Rebel Cell

Visit Swanktrendz

Visit Baba at

>Hello People,

Thanks for all the great feedback on my Fly on the Wall episode, and now this one is about the next chapter. In three days Dizraeli and I will perform our first show at the Edinburgh Fringe, the World Premier of The Rebel Cell. Exactly four years ago I premiered The Rap Canterbury Tales here and the reverberations are still being felt, not the least by me.

Well, The Rebel Cell, in my humble opinion, is better - it's funnier, crisper, more topical, and in many ways a perfect inheritor to the Lit-Hop mission I began with the Tales, although its content is more Orwellian than Chaucerian. I sincerely hope the reverberations of this project go even further; although, tragically, not everyone can make it to the Fringe!

Never fear. Just like with the Tales, we've recorded The Rebel Cell as a full-length rap storytelling album, and it is now available for free download from my website. Free?!? Yes, that seems to be the nature of the beast these days. Everyone with a bit of web savvy will be able to get it for free soon anyway, so why not follow in the footsteps of Radiohead and beat them to the punch? At least that way we can raise the buzz to a fever pitch and hopefully have a successful run at the world's biggest arts festival. So please, tell your friends!

Of course, if you want to order a physical CD in the mail that's still an option, and if you want to support us there is also the option to donate £5 ($10) to the cause of a couple of recording artists doing good things, but either way you can start listening to The Rebel Cell... right now, no strings attached.

Okay, that's all.

All the best from the 'burgh,

Baba

Read a review of Rebel Cell.

Tawdry Travelogues By: Baba Brinkman

Visit Baba Brinkman’s Site

Visit Baba Brinkman’s Site

Visit Swanktrendz's Home Page

Attention Seekers,

Name-dropping is so tawdry, but so are most things that instantly capture our complete attention. Twenty minutes ago I bid goodnight to my dinner companions, a group of five including the legendary English actor and playwright Steven Berkoff, theatre dynamo and James Bond villain extraordinaire. Steven regaled us with tales of theatre productions in the 60's when he shared the stage with a 24 year old Ian McKellan, and I reciprocated with a command performance of The Wife of Bath's Tale. It turns out he's also directing a play at the Pleasance Dome in Edinburgh this year, so we'll soon be sharing a venue. When I told him that we'd be performing 27 consecutive shows in Edinburgh, he retorted: “I have a tour of Australia coming up in September with 36 consecutive performances, two hours per night!" Nothing like a little healthy competition among playwrights...

If you don't know who Steven Berkoff is, then you've never seen Beverly Hills Cop. Check him out:

I'm writing from the Lowdham Book Festival in Nottinghamshire, where I have three days of performances and workshops in schools to keep me busy. Today I performed The Rap Canterbury Tales in five consecutive one-hour sessions starting at 9 a.m., for groups of students ranging in age from 11 to 18.

Ouch, I can hear some of you wincing. Cool, I can hear others enthusing. Yeah, a bit of both, I concede. On the one hand, it leaves me completely wiped out, rapping for hours on end, repeating the same stories. On the other hand, every new audience brings new appreciation, and I get $1000 a day when I'm gigging. The only thing more tawdry than name-dropping is talking about how much money you're making, ugh. Whatever. Independently mounting a full production at the Edinburgh Fringe is an expensive endeavor, and this is how I'm financing it. Speaking of which, Dizraeli and I finished writing the script for the Rebel Cell the other day and have done a few test runs, smoothing out the kinks. We're also pressing ahead with the album version of the show, and we'll have advance copies ready in time for the Fringe, barring any unforeseen disasters. We recently completed the first track, The Fallout, during which we break up like the Fugees in true dramatic fashion. The preview is now on myspace if you want to give it a listen.

Last week I was in Stoke-on-Trent, (which the locals call Choke-on-Stench), an industrial town not far from here that couldn't be more different (Lowdham's demographic is more than 70% millionaires, according the cab driver).

I spent three days performing at Staffordshire schools and teaching workshops to kids who definitely don't see outsiders much, lovely as they were. Some of them came up with very clever raps. Most bemusing was the fact that they mistook me for a celeb and had me signing dozens of autographs, which they seemed to think might be worth money someday. But I can't imagine even Eminem's autograph is worth anything on a scrap of paper (autographed large glossy photos go for about $5 on Ebay). If it were otherwise, he could just stay home scribbling his name all day instead of making records. Of course, no one is a celebrity until/unless people mistake him/her for one!

Hold me back. In two days I depart for the notorious Glastonbury Festival, headlined by Jay-Z, Amy Winehouse, and Leonard Cohen. I'm performing on three different stages over the course of the weekend; a mixed bag including both hip-hop gigs with Mud Sun Image from pleasancepages.co.uk :

and solo spoken-word gigs. I've heard the Glastonbury legends for years and I'm finally going to see for myself, and under the exact circumstances, which I had most hoped for.

After just over three weeks in England the cuts and scrapes on my limbs from a month of tree planting have finally healed and I've completed my seasonal metamorphosis from a beast of burden into a purveyor of linguistic animal magic.

If you're curious about what our new Edinburgh show is going to be like, take a moment to read some press on The Rebel Cellat Rebel Cell Press:

During the current run and lead up to the Fringe, (...under a month left to go...) is that time when the publicity drive kicks into gear, so any press contacts or suggestions for getting the word out are always appreciated.

Wish me luck at the mother of all music festivals!

baba

Any Middle and high Schools interested in booking Baba Brinkman for a performance/ assembly, please contact Baba through his website.

Freestyling the Fringe By: Baba Brinkman

Visit Swanktrendz’s home Site

Well-Adjusted Citizens,

Today is the last day of the Edinburgh Fringe (nicely planned, I know), and tonight I will play my last of 24 consecutive shows, followed by a post-partum rest. A few hours ago I was on a different kind of stage, being presented with an impressively titled Three Weeks Editor's Choice Award including a photo and framed plaque. The biggest festival reviewing newspaper Three Weeks chooses the ten events, shows, or performers that made the fringe special each year, and this year I was one. Being selected as one special thing out of ten may not seem like a great honour, but there are over two thousand shows competing for attention at the Fringe this year.

Here is the Three Weeks review that led to the Award.

I have been rubbish (UK-ism) at keeping up with email during this festival, due to the constant welcome distractions provided. Our daily routine for the past month has been to wake up each day at around noon (or sometimes 3 pm, depending on the night before), and proceed to the local coffee shop for beverages, internet, and breakfast (I'm here right now, 4:30 pm, right on schedule). Then we prepare and hand out flyers for a few hours each afternoon, and get ready for our shows. Aaron has had about a dozen gigs at various times over the past three weeks, some at theatres and some at bars and cafés, and I have been performing The Rap Canterbury Tales every night at 8:45. When the shows are all finished around 10 pm we head out on the town for the smorgasbord of cabaret, dancing, theatre, live music, comedy, and nightclubs that are available around the city until 5 am every night, often ushering in the dawn as we walk home, and the next day we do it all again. In the (purloined) words of Jay-Z, it's a hard knock life for us.

How can I still be having fun doing the same thing I was doing three years ago? Well, this year I changed up my strategy and starting working more and more improvisation into my act, turning it into a spontaneous comedy play. For me, this has been the Freestyle Fringe. In the first week of the festival, Erik challenged me to experiment with the script every day (he said he'd die of boredom tech-ing the same exact show twenty four more times), so I have been doing my best to surprise him with new twists and improv dialogue in each show. We have also included a segment where the audience fills out short surveys in the lobby before the show, writing down phrases and words that they associate with rap and Chaucer. Then, at the end of the show, Erik projects the responses onto a screen on stage, and I extemporize everyone's ideas into a live freestyle rap as an epilogue.

The reputation I got for doing this freestyle outro in the show quickly spread to the official Fringe radio station, Festival FM, and on the fourth day of the festival they brought me in for an interview and got me to freestyle live on air. It went so well that they offered me a regular slot reading the nightly 8 o'clock news as a freestyle rap. So for the past three weeks I have stopped in at the radio station on my way to perform every evening, and they have prepared a list of the day's headlines, finding the quirkiest and most bizarre items of news to try to challenge me. Then they hand me the list of headlines and with no rehearsal or preparation I put them into rhyme live on air. This regular stunt has earned me a cult following with the festival media people, and we even brought the camera in to film one of the news sessions. You can watch the YouTube video here:

The result of all this experimentation and creative development, I'm happy to announce, has been a critical smash at this year's fringe. I was reviewed five times by various papers and websites and never got less than four stars out of five, with one five star review and two Critic's Choice picks. For those of you who are currently feeling nauseated by all this saccharine positivism, you will surely appreciate the final words of the Three Weeks review: if he wasn't so likeable, he'd be almost sickening. Erik takes issue almost every day with this affront, especially when I get on his case... "’likeable? ha!’

Here's some more of what the critics are saying:

Fest Review:

Review

FringeReview.com Review:

In a few days I'm on my way back down to Brighton and London to do some more recording with my UK hip-hop affiliates, then to Brisbane, Australia on September 6th. The Brisbane Writer's Festival has organized a writer's retreat for the week preceding their events. This entails flying all of the featured writer's to an island off the coast, where we will be put up in cabins and left to our own devices for four days in the middle of a national park. Fringe benefits.

Hope you have all had a similarly spectacular summer, and wish me luck on the hard road ahead.

baba

Image from babsword.com