A smash hit at the Edinburgh Festival, off Broadway and around the world, Canadian Baba Brinkman’s The Rap Guide to Evolution, complete with a live DJ and an extraordinary audio-visual show, is at once provocative, hilarious, intelligent and scientifically accurate.
In a novel species of theatre show, Brinkman combines the wit, poetry and charisma of a great rapper with the accuracy and rigour of a scientific expert. Using hip-hop as a vehicle to communicate the facts of evolution he simultaneously illuminates the origins and complexities of hip-hop culture through the lens of Darwinism. Through his clever reworkings of popular rap singles, as well as his own originals, he illustrates Natural Selection, Sexual Selection, Evolutionary Psychology and much more.
Brinkman undertook the project at the suggestion of the University of Warwick’s (UK) Dr Mark Pallen, author of The Rough Guide to Evolution. After seeing Brinkman’s internationally acclaimed Rap Canterbury Tales, Dr Pallen challenged the polymath rapper to “do for Darwin what he had done for Chaucer”. To ensure scientific and historical accuracy, Brinkman consulted Pallen throughout the creative process, making The Rap Guide to Evolution the first ever peer-reviewed hip-hop show.
Baba Brinkman is a Canadian rap artist, writer and scholar with a Masters in Medieval and renaissance English Literature. His thesis drew parallels between the worlds of hip-hop and literary poetry. Graduating in 2003, Baba began his career as a rap troubadour. To date baba has written or co-written five hip-hop theatre shows, including The Rap Canterbury Tales, The Rap Guide to Evolution and The Rebel Cell with MC Dizraeli.
Baba is also the founder of Lit Fuse Records, which represents Aaron Nazrul, Smoky Tiger and Mud Sun, as well as his own music. Besides executive producing and developing new talent, Baba has released seven solo albums since 2004.
