Brethren,
From a small B & B in the city of Leicester, England,
the hip-hop troubadour salutes you.
This life is glamorous indeed, especially in the absence of an entourage. Snoop Dogg and his crew of thirty
henchmen got in a brawl at Heathrow Airport a few weeks ago, because he
couldn't get them all into the First Class VIP lounge with his one First Class
ticket. I don't have that problem.
I flew to Belfast
a few weeks ago and performed some shows in the Cathedral Quarter Arts
Festival, made friends with a cabaret punk band from Boston called the Dresden
Dolls, and was generally well entertained by Northern Ireland's biggest arts
fest. I also competed and was a finalist in the annual Belfast Poetry Cup, but
lost to a sexy Jill-Scott-style Irish mama with an afro and a honey
tongue. A former IRA soldier with
an armful of bullet wounds gave me a guided tour of the trouble zones on the
way to the airport, and it seems like now the city is moving swiftly from war
zone to tourist mecca and culture centre.
Murals and forbidding barbed wire fences still serve as reminders that
"the troubles" are barely a decade behind them, but the people in
Belfast were as friendly as anywhere I've been.
For the past few
weeks I've mostly been in London, doubling as a spoken word artist and a
consort of the British education system.
Of the forty of so gigs that my darling agent managed to secure for me
on this tour, about twenty-five of them are in schools, introducing or
enhancing the study of Chaucer, and teaching hiphop lyric writing workshops.
Although the
material is generally the same, there is no uniformity or consistency in this
job. One day I come into a school
and there is a lunch banquet in my honour in the teacher's lounge, with keen
young minds drawn from various classes, hand-selected to witness the much-hyped
exclusive performance from the formerly-Cambridge-sponsored international rap
artist and alumni of the Edinburgh Festival. The students hang on every word and then rush me for
autographs afterwards, taking pictures of me with their mobile phones. I leave having opened their minds to
literature and the subtleties of hiphop lyrics, and best of all I leave with
new fans. This tends to make me
feel like a big deal.
The next day I
arrive at a school and I'm taken to a massive gymnasium with high echoing
ceilings and hundreds of plastic chairs: "you'll be rappin' in 'ere." The school provides me with a tiny
portable cd player and no microphone, then they herd in a hundred and fifty
squabbling twelve-year-olds with ADD, who I am charged with entertaining for an
hour. Halfway through the show my voice is pretty much gone from trying to
shout into the enormous space, and the kids are visibly bored and talking
amongst themselves; the cd player skips, and the bell rings without warning in
the middle of the performance, cutting me off, at which point the teachers
shrug and begin herding everyone out.
This tends to make me feel like a rodeo clown and a babysitter.
I still get paid
either way, but for the amount of impact I have at some of these schools I
might as well be juggling grapefruits.
On the other hand, the majority of the time I feel like I am reaching
them, and head for head I can get my ideas across to more people at schools
than most other gigs (since I'm not quite selling out stadiums yet). This is my hustle, and it can be every
bit as grimy as my former job planting trees. I guess every day can't be gravy.
The best part is that I've been working on new music collabos with some UK hiphop artists, including Emunah (http://www.myspace.com/emunahmusic) and Lucid Notion, the producer from London's Covert Recording label that I connected with last summer. Lucid cooked up a whole pile of new beats for me, which has pushed me to write a number of new songs over the past few weeks, a few of which were recorded last weekend. More important than any rough school gigs is the fact that this tour is supplying me with both the funds and the material for my next album, which will be recorded when I get back to Vancouver in August.
In the meantime,
stay on the grind and go with the flow - simultaneously.
Baba