Baba Brinkman was born in B.C.’s West Kootenays, and grew up mostly in Vancouver. He was raised in the midst of the province’s tree-planting sub-culture, which was founded in the 1970s by his parents and their friends, and Baba himself planted trees for ten years, from the age of 15-24, personally sowing over one million seedlings. The views and values of this culture: tribal, environmentally conscious, self-reliant, and pro-active, all continue to inform his life and art.
In his youth Baba Brinkman was an avid writer and poet, and a fan of hip-hop music since eleven years old. In 1998 he began writing and performing his own original hip-hop lyrics and practicing freestyle rap, intent on mastering the craft of the MC. Since he was midway through a B.A. in English at SFU, Baba found ways of merging his dedication to hip-hop with his studies, and in the spring of 2000 he wrote his undergraduate thesis comparing freestyle battles to Chaucer’s storytelling competition in The Canterbury Tales. After graduating with an honours degree at the age of 21, Baba traveled at his own expense to England to perform his first hip-hop adaptation of Chaucer at the Canterbury Festival 2000, and returned the following fall to begin a Master’s in English at the University of Victoria. For his M.A. thesis, Baba further researched connections between hip-hop culture and English literature, and continued to adapt more of The Canterbury Tales into his own rap storytelling style.
With a Master’s in Medieval Literature and extensive battling and performing experience as a rap artist, Baba Brinkman launched his professional entertainment career at the age of 24, performing his one-man hip-hop theatre show “The Rap Canterbury Tales” at the Vancouver Fringe Festival in the fall of 2003. Since then he has been making his living independently from performances and record sales.
In the spring of 2004 Baba founded his company, Babasword Productions, and self-financed his debut full-length hip-hop album “Swordplay” before embarking on a self-produced world Fringe Festival tour with “The Rap Canterbury Tales.” Between May and September 2004 he performed his one-man show at festivals in Brighton, Prague, Montreal, Toronto, Edinburgh, Victoria, and San Francisco. Baba was also featured as a performer and presenter at the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation’s 2004 “Think Again” conference in Ottawa in September, which featured innovative scholars from across the nation presenting their ideas to Canada’s brightest young minds. The pinnacle of this tour was the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August, the largest arts festival in the world, where “The Rap Canterbury Tales” sold out the majority of its 33 performances over a three week run. The show was nominated for a Tap Water Award for Theatrical Excellence and also received a coveted five-star review from The Scotsman, one of only nine shows to be awarded this honour out of hundreds competing. Baba has no formal acting training.
Following his success in Edinburgh, Baba Brinkman returned to Vancouver to record and independently release his second full-length LP in one year: “The Rap Canterbury Tales”, produced by Lin Gardiner. The album’s release attracted national media attention in Canada, and Baba’s success in Edinburgh prompted the UK’s prestigious Cambridge University English Department to sponsor him on a tour of secondary schools. In the spring and summer of 2005, this sponsorship allowed Baba to perform his show and teach creative writing workshops on rap storytelling in over 30 high schools around the UK, introducing students to Chaucer through the medium of hip-hop culture. Following this tour he returned to the Edinburgh Festival in August for another successful run.
In the fall of 2005 Baba Brinkman was a featured performance poet at the Vancouver, Calgary, Banff, and Edmonton Writer’s Festivals, where he shared the stage with the likes of bill bissett, Shane Koyczan, Ivan E. Coyote, and Sherri D. Wilson. Baba was also offered a publishing contract from Vancouver’s Talon Books in July of 2005, and through the fall and winter of 2005/2006 he compiled and edited his “Rap Canterbury Tales” into a full-length manuscript, illustrated by his brother, Erik, a former graffiti artist.
Most recently, Baba Brinkman completed his third full-length LP, “Lit-Hop”, featuring ten songs produced and recorded while on tour in the UK, as well as collaborations with Canadian artists. The album features Vancouver hip-hop stars Josh Martinez and Moka Only, and up-and-coming UK MC Dizraeli. This album represents a rare collaboration between Canadian and UK hip-hop culture, another way in which Baba is forging new ground in the genre. “Lit-Hop” was released to coincide with the publication of “The Rap Canterbury Tales” by Talon Books, which was also launched in September of 2006.
To date, Baba Brinkman has been featured in the national media in Canada, the UK, Australia, and the US, including full and half-page articles in The Globe and Mail, The Times (UK), and The Independent (UK). His creative projects have been featured in stories broadcast nationally and internationally on CBC, NPR, ABC, and BBC Radio, including a broadcast on BBC World Service in July 2005 that reached over fifteen million listeners. He produces the annual “Rap is Poetry” concert in Vancouver each Spring, an event that features the conscious side of Vancouver’s underground hip-hop scene, and in 2005 he produced the first “Rap is Poetry Brighton” event for the Brighton Hip Hop Festival in the UK. Through his touring and other activities he has sold thousands of copies of “Swordplay” and “The Rap Canterbury Tales,” and has performed professionally in hundreds of clubs, theatres, libraries, and schools around the world. When he is not on tour he resides in Vancouver, Canada, with his brother.