What’s scarier? The prospect of global environmental collapse, or the prospect of spending an hour listening to a white boy from Canada rapping dire warnings about it? One of the virtues of this smart, funny, well-sustained show from Baba Brinkman — whose earlier shows had him lay down rhymes about evolution, religion and Geoffrey Chaucer — is that he knows just how naff his approach could be. So he spends his first few minutes boomingly addressing our fears, celebrating his show’s simultaneous urgency and absurdity.
With graphs on a screen upstage, he takes us from 1800, when the world had just “one billion people trying to get their freak on”, through to 7.3 billion of us in 2015. As backing tracks thud along, he guides us through the pioneers of climate change science (John Tyndall, Svante Arrhenius, Guy Callendar, Charles Keeling). His mother, Joyce Murray, a member of parliament for the Liberal Party in Canada, once wrote a thesis on climate change, too. So if we diss his science, “Yo dissing my momma!”
This must be what fellow rapper KRS-One termed “edutainment”. Brinkman is pointed, propulsive and perspiring as he plays with the trappings of his genre. On Mo Carbon Mo Problems he incorporates some of Donald Trump’s tweets into his tune. Another song is based on Pope Francis’s environmentalist utterings on Twitter.
Brinkman travels the world to rap his “evidence-based predictions” and, yes, he owns up to his own inconsistencies on a tune such as Fossil Fuel Baller. He allows scepticism some time on the mike too: “It’s always the lefties/who salivate at the thought of capitalism’s death wheeze”, he raps from the point of view of a “contrarian”, who argues that trusting the markets, not regulation, is how to solve the problem of man-made climate change.
Brinkman is not here to go along with that argument. He wants carbon taxes, he wants a sense of urgency. At one moment he uses an explanation of freestyling — improvised rapping — to look at how freedom is not an absolute, but a negotiated midpoint between chaos and absolutism. That applies to art, freestyle raps included, just as it does to societies. It’s the single smartest moment in an invigorating hour: beats-driven agitprop at its best.
Box office: 0131 622 6552, to Aug 31
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