>>REVIEW
THE RAP CANTERBURY TALES
Baba Brinkman
Talonbooks, 352 pp.
When reading The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer's poetic masterpiece, whether they would translate well into hip hop was never, it's fair to say, something that came to mind. However, Baba Brinkman's Rap Canterbury Tales is indeed an attempt to lay down those 14th century rhymes, gangsta-style in the house. Forsoothizzle.
It's not actually as crazy an idea as it sounds. In an erudite and scholarly introduction, Brinkman presents rap – and, in particular, the "battles" in which MCs learn their craft, as seen in the film 8 Mile – as a natural progression from the story-telling competition at the heart of The Canterbury Tales themselves. It's a compelling argument that is supported well by the rap translations, which show that the subjects of stories of yesteryear (essentially money, respect, hos and homies) are at one with what Jay-Z and Nas deal with today.
So far so good. However, The Rap Canterbury Tales falls into the trap typical of many hip hop albums by providing a lot of filler, but little quality content. Lengthy introduction aside, Brinkman provides hip-hop versions of only four of Chaucer's 26 stories, a measly return that doesn't portray the broader issues of the Tales as a whole. What's more, his story selection appears faulty – translating the incredibly tedious "Knight's Tale" over those of the Reeve or the Merchant, both of which are far more exciting and thus better suited for adaptation, seems quixotic at best.
The other issue is that Brinkman appears to possess an incredibly holistic view of hip hop that not only doesn't fit with rap's modern-day image, but can't even cope with the cruder aspects of the 600-year-old Canterbury Tales. In the most egregious example, Chaucer's use in the "Miller's Tale" of the word "queynte" – literally, cunt – is replaced in the rap version with a bland euphemism that drastically reduces the original's scatological impact. It's a bizarre moment that greatly reduces the credibility of the rap itself, as it's hard to imagine Ol' Dirty Bastard, for example, censoring his own material similarly.
In fact, the work as a whole (perhaps unsurprisingly, given the concept) suffers from a certain po-facedness that detracts from the humour evident in the original Chaucer. Brinkman's belief in the pioneering, pure nature of hip hop as an art form is best summed up with a ludicrous statement in his introduction. He says "Hip hop has managed to spread around the world without falling victim to excessive corruption or distortion of its principles. I'm sure this statement will be disputed, but only by those whose primary understanding of hip hop comes from MTV."
There are a million ways to argue against this absurdity, from bringing forward the spectres of Tupac and Biggie, or by bringing up Flavor Flav's appearance on The Surreal Life, but the best way is surely just to mention the existence of the Black Eyed Peas as the ultimate refutation and leave it at that.
Ultimately, The Rap Canterbury Tales is an interesting experiment that makes a decent first of placing hip-hop somewhere in the literary canon. However, it's also pretty unnecessary. While the idea of rap being part of "culture" might have been shocking back when Chuck D was claiming Public Enemy were the black CNN, it's not any more. Hip hop is now as mainstream and bastardized as rock ’n’ roll, soul, disco and jazz were before it and doesn't need quasi-intellectual justifications like this one to demonstrate its cultural importance.
The other reason it's unnecessary is that fundamentally, the raps just aren't as good as the Chaucer originals, which will always rank amongst the greatest achievements in English literature. You can't go wrong with just reading them instead. |
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