Posted: Tuesday March 23, 2010

Baba Brinkman

Baba Brinkman was born in British Columbia’s West Kootenays in 1978 and grew up in Vancouver. He is the child of B.C.’s tree-planting subculture, which was founded in the 1970s by his parents and their friends.
Brinkman planted trees himself every summer from 1994–2003, and has personally planted over a million trees. During this time he also earned a master’s degree in medieval and Renaissance literature from the University of Victoria. His thesis made connections between hip-hop culture and poetry in England in the fourteenth century.
Brinkman started rapping in 1998 at the age of nineteen, and he brings a rare literary aesthetic to his rap-poetry. Since graduating he has produced and distributed two full-length albums independently, Swordplay and The Rap Canterbury Tales, as well as two EPs and dozens of collaborations. He also toured the performance piece “The Rap Canterbury Tales” to arts festivals around the world in 2004–05, including Edinburgh, Montreal, Prague, London and San Francisco. In the spring of 2005 he was sponsored by Cambridge University’s English Department to perform in dozens of schools in the U.K.
Between frequent tours and recording projects, Brinkman currently resides in Vancouver.