BABA BRINKMAN
Baba Brinkman is a rap artist, science communicator, and award-winning playwright based in New York, NY. Best known for his “Rap Guide” series of science-themed plays and albums, Baba has toured the world and enjoyed successful runs at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and off-Broadway. The series so far includes rap guides to Evolution, Human Nature, Religion, Climate Change, Consciousness, and the brand-new Rap Guide to Culture.
In this interview, he discusses his beginnings rapping Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the origins of his science rap guides, how he chooses his topics, his approach to live performance, and more.
Interview by Megan Farrell
How do you explain to people what you do? When you created your thesis — a one man hip-hop production of The Canterbury Tales — did you ever think that years later it would have caught on and grown into an award winning collection?
I usually use examples from multiple genres like: if you cross Eminem with Neil deGrasse Tyson and add a bit of Nick Kroll, you get me. Sometimes I call my live shows science rap theater, or comedy science rap, or sometimes just “peer reviewed rap,” but to me it’s all hip-hop, just a natural outgrowth of what the culture and the genre always foreshadowed and seemed, at least to me, to point towards. Whether it’s KRS-One whose name stands for “knowledge reigns supreme over nearly everyone” or the classic rap claim to be “dropping science” or Tribe Called Quest releasing an album called Beats, Rhymes, and Life, it was a short leap to turn “life” into “life sciences,” and make “science" encompass the depth and breadth of actual research findings, and make “knowledge" literally be “the best of our knowledge” from a scientific perspective.
And yes, even when I started rapping Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as far back as 1999, I was naive enough to think this stuff was going to blow up and I would be at the forefront of it. In my head I was like “the future of hip-hop will be a Top 40 chart dominated by science and literature-themed rap songs!” Obviously I’ve had to manage expectations since then, since people like what they like and they don’t always like to be made to think all the time. But the fact of winning awards, traveling the world, and most importantly making a living from nothing but music and live shows since 2004, is a vindication of my early ambitions. I’ve never gone platinum with a release, but how many rappers can even say they’ve made a million dollars off of rap, never mind science rap? I can. The only caveat is that I made it over the past fifteen years and paid a mortgage and raised kids and covered production costs of new records with it. Making a million is easy. Saving it is hard.
You started creating “Lit-Hop” compositions that focused on classical and medieval tales like Beowulf. How did you transition from that to the Rap Guides you showcase now?
Rap adaptations of literature come more naturally to me since I have a masters in comparative lit. While I was in grad school I was making a study of thematic and stylistic parallels between hip-hop music and world oral poetic traditions, as well as written poetry traditions which pretty much go back to Gilgamesh and no further. In a way, I guess I got into science because I felt that was the story the world needed to hear, and also because I was recruited by scientists to help them explain complex topics. Each of my Rap Guide shows began with a scientist saying, “how about giving the rap treatment to this research field?” The first one, Rap Guide to Evolution, was literally conceived when a biologist who had seen my Canterbury Tales show reached out and asked me “could you do for Darwin what you did for Chaucer?” When I get an email like that, my immediate reaction is: “Oh, hell yes.” But then figuring out how is harder, since literature contains its own stories, whereas with science you have to find the characters and stories, or invent them yourself, to make it accessible.
Your informative hip-hop Rap Guides use the space of whole albums to explain one central theme. Where did you come up with this idea? How do you choose a subject for each new project?
Hip-hop culture has been full of “concept albums” and storytelling rap since way back, so as I say in one of my recent songs: “I took the concept of ‘concept rap’ and ran with it / take a topic, examine it / make it simultaneously crazy poppin’ and accurate / not immaculate / cognition is flawed, but hey, take a stab at it.” In a way I didn’t come up with the idea of doing deep dives into science topics as concept albums. That idea came from Dr. Mark Pallen, the biologist I mentioned above. He was organizing an event for Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday in 2009 and in the fall of 2008 he reached out and asked if I would write a show, or a series of songs, about Darwin’s theory of natural selection and how powerfully it explains life on earth, including animal and human behavior. So it was a commission, a job. Mark had funding from the British Council and offered to pay me to write the record and organize a tour. Not a lot, I think the fee was like £2,000 plus travel costs or something, but his pitch was: write this for me, do it at my event, and afterwards I’ll introduce you to lots of scientists and you can tour it all around the world. Seemed like a long shot but I decided to go for it, and he was even the one who suggested I title it “The Rap Guide to Evolution”. Well, based on how well received that project was, it didn’t take me long to realize I could make “Rap Guide” albums about a lot more science topics, like the Books for Dummies series but as a series of rap albums and shows. Basically that’s what I’ve spent the last decade working on, with six shows and eight albums and counting produced.
As for how I choose each next topic, I usually have four or five scientific topics I’m interested in, and I reach out to scientists in the field with queries like: “If I were to make a Rap Guide to X, would you want to work with me on it? Could you advise me on what to read, and what themes to cover? Would you consider programming it as entertainment at a conference or festival, or on campus for your colleagues and students? And most importantly, can you help me find grant money to support the production and writing process?" A lot of those queries end up going nowhere, but the ones that have come through have sewn the seeds for each of my projects, and six of these Rap Guide shows have now played off-Broadway in New York, where I’m currently the 2019 Artist in Residence at the Soho Playhouse.
What is the process of taking your album and making that into an off-Broadway level production? What is your main focus in these productions — what are the key elements you make sure transfer over and what elements are specific to each medium?
Sometimes I record the album first and then make a show out of it, but more often I write the theatrical production first and then adapt it into an album, and that process is very much in collaboration with Darren Lee Cole, the artistic director at the Soho Playhouse and the director of most of the Rap Guide productions. Each show usually starts with about six months of research, a careful reading of the ten or twelve most recent popular science books on the topic, plus dozens of articles in media and in peer-reviewed science journals, so I can get a solid grasp of both the science and the ways in which it is being debated in the wider society in terms of ethics, worries, hopes, fears — basically any locus where the science provokes powerful emotions that can be turned into songs and dramatic characters. The most important thing I want people to take away is a broad understanding of the state of human knowledge on the topic, but I also want them to appreciate why there’s a debate, what provokes it, and how we can think more clearly about the issues and use the science to increase compassion and solidarity around challenges facing humanity.
For the live shows, I can preface the songs with background material and comedy to make them more intelligible, but for the albums I want the songs to speak for themselves. Sometimes I do this by adding voice-over quotes from audio books or just monologue intros or outros that I write, but sometimes the song just says what it says. I also love collaborating with musicians and singers, since I’m no Drake. I end up with hooks on the album that are beautiful but are not melodies I can sing live without butchering them, so I have to rewrite the songs with simpler elements, often call-and-response elements, in place of the singing.
How long does it take you to research each theme? As you go in depth into these topics, are you already breaking it down into tracks as you learn, or does that come after the research?
Usually the research comes first, for about six months, and the writing of a first draft of a sixty minute show usually only takes me four to six weeks. But sometimes during the research I’ll come across an idea for a song that just seems to write itself since the research contains such an obvious hook or concept that it’s clear how I can link it with hip-hop or pop culture. Mostly it’s like sausage-making though, a long messy grind of a process that produces something tasty in the end.
You recently performed with Neil deGrasse Tyson, and you have worked with Deepak Chopra, David Chalmers and Jonathan Haidt. What is it like to perform for and in front of experts in the subject of your projects?
Frankly, working with some of my intellectual heroes has been one of the most surprising and thrilling aspects of this whole process. Sometimes I’ll be reading a book one week, totally in awe of the author’s intellect and vast knowledge, and within a few weeks I’ll write a song and email it to them and get a reply saying they love it and how can they help me promote the show. One of the latest examples was Daniel Dennett, whose books on consciousness from Consciousness Explained to Freedom Evolves to the latest From Bacteria to Bach and Back Again inform a lot of my thinking. He sat in the front row of a performance back in 2017 and now we’re friends, plus he’s helped promote my work to his followers.
You also write custom raps tailored to events in addition to your individual work. What kind of custom compositions have you created for these? At what kind of private events have you made an appearance?
I started writing and performing custom raps way back as early as 2005 as a bonus offering, so if I was at a conference or festival anyway for a performance I would talk to the organizers and offer to write a rap summary that references the other talks and perform it at the end of the day. I started calling this kind of performance a “Rap Up” (unavoidably) and lately I’ve been getting more and more work on the custom front. In terms of what kind of events, sometimes it’s technology or software conferences, sometimes it’s environmental conferences, sometimes academic meetings, sometimes TED Talks. I have a playlist on YouTube with a bunch of examples, but my favorite is probably my Rap Up of the World Parks Congress in Sydney, Australia, which I performed on the main stage in front of 5,000 government delegates from 120 countries in this huge airplane hanger space at the convention centre, with a group of aboriginal and Pacific Islander musicians accompanying me. The lyrics were written in the two hours prior to the performance and the whole thing was an unbelievable thrill, so whatever kind of rap career I imagined when I first got into this game, the chance to do performances like that are about as satisfying as I could hope for.
Check out Baba’s new album See From Space and view the video for his new single “Feelings for Reasons” below. Also check out more of his music and work on his site and Instagram.
Megan Farrell is a twenty-two year old writer and filmmaker who lives in New Jersey. She has recently graduated from the University of Alabama with a dual degree in Telecommunication/Film and Economics. In her spare time, Megan enjoys amateur photography and playing tennis.
