Biography Wikipedia
Wikipedia:
"Baba" Dirk Murray Brinkman Jr (born October 22, 1978) is a Canadian rapper and playwright best known for recordings and performances that combine hip hop music with literature, theatre and science.
Biography
Born in the remote community of Riondel, British Columbia, in a log cabin built by his parents, Brinkman is the eldest of three children of Joyce Murray, a Member of the Parliament of Canada, and Dirk Brinkman Sr, who is notable for having founded a company responsible for planting one billion trees. Dirk Sr gave Brinkman the honorific nickname "Baba" at birth, because of his son's contemplative, Buddha-like expression. Brinkman's childhood was divided between Vancouver and the Kootenay region of British Columbia. He attended Crawford Bay School and Relevant High, a democratic school.
Brinkman spent his early summers in remote tree planting camps,, and began planting trees himself at the age of 15. He worked for his parents' business, Brinkman & Associates Reforestation, for twelve seasons in British Columbia and Alberta, personally planting more than one million trees. During this period he also earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature from Simon Fraser University and a Master of Arts degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Victoria, Canada. He studied human evolution and primatology with the orangutan researcher Biruté Galdikas and wrote his thesis comparing modern Hip hop freestyle battling with The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.
Literature Rap
Brinkman first gained widespread media attention for his one-man show "The Rap Canterbury Tales", devised as a means of re-telling Chaucer's iconic stories for a modern audience. The show premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2004, and the following year Brinkman was sponsored by Cambridge University to perform the show in British secondary schools. The Rap Canterbury Tales was published as an illustrated paperback by Talon Books in 2006.
Brinkman's 2010 follow-up show, Rapconteur, premiered at the Edinburgh Free Fringe and features hip hop adaptations of Beowulf, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Finnish Kalevala. Because of his interest in merging hip hop and classic literature, Brinkman has referred to his style of rap as "Lit hop", which was also the title of his 2006 solo rap album.
Science Rap
In 2008, Brinkman was commissioned to write a new rap show about evolution by Professor Mark Pallen, a Birmingham University microbiologist and author of The Rough Guide to Evolution. The result was "The Rap Guide to Evolution," a hip hop homage to Charles Darwin which Brinkman first performed in Britain for the Darwin bicentennial in February 2009. Because the lyrics were fact-checked for scientific accuracy, Professor. Pallen calls it "the first peer-reviewed rap". Brinkman cites Richard Dawkins, David Sloan Wilson, Jared Diamond, Geoffrey Miller, and E. O. Wilson as his influences in writing the show.
The Rap Guide to Evolution premiered at the 2009 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, winning a Fringe First Award from The Scotsman for best new theatre writing. In 2010 the UK's largest biomedical charity, the Wellcome Trust, provided grant funding for Brinkman to make a series of educational music videos based on the show, as a resource for biology teachers. The Rap Guide to Evolution began an Off-Broadway run in New York City in June 2011.
Brinkman followed up his Darwin-tribute with a sequel show specifically about evolutionary psychology, The Rap Guide to Human Nature, which also premiered at the Fringe in 2010.
Controversy
The Rap Guide to Evolution has been viewed unfavourably for a variety of reasons. A science writer for The Scientist Magazine called the project "misguided" and accused Brinkman of "if not misogyny, then at least sexism" for his use of "scantily clad women" in the Wellcome Trust music videos.
When asked what other subjects he intends to explore through rap, Brinkman responded: "Global warming, health care policy, religion, gender politics. As long as it’s controversial I’m interested."
Works
Theatre
2004: The Rap Canterbury Tales
2008: The Rebel Cell (co-written with MC Dizraeli)
2009: The Rap Guide to Evolution
2010: Rapconteur
2010: The Rap Guide to Human Nature
Discography
2004: Swordplay
2004: The Rap Canterbury Tales
2005: Pandemonium
2006: Lit-Hop
2009: The Rap Guide to Evolution
2009: Apocalyptic Utopian Dreams in the Western Wilderness
2010: Rapconteur
2010: The Rap Guide to Human Nature
2011: The Rap Guide to Evolution: Revised
2011: The Rap Guide to Business
Writings
The Rap Canterbury Tales, Talon Books 2006
"The Speciation of Rap" The Evolutionary Review, Volume 2, March 2011