on some level that you're fighting the good fight, and that you will let people down if give less than your best, or quit (especially if you have dependents or a mortgage). The first greener quit a few days ago, because he said he felt he wasn't contributing, that he was constantly frustrated. The job isn't for everyone I guess.

My friend commented on the block the other day that there are two kinds of fast planters: the first are workaholic immigrants and francophones whose mentality is "we are here to earn", and the second are middle class white boys from the suburbs who have something to prove about their work ethic. I guess I fall into the second category, and so what? There is pride to be taken in choosing a harder path when easier ones are available, just to discover what you are capable of. I think that same psychology lies behind the desire of so many suburban white kids to be rappers, myself included. It's probably the least likely vocation you could choose in terms of success rate, but what else do you expect from such a defiant generation? Both treeplanting and rap give you skills and resilience that transfer to other things, once the grind starts to get you down, and both of them are there for you if you decide to dive in again. In the past I've been paid a lot better for performing than I have for treeplanting, but not nearly as consistently. Four years earning a living only from art is still pretty rare. This is me rationalizing why I'm back at work instead of touring like an itinerant rock star, or a Kerouac type, but I'll be back to that lifestyle soon enough.

Day three of last shift was blazing hot all day, on a block with big rock piles and frozen ground and snow patches to dig through and plant around. Frustration is epitomized by trying to plant trees in a big pile of soft-looking dirt that is frozen solid. Whenever I passed a snow patch, I'd scoop some of the slushy crystals into my hat to keep my head cool while I was working. The part of the block we were planting was a long hike to the back and cut off from the front by a wildlife tree patch left in the middle of the clear-cut, so that it was shaped like a big hourglass above the road. We stayed until almost six pm to finish that upper piece, just to save the next crew the hassle of having to walk over our planted trees to get to the unplanted ground at the back. Then we loaded the remaining trees and garbage into our bags and into boxes on our shoulders and hiked everything out, leaving no sign of the cache, because the quad (ATV) had broken down, fighting the good fight, karma yoga, all that feel-good stuff. After work I got the whole crew a beer for their efforts, feeling like Andy Dufresne.

Ten days to go until I depart for England and the next round of touring, and a return to relative solitude. How do I feel about this? I feel the same way that I feel about many important things, in my quintessentially Canadian way. How do I feel about vegetarianism, about global warming, about the seal hunt, about globalization? I feel a deep and passionate ambivalence.

Training Days

2008-05-11T06:09:00.000+01:00

May 10 2008

Yesterday I started a new phase of this job: training greeners. This contract has a dozen rookies out of thirty planters, and yesterday I took them out into a fill plant for some planting boot camp. I've done this for so many years, it's easy to forget how hard it was when I started, how awkward the shovel felt in my hand and how confusing it was to try to work the block effectively.

I first went out treeplanting when I was fifteen year old, to a contract in 100 Mile House in central BC. On my first day I planted 250 trees, unable to believe that some people could actually love this job. 250 trees at 22 cents each isn't exactly a windfall. But I loved the lifestyle from the beginning, sleeping in a tent and being outdoors and sharing your daily activities with a tribe of people who quickly become your friends. I didn't break 1000 trees in one day until my second summer contract, this time near Whitecourt Alberta, and didn't break 2000 trees a day until my third at age seventeen in Clearwater, BC. My personal best was 4400 in one day, on the same contract near Whitecourt about five years later. On the second day out here in Merritt this year I planted 3000 trees in the furrows, priced at 13 cents per tree. It's good pay for good work, once you get the hang of it.

Now the greeners are out there figuring it out stroke by stroke, how to read the ground, find the plantable spots, identify the good naturals and space off of them, and of course how to get those trees into the ground quickly, while still maintaining quality. Some of them pick it up easily, a few of them planting 700-800 already on their second day. For the others who are still struggling with it, I remind them of how I started out, and show them the techniques again.

Now it's late, most of the camp is already in bed, and my truck is loaded with boxes of fir and pine trees, ready for the drive to work in the morning. Tomorrow training is officially ended and the rookies will be integrated into the crews of experienced planters, myself included. Give them water wings, teach them a few strokes, and get them to jump in the pool. Some will achieve fluid motion, while others will flounder. But you don't have to become a professional to appreciate the experience.

I'm having fun out here, I have to admit.

Relapse

2008-05-06T05:03:00.000+01:00

May 5 2008

I'm sitting on the sidewalk outside the internet cafe in Merritt, BC. The place is closed, but its signal is still broadcasting and I have half an hour left on my laptop battery, so what the hell. Today was day one of my month-long mini-season and return to the treeplanting life. The camp is in a great location, normally the campground of the Merritt Mountain Music Festival, now dormant save the planters who just moved in. My tent is on a sandbar a stone's throw from the bank of the river. In my mind there is no better sound to fall asleep to, but the days are not quite so tranquil. Sweat and dirt and frozen ground that shovels cannot penetrate were the order of day one. Still, I managed to put in 1600 seedlings even working on three different blocks, and the nuances of the job have not escaped me in my four-year hiatus. What has escaped me is my physical fitness, ouch.

I always had a bad habit of planting on auto-pilot while letting my mind wander, reciting or composing lyrics in my head or playing out scenarios, daydreams, plots and schemes. Today I practiced focusing on my breathing and on the motions required to put each tree into the ground with minimum effort. I recently finished reading Eckhart Tolle's "A New Earth", which was sometimes irritatingly nebulous, but it also contained some truly useful tips and techniques for focusing and being present, even with difficult experiences.

It's also hard not to drift into the future. At the end of May I'll fly this coop and proceed directly to the Sunrise Celebration in Western England. The plane will land at Heathrow at 6 a.m., and I'll make my way to Somerset directly, where I'm performing with Mud Sun (for the first time!) that same night.

For now though, my ride is leaving shortly to take me back to camp, and tomorrow we have a massive gravy block, all furrows (some still frozen). From the cool breezes of Merritt at night, salut.

Back to the Bush

2008-05-02T07:37:00.001+01:00

May 1 2008

The day after tomorrow I'll be loading my things into a crewcab truck and driving to Merritt, B.C. to go treeplanting for the month of May. Except for a few short visits of a few days, I haven't been treeplanting since 2003, but before that it was my summer job, the perfect counterpoint to the life of a full-time student. Every spring was the same, finishing up exams and essays in April, packing my things into a truck, and driving into the mountains for a summer of living in a tent and working the land. Sounds romantic doesn't it? Well, it definitely has its moments, but they are mingled amongst the aches and pains and generally grueling physical work. Hmm, my duality is revealed. Last time I treeplanted a full season in 2003 I remember feeling like I had to escape the job or I would be ground down completely by it. I planted for ten years, starting when I was 15, and I loved the job unconditionally for most of my tenure. It was just in the last year or two that I started feeling strongly like I had to get out of it.

But over the past four and half years since my early retirement from the planting scene, I've come to romanticize it more and more, remembering the freedom of leaving the city swarm behind and experiencing the wilderness as a daily presence, not just a weekend poultice. Also, the hurt subsides once the body has acclimatized, and as a lifestyle it has a lot to recommend it, good food, good pay, good people, good karma, good times, and best of all, no stress. In camp, you're responsibilities are clear day by day, working hard and getting along with your co-workers, but there isn't room for a mess of distractions under those conditions. I've been self-employed since 2004 and I don't think I've rested my mind for more than a day or two since taking that leap into the abyss, boarding that raft off the island, or whatever metaphor you prefer.

This year my brother graduated to a full-blown supervisor and got his own contract, and he's been filling his crew list with some pretty special, creative people. I couldn't resist, nor could I afford to. Performing rap and selling CDs and books has been my sole source of income for over four years now, but it's a boom and bust existence, and times are lean, especially in the winter, and in this city. At the end of May I'm heading back over to England for another tour, and I need a cash infusion to get me there. So my mission is clear for the coming month, plant hard, return my mindstate to a liberated existence as opposed to a harrowed one, and emerge ready to bring that energy to the stage. Oh yes, and don't forget to bring back some good stories to tell.