From Weekend Section, THE FRESNO BEE, Mar. 11, 2005

Canterbury' rapper is something of a Rogue scholar
By Marty Berry / The Fresno Bee
(Updated Friday, March 11, 2005, 7:14 AM)

Rapper-scholar Baba Brinkman is the first to admit that his "Rap Canterbury Tales" show "sounds like it can be really bad."

"I never expected to be rapping as Chaucer," he says. But that's just what he's been doing, touring with his rap translation of "The Canterbury Tales" around the world the past few years, and, currently, at the Rogue Festival.

"A long time ago I realized that I was not going to be a credible gangsta, being a pseudointellectual," says Brinkman, an affable, white, Canadian medieval literature scholar from British Columbia. "I rapped about tree-planting, English major nerd stuff, dead poets."

The idea of retelling "The Canterbury Tales" came to him when he was working on his undergraduate English honors thesis at Simon Fraser University, in Burnaby, B.C., then his graduate thesis at the University of Victoria, where he received his master's degree in medieval and Renaissance English literature.

"The battling in 'The Canterbury Tales' is like the freestyling in '8 Mile.' It's really similar. So I was looking at Chaucer's sense of competition, and the framing really worked. I've been a rapper for about five or six years, and a scholar, so I felt I was uniquely poised to do this. Chaucer is meant to be live." Chaucer set up the lively and often-humorous "Canterbury Tales" as a competition among tale-tellers to entertain the pilgrims on their annual trip to Canterbury, to receive the blessing of English martyr Thomas à Becket. Brinkman set up his version as a competition among rappers on a tour bus, onto which he, as the narrator, has stowed away.

Brinkman spent almost three years on his own translation of the "Tales" while he was a full-time student, and started out performing one of the tales, gradually adding on to include the present four: "The Pardoner's Tale," the bawdy "Miller's Tale" ("It's Miller time!"), "The Wife of Bath's Tale" and "The Tale of Sir Topas," or as he calls it, "The Fan's Tale," which he describes as "bouncy, romantic, doggerel rhyme."

"I chose tales that have solid endings, that really lay out a clear narrative thread," he says. He used "The Fan's Tale," which is Chaucer's personal tale, as a way to "sum up one and a half million years of literature in five minutes," as he says.

Brinkman says academics greeted him with some skepticism at first but then became his most enthusiastic supporters.

"They were initially reserved but curious. But I've had more enthusiasm from academics. Their lives tend to be more dusty, I suppose, and this is something lively."

He got "the ultimate seal of approval" when England's Cambridge University approached him to do a tour of British schools this past January and February, which Cambridge sponsored.

Much of his performing is in schools, to give students a new appreciation for "The Canterbury Tales," as well as for rap, which he believes is "the source of today's literary genius."

"On the one hand, I'm enlivening Chaucer, and on the other I can gain credibility for rap, get people to see rap through new eyes. That it's poetry."

Rappers' reactions to his "Tales" have run the gamut, "from supportive to benevolent to indifferent."

"No one has been actively hostile. Most say, 'Hey, that's cool. It's something different. Way to not be formula.'"


The reporter can be reached at mberry@fresnobee.com  or (559) 441-6370.