June 5 2005
Tender
Crustaceans,
Well, I'm still here. In Brighton that is. This town has been showing me real love in many ways and as a result I find myself wanting to be around here more and more. It has now been exactly two weeks since I finished my Rap Canterbury Tales run at the Brighton Festival. The shows were well-attended, though not sold out, and the run was a success financially and otherwise. I was even nominated for two awards, "Best International Act" and "Best Fringe Personality", neither of which I won.
In the past two
weeks I have been chillin' in hiphop mode, making new songs and taking in
multiple shows, including DJ Jazzy Jeff and Grandmaster Melle Mel, as well as a
showcase of Brighton acts, one of which was Menagerie, who are my hosts
here. One of the reasons I am so
into this town is the hiphop talent here, which I have somehow managed to tap
into. I am staying with Tom
Caruana, who is one of the producers for Menagerie, and he and I are working on
a recording of my "Drop-Out-Cast" rhyme, with tempos that speed up a
la Cut Chemist vs. Blackalicious collabos. I also have a half-dozen other songs on the go with other
producers and rappers here, as I find myself in demand lately as a guest
vocalist on Brighton tracks. This
has given me the opportunity to advance my understanding of the indie music
scene here, and I have also been researching record labels in the UK and sending
my demo out to quite of few of them.
Towards that, I have decided to invite you all to download my demo for free. These are the four new tracks I made with Lin G over the months before my departure, which together form the EP "Pandemonium". I have built a secret page into my website, from which the full songs can be accessed. This will not be linked to the main site, which means its an exclusive offer to the people who get this email. I hope you take the time to listen to the tracks and (I shudder to say it) share them with friends online. I know that online music sharing has contributed to the current situation in the music industry where record labels are growing ever more cautious, spending their dwindling profits only on developing sure-shot artists, of which I am not one. I am also not usually into giving away music I paid money to make, but in this case I am simply excited about these new tracks and I want people to hear them now, not in some hypothetical future when I am a rap star. Whatever happens I'm sure I will not regret the giveaway.
Since the past
few weeks have been a bit of a lull in terms of performances, and have instead
been about recording new music and gong to see hiphop shows, I will make this
update a bit of a grab bag of interesting recent developments.
Mid-way through
my Rap Canterbury Tales run a couple weeks ago I suddenly got a flood of online
orders for Rap Canterbury Tales CDs from all over the US. This odd yankee behaviour was the
result of an interview I did back in April for a radio program in the States
called "To the Best of Our Knowledge", which runs nationwide on over
300 public stations, and they finally aired it. The program was a Chaucer special, featuring myself and
Terry Jones from Monty Python, who is a bit of a Chaucer nut himself. His most recent book is called
"Who Murdered Chaucer?", a historical mystery that I now fully intend
to read. You can listen to the
interview online at:
http://wpr.org/book/050515a.html
I also heard the fist techno remix of my music recently, a bouncy jungle version of "Induction" by a producer called INS from Prague. INS was the clerk at the Hostel I stayed at while performing at the Prague Fringe last summer, one of those random people I gave a "Swordplay" CD to impulsively along my travels. As it turns out, he put a great twist on the track and randomly sent it to me a few days ago. If any other producers out there would like to have a stab at remixing any of my music, feel free to send me a request.
I hate to mention
this next one because it's a big fat fishy story about the one that got away,
but I've decided to include it, only because it had me bouncing off the walls
for a few days. In the week before
I left for England I got an email from Dr. Sarah James at Cambridge (my
benevolent host professor) which read:
>I wanted to
run one thing by you. The Queen is coming to perform the
>official
opening of our office building on 8th June, and will be spending
>some time (a
whole 10 minutes) with our operation...
>At this stage
I can't confirm this; we have to get all our plans approved by
>the
powers-that-be, who may just get too freaked out by the idea of rapping
>in front of
HRH. But what do you think? How would you feel about
>rapping in
front of royalty? (You'd have to
learn to bow!)
Needless to say I
had nothing but enthusiasm for the idea, and the wheels were put in motion, but
unfortunately Sarah's intuition turned out to be right on that one. I learned recently that the proposal to
have me perform for the Queen was shot down by her palace handlers. I guess I'm not quite the right caliber
of minstrel yet, but I bet she would have loved The Wife of Bath's Tale. Who knows, maybe some day.
In a few days I
will be heading to Oxford for a gig with the Oxford Poetry Society, then
Cambridge has me visiting nine schools in five days the following week. In other words, the relaxing pace of
the past few weeks is about to evaporate, but for now I'm quite enjoying
it. A week ago I lay out in the
park shirtless for my first sunbathing of the summer and, failing to take the
English sun seriously, I managed to burn myself worse than ever in my
life. For the past few days I've
been peeling patches of dead skin off my back like a snake. I also managed to lose my voice this
week, luckily the one time I could get away with it. It was a combination of factors, mostly just going out too
much and hanging out in too many smoky bars, but it did remind me starkly of how completely I've come to rely
on my larynx for my livelihood.
It's mostly returned to me now, though, so there's no panic.
Finally, as a means
of plugging my hiphop-in-schools concept here in the UK I recently submitted a
short article to the National Literacy Trust newsletter, which was sent out to
2500 teachers around England. If
you're interested it can be read on their website at:
http://www.readon.org.uk/campaign/Rappers.html
All the best from
sunny Brighton, and more to come...
baba