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Listening to Baba Brinkman’s tracks it becomes immediately obvious that this guy has a rather unorthodox approach to rapping.
Take his new record as an example, “Tranquility Bank” ft. Aaron Nazru’ from the new collection The Rap Guide to Wilderness.
It is a combining of hip-hop rap with an awareness of biodiversity, celebrating wild nature and the many contributions it offers to human wellbeing. And it’s good. It’s really good.
This isn’t an usual topic for the Canadian born rapper to write about. Most of his tracks will be on subjects mostly unheard of in hip-hop tracks. No bitches to be shouted about and no drugs for the taking.
After premiering in 2004 at The Edinburgh Fringe with his one man show The Rap Canterbury Tales, a collection of tracks based on Chaucer’s Canterbury tales remixed for a modern audience, this rap career took off and has numerous rap albums and performances to his name.
Several writings have been the subject of his rhymes. Beowolf is another literary great to be written in rap.
This unique merging of Literature and hip-hop has led to a renaming of the genre to ‘Lit Hop’, also the name of his 2006 rap album.
Not just a literature buff, despite his impressive academic history – he has both a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Master of Art’s degree with Literature subjects – Baba also tackles science in his unusual rapping style.
Evolution and a hip-hop homage to Charles Darwin are revised in The Rap Guide to Evolution after a commission by Warwick University, which even went on to win the highly illustrious ‘Scotsman Fringe First Award’.
Told you he was good.
This new track is born from a project working with ‘The WILD Foundation’ and is described as a ‘thought-provoking hip-hop celebration of nature’.
Baba himself, while working for Brinkman & Associates Reforestation partook in a serious nature restoration and planted over a million trees with his own hands before his rap career.
A rap collection honouring nature was bound to come along at some point.
Available from December 16th and with an album of tracks dedicated to a passion, with half the proceedings going to WILD’s conservation projects, the one thing this collection won’t lack is heart and no doubt a future flurry of notable awards and success.
For more information, find Baba at his website http://www.bababrinkman.com/ and follow him on Twitter via @BabaBrinkman.