Baba Brinkman

Dirk Murray Brinkman (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.

Baba Brinkman
Baba Brinkman performing at the CUSP Conference, 2010, Chicago, IL
Born
Dirk Murray Brinkman

(1978-10-22) October 22, 1978
Riondel, British Columbia, Canada
Other namesBaba Brinkman
Spouse(s)Heather Berlin
FamilyJoyce Murray (mother)
Musical career
OriginVancouver, British Columbia, Canada
GenresCanadian hip hop
Occupation(s)
Years active2004–present
Websitebababrinkman.com

Early life and education

Born in the remote community of Riondel, British Columbia, in a log cabin built by his parents,[1] 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 the world's only private company responsible for planting more than one billion trees.[2] Dirk Sr gave Brinkman the honorific nickname "Baba" at birth, because of his son's contemplative, Buddha-like expression.[3] Brinkman's childhood was divided between Vancouver and the Kootenay region of British Columbia.[4]

Brinkman spent his early summers in remote tree planting camps, and began planting trees himself at the age of 15.[5] He worked for his parents' business, Brinkman & Associates Reforestation, for twelve seasons in British Columbia and Alberta, personally planting more than one million trees.[6] 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[7] and wrote his thesis comparing modern Hip hop freestyle battling with The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.[8]

Career

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.[9][10] 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.[11] The Rap Canterbury Tales was published as an illustrated paperback by Talon Books in 2006.[12]

Brinkman's 2010 follow-up show, Rapconteur, premiered at the Edinburgh Free Fringe and featured hip hop adaptations of Beowulf, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Finnish Kalevala.[13][14][15]

In 2011, Brinkman premiered The Canterbury Tales Remixed at the Soho Playhouse in New York City.[16] The show combined material from Rapconteur with new adaptations of The Merchant's Tale, The Pardoner's Tale, and The Wife of Bath's Tale and was released as a full-length album in 2012.[17]

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.[18]

Science rap

In 2008, Brinkman was commissioned to write a new rap show about evolution by Mark Pallen, 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.[19] Because the lyrics were fact-checked for scientific accuracy, Pallen calls it "the first peer-reviewed rap".[1] 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.[20] 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.[21] The Rap Guide to Evolution completed a five-month Off-Broadway theatre run in November 2011,[22] for which Brinkman received a 2012 Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Solo Performance, losing to Irish actor Cillian Murphy.[23]

Brinkman has performed selections from The Rap Guide to Evolution on The Rachel Maddow Show[24] and at the Seattle Science Festival, sharing the stage with Jurassic Park palaeontologist Jack Horner and British physicist Stephen Hawking.[25]

In 2010 Brinkman produced a Rationalist Anthem called Off That, attacking various forms of pseudoscience. The song was inspired by the Jay Z track of the same name, which is featured on The Blueprint 3 album. The video for Brinkman's unauthorized remix was released as part of an online science music festival called Geek Pop[26] and was popular with atheist blogs.[27][28]

Brinkman followed up his Darwin tribute with a sequel show specifically about evolutionary psychology, The Rap Guide to Human Nature, which premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2010.[29] The album features peer review phone messages from David Buss, Olivia Judson, and David Sloan Wilson commenting on the science content in Brinkman's lyrics.[30] In 2012 Human Nature was adapted into a theatre production, Ingenious Nature, which ran off-Broadway from November 2012 through January 2013.[31]

In March 2012, Brinkman was announced as a songwriter-in-residence at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) and spent a month at the University of Tennessee Knoxville as a guest of the Institute, along with DJ and music producer Jamie Simmonds.[32] Brinkman later released "The Infomatic EP," a collection of hip-hop songs inspired by computational biology.[33]

Brinkman's next play, Rap Guide to Religion, premiered at the 2014 Edinburgh Fringe,[34] before transferring to the Soho Playhouse for an off-Broadway run in October 2014. The production ran for seven months and was a Time Out New York[35] and New York Times Critics' Pick, as well as receiving a 2015 Drama Desk Award nomination in the category "Unique Theatrical Experience".[36] The show explores theories from the cognitive science of religion and promotes religious naturalism, prompting American Humanist Association magazine to refer to Brinkman as "atheism's best salesman".[37]

In 2015, Brinkman was commissioned by Arizona State University and Randolph M. Nesse to write and produce an album entitled The Rap Guide to Medicine, which communicates themes from evolutionary medicine. Nesse said of the finished project: "This is amazing. I won't need to teach my course, I'll just have students listen to the album!"[38] The album includes songs about Mendelian disease, parasitology, somatic evolution in cancer, mismatch theory, and senescence.[39]

In 2014 and 2016, Brinkman attended the Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson, AZ, performing a Rap Up or daily rap summary of the conference talks on Neuroscience and Philosophy of Mind.[40] Computational neuroscientist Anil Seth saw Brinkman's performances and proposed they collaborate on a new show about the neuroscience of consciousness.[41] Brinkman premiered "Rap Guide to Consciousness" at the 2017 Brighton Fringe, Winnipeg Fringe and Edinburgh Fringe to critical acclaim.[42][43][44] The show explores several neurobiological theories of consciousness, including Global Workspace Theory, Integrated Information Theory, and predictive coding, as well as the Philosophical Zombie, Free Will, Materialism, and Memetics.[45]

Environment and ecology rap

Brinkman was commissioned by the WILD Foundation to produce The Rap Guide to Wilderness in 2014. The album was critically acclaimed and features songs about biodiversity, extinction, conservation, habitat loss and trophic cascade.[46][47][48][49][50]

In 2015 Brinkman's play Rap Guide to Climate Chaos premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe,[51][52][53] followed by performances at the COP21 United Nations Climate Change Conference.[54] "Climate Chaos" went on to play-off-Broadway for six months in 2016, and featured Michael E. Mann, Gavin Schmidt, Naomi Oreskes and Bill Nye as talkback speakers.[55][56] Bill Nye also features on the album version of "Climate Chaos", rapping the chorus of the track "What's Beef", which remixes a Notorious B.I.G. song to discuss climate change denial.[57] "Rap Guide to Climate Chaos" summarizes the science, politics, and economics of climate change and advocates for a global carbon tax as part of the solution.[58]

In 2016, after the election of Donald Trump, Brinkman worked with Gary Yohe at Wesleyan University, a senior contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and co-recipient along with Al Gore of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, to produce a new song and video entitled "Erosion", summarizing data from the National Climate Assessment on the US-based physical impacts of climate change.[59][60]

Science comedy

Brinkman and his wife, the neuroscientist Dr. Heather Berlin, co-wrote and performed in a science comedy variety show entitled Off The Top at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2014, 2015, and 2017 about the neuroscience of improvisation and freestyle rap.[61][62][63] The Rap Guide to Evolution won the National Center for Science Education's 2013 Friend of Darwin Award.[64]

Controversy

Teachers have also expressed concern about Brinkman's use of strong language and anti-religious sentiments in his educational performances and videos.[65]

Brinkman himself has been described as an "evangelical atheist"[66] and has blogged about his encounters with creationists, both in educational settings[67] and within his own family.[68] He also performed in support of the Military Association of Atheists & Freethinkers Rock Beyond Belief concert alongside Richard Dawkins at Fort Bragg, NC in 2012.[69]

Ingenious Nature was reviewed unfavourably, and Brinkman received criticism for "singling out women in the audience, pointing at them, and rapping about their ovulation cycles," among other things.[70]

The song Tranquility Bank from The Rap Guide to Wilderness received a hostile response from some environmentalists because of its assertion that urban living is better for the environment than back-to-the-land movements.[71]

Theatre
  • 2004: The Rap Canterbury Tales
  • 2008: The Rebel Cell (co-written with Dizraeli)
  • 2009: The Rap Guide to Evolution
  • 2010: Rapconteur
  • 2010: The Rap Guide to Human Nature
  • 2011: The Canterbury Tales Remixed
  • 2012: Ingenious Nature
  • 2014: The Rap Guide to Religion
  • 2015: The Rap Guide to Climate Chaos
  • 2017: The Rap Guide to Consciousness

Discography
  • 2004: Swordplay
  • 2004: The Rap Canterbury Tales
  • 2005: Pandemonium
  • 2006: Lit-Hop
  • 2008: Mine the Gap (Mud Sun)
  • 2008: The Rebel Cell (Mud Sun)
  • 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
  • 2012: The Canterbury Tales Remixed
  • 2012: The Infomatic EP
  • 2014: The Rap Guide to Wilderness
  • 2015: The Rap Guide to Medicine
  • 2015: The Rap Guide to Religion
  • 2016: The Rap Guide to Climate Chaos
  • 2017: The Rap Guide to Consciousness
  • 2019: See From Space

Publications
  • The Rap Canterbury Tales, Talon Books 2006
  • The Speciation of Rap The Evolutionary Review, Volume 2, March 2011
  • Finding 'God' in the Female Orgasm The Evolutionary Review, Volume 3, May 2012
  • Darwin On The Mic Evolution, Volume 69, Issue 5[72]


Personal life

Brinkman is married to cognitive neuroscientist and television host Heather Berlin. They have a daughter, Hannah, born in 2013, and a son, Dylan, born in 2016.[73]

gollark: And even my bad phone has GPS accuracy to within a few metres, as far as I can tell.
gollark: In the olden days we had something called "micro-SD cards".
gollark: Doesn't that break things like receiving calls?
gollark: There's no "pretend", the percentage is kind of arbitrary.
gollark: And don't want to pay extra for the modern phone features I don't want or need.

References
  1. Overbye, Dennis (June 27, 2011). "Paying Homage to Darwin in an Unconventional Format: Rap" – via NYTimes.com.
  2. "The Walrus Article "The Money Tree"".
  3. "Skepchick Article "Interview with Baba Brinkman"". Archived from the original on September 18, 2011. Retrieved September 27, 2011.
  4. "PEOPLE: Meet Baba Brinkman, the peer-reviewed climate rapper". www.eenews.net.
  5. Mckenzie, Kevin Hinton & Ryan. "Vancouver Magazine". Vancouver Magazine.
  6. "Brinkman & Associates Millionaire's Circle". Archived from the original on December 1, 2017. Retrieved November 22, 2017.
  7. Birute Galdikas Twitter
  8. "Rap Canterbury Tales General Prologue" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on December 9, 2017. Retrieved September 27, 2011.
  9. Reviewer, Cameron Woodhead (October 4, 2007). "The Rap Canterbury Tales". The Age.
  10. "Yo, just call him Chaucer's homie". Los Angeles Times. December 25, 2006.
  11. "Chaucer's tales become rap songs". July 28, 2005 – via news.bbc.co.uk.
  12. "The Rap Canterbury Tales » Books » Talonbooks". talonbooks.com.
  13. "Scotsman Article "Rapconteur Review"" (PDF).
  14. "Rapconteur: 4 star review by Tony Challis". broadwaybaby.com.
  15. "Rapconteur | WhatsOnStage". www.whatsonstage.com.
  16. "The Canterbury Tales Remixed". www.backstage.com. December 5, 2011.
  17. "The Canterbury Tales Remixed Album Has Been Released". May 2, 2012.
  18. Wong, Jackie (March 1, 2007). "Listen to This!". The Tyee.
  19. "Rapping with Darwin and Dawkins". Origins. February 11, 2009.
  20. http://www.edinburgh-festivals.com/viewpreview.aspx?id=670
  21. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on August 31, 2017. Retrieved September 27, 2011.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  22. Rooney, David (November 6, 2011). "Rapping Your Mind-State Around Darwin" – via NYTimes.com.
  23. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on August 16, 2012. Retrieved September 7, 2012.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  24. "Friday, May 28th - Rachel Maddow show- NBCNews.com". www.nbcnews.com.
  26. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on March 4, 2016. Retrieved May 7, 2013.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  27. Atheist, Friendly. "Off That (the Rationalist Anthem)".
  28. "40YearOldAtheist.com is for sale (40 Year Old Atheist)". HugeDomains.com. Retrieved July 3, 2020.
  29. "The Rap Guide To Human Nature : Chortle : The UK Comedy Guide". www.chortle.co.uk.
  30. "The Rap Guide to Human Nature, by Baba Brinkman". Baba Brinkman.
  32. Crawley, Catherine. "NIMBioS Announces New Songwriter-in-Residence: Baba Brinkman | NIMBioS".
  33. "Baba Brinkman – BC's Raconteur | BC Musician Magazine BC Musician Magazine is a very different music & arts magazine. We have a cadre of volunteers around the province who help with story ideas, photography, album reviews, and magazine distribution". www.bcmusicianmag.com.
  34. "Theatre review: Baba Brinkman - The Rap Guide to Religion at Gilded Balloon". British Theatre Guide.
  35. "The Rap Guide to Religion | Theater in New York". Time Out New York.
  36. Gates, Anita (March 1, 2015). "Review: 'Rap Guide to Religion' Examines Why Humanity Created God" – via NYTimes.com.
  37. "Atheism's Best Salesman". TheHumanist.com. February 19, 2015.
  38. ASU Center for Evolution and Medicine Article “Peer Reviewed Rap”
  39. "Rap Guide to Medicine -".
  40. Johnson, George (May 16, 2016). "Science of Consciousness Conference Is Carnival of the Mind" – via NYTimes.com.
  41. Hakner, James. "Sussex neuroscientist works with rap artist to create "Rap Guide to Consciousness"". The University of Sussex.
  42. "Fringe interview: Baba Brinkman on the Canadian Fringe circuit". www.scotsman.com.
  43. "Baba Brinkman review: Brain-buzzing mix of comedy and neuroscience". Evening Standard. August 31, 2017.
  44. "Baba Brinkman's Rap Guide to Consciousness: 5 star review by Katie Rose". broadwaybaby.com.
  45. "The Rap Guide to Consciousness, by Baba Brinkman". Baba Brinkman.
  46. "The Rap Guide to Wilderness, by Baba Brinkman". Baba Brinkman.
  47. Hill, Melanie (November 25, 2014). "Rap Guide to Wilderness | WILD Foundation".
  48. "Review: The Rap Guide to Wilderness". Audubon. May 5, 2015.
  49. Editor, Mary Anna Rice, Assistant Opinion. "Album explores environmentalism and science". Technician.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)
  50. "Culture". Treehugger. January 1, 2010. Retrieved July 3, 2020.
  51. "The Stage "Climate Chaos" Review".
  52. Scotsman “Climate Chaos” Theatre Review
  53. "George Egg, Lou Sanders, Baba Brinkman: review - The Skinny". www.theskinny.co.uk.
  54. "Meet the Guy Raising Climate Change Awareness Through Hip Hop". January 7, 2016.
  55. "The Rap Guide To Climate Chaos". Popular Science.
  56. "Pataphysical Science: Q&A with Rap Artist Baba Brinkman". March 10, 2016.
  57. XXL Magazine “Bill Nye the Science Guy Raps on Baba Brinkman’s ‘What’s Beef’”
  58. Williams, Casey (April 22, 2016). "This Guy Raps About Climate Change, And Bill Nye Loves Him". HuffPost.
  59. "Yohe Brings "Rap Guide to Climate Chaos" to Campus".
  60. Miranda, Miguel (February 8, 2017). "This Canadian Rapper Schooled Trump on Climate Science". Medium.
  61. "Baba Brinkman and Heather Berlin: Off The Top". August 18, 2015.
  63. "Off the Top: 4 star review by Rose Collard". broadwaybaby.com.
  64. "Rap Artist, Education Advisor Extraordinaire, Master Scientist-Communicator honored by NCSE | National Center for Science Education". ncse.ngo.
  65. "Response to a Concerned Teacher's Comment | The Rap Guide to Evolution".
  67. Brinkman, Baba (April 24, 2012). "Tennessee Monkey Trials".
  68. Brinkman, Baba (July 11, 2012). "Communicating Evolution via Creationist Cousins".
  70. "'Ingenious Nature' Is Too Scientific". www.backstage.com. December 6, 2012.
  71. "Baba Brinkman Offends Some People with The Rap Guide To Wilderness". www.samaritanmag.com.
  72. Brinkman, Baba (2015). "Darwin on the Mic". Evolution. 69 (5): 1355–1357. doi:10.1111/evo.12657. ISSN 0014-3820.
  73. "Rap Scholar". Orlando Magazine. April 24, 2015. Retrieved July 3, 2020.
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