Chaucer is for Ballers, Right?

Dirk M. “Baba” Brinkman utters phrases like “punk ass”, “homie”, and “wassup” freely on stage. He name-checks Redman and Old Dirty Bastard. He wears his cap backwards and spits rhymes with fierce energy and unbridled theatrics. Naturally, Loker Professor of English W. James Simpson thinks he’s awesome.

Simpson admits that he’s not much of a hip-hop enthusiast, but Brinkman’s brand of rap—literary hip-hop, or lit-hop—is relevant to the medievalist; Brinkman translates “The Canterbury Tales” into the language of contemporary youth culture.

“He preserves the kind of brilliance and surprise, the kind of linguistic pyrotechnics one finds in Chaucer,” says Simpson, who had publicized Brinkman’s originally planned Oct. 5 visit to Harvard.

But the U.S. Border Patrol had other plans for the Canada native.

“I was trying to come [into the U.S.] with a business visa, but I needed a ‘P’ visa, which is specifically for entertainers,” Brinkman says. “It was okay if I came into the country to promote my book as an author, but not if I came into the States as an entertainer.”

Brinkman had to cancel his Harvard performance, but he recently visited Cambridge, where FM flagged the rapper down for a chat at Au Bon Pain.

“The thing about my show that I really like is that it draws the full range of society,” says Brinkman. “You get your blue-rinsed geriatric retirees who are there because they remember Chaucer positively and your hip-hop heads next to them....I feel like that really represents the spirit of ‘The Canterbury Tales,’ because Chaucer’s pilgrims are a really diverse group.”

Brinkman says he and the English department are trying to reschedule an appearance at Harvard later in the year, but if you can’t wait until then, his new album, Lit-Hop, will be available on iTunes soon.

Memorizing that first stanza just got easier.