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