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I’m A African!

By February 18, 2012 No Comments

Happy Darwin Day!

Okay, so I’m a bit late. Darwin Day was last Sunday, which found me and Mr. Simmonds and the rest of the off-Broadway team in Iowa City on the first stop of our Evolution 2012 tour. We performed The Rap Guide to Evolution to a packed house and got a rousing response, and even went bar-hopping the night before the show with a group of rowdy PhDs and a full-sized cardboard cut-out of Darwin in tow. At one point the esteemed naturalist was drawn into a burlesque mating dance. Here’s review article about the show from the local paper, the Iowa Press Citizen.

 The Iowa review zeros in on the section of the show that many people find the most surreal and memorable, the part where I remix the classic Black Nationalist anthem “I’m A African” by Dead Prez (from their album Let’s Get Free), flipping it as a celebration of the unity of common descent of all humans and our recent common roots in Africa. From the perspective of evolution, Afro-centricity belongs to the whole human race, and in honour of Darwin Day 2012 I am proud to unveil the new music video for I’m A African, animated by the amazing Tommy Nagle and sponsored by the Wellcome Trust (with the help of some lovely Crowdfunders).

To create the video I solicited video clips and still images from my mailing list (sign up to the left), and you came through beautifully, with dozens of people representing ethnic groups from every continent and every background, all singing along: “I’m A African! And I know what’s happenin!” We even got the world-famous human evolution expert and originator of the “Out of Africa” theory of human origins Chris Stringer in on the act, and gave him a special clip at the end. What I didn’t do a good job of though, is keeping track of who’s who, so if you are in the video and you want to be credited in the “Contributors” section of the website, just put your name in a comment or write me an email requesting inclusion.

And what’s next? The Canterbury Tales Remixed will be playing Teatro Jaco in Costa Rica in early March, so in two weeks I’m hitting the beach for my first-ever public theatre run in Central America. But first, the Wonder Cabinet is at NYU on February 25th, free and open to the public!

If you want to know what else I’ve been up to here’s a recent interview with some poetic waxing.

Baba Brinkman

Author Baba Brinkman

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