WELLESLEY, MASS. — The lights dim, the music pumps -- a steady beat that can be felt in the bones -- and Baba Brinkman struts and bounces around the stage, belting out his rhymes about hard living, violence, sex and the secrets to true love.
He gets his inspiration not from growing up in the 'hood, but from the musings of a 14th century English poet.
"Ready to kill with their jagged-edged daggers drawn / The three aggravated braggarts staggered up the lawn / And without dragging on while the story is told / Beneath the tree they found a bag filled with glorious gold," Brinkman raps in a seamless cadence, updating Geoffrey Chaucer to hip-hop.
Brinkman, a native of Vancouver, Canada, who has a master's degree in medieval and Renaissance English literature from the University of Victoria, has adapted some of Chaucer's earthy, satirical and pious "Canterbury Tales" into rap.
There are remarkable parallels between "The Canterbury Tales" and modern rap, Brinkman said at Wellesley College during a recent stop on his tour of high schools and colleges across the eastern United States and Puerto Rico.
"Chaucer and rap are both performance-based and they're both battles of words where your proficiency gets you by," said Brinkman, whose master's thesis compared the two.
"The Canterbury Tales" was a storytelling competition among pilgrims on their way to Canterbury Cathedral, much like freestyle rap battles today.
"Before I ever read anything about [Brinkman], I could see the similarities between rap and Chaucer, especially the storytelling aspect," said Kathryn Lynch, a Wellesley English professor who teaches classes on "The Canterbury Tales."
"Like rap, the sound of Chaucer is important for the audience's experience, and they are both competitive verse forms."
Brinkman, 27, creatively adapts the Middle English of "The Canterbury Tales" into contemporary English, yet stays faithful to the original.
"My goal is that anyone who knows nothing about Chaucer would really be able to appreciate it," said Brinkman, who has previously performed in Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia.
He captures the humor, the vulgarity, the suspense, educating and entertaining in the process.
"I think seeing something like this, you'd learn as much, if not more, than any other way, other than reading Chaucer in the original," Lynch said after a show at Wellesley attended by about 100 people. "He really knows the tales he's rapping."
