A “Rap Up” is a unique hip-hop comedy experience, written for your event, at your event. Baba has performed these custom compositions at academic and business conferences around the world, covering topics as diverse as technology, climate economics, neuroscience and wilderness conservation. To create a Rap Up, Baba attends the event, taking notes on the other speakers and writing the rap simultaneously, completing the lyrics in time to step on stage and perform at the conclusion of the event. In his signature tongue-in-cheek style, Baba both celebrates and satirizes, poking light-hearted fun at the day’s content and creating an unforgettable finale for the participants.

Baba frequently produces commissioned rap songs and music videos that synthesize complex ideas into a fun and accessible format. He has written and premiered original songs and raps for major conferences and events such as Future of Storytelling, Geek Pop, Intelligence Squared, the Society for Applied Microbiology, and the Brisbane Writer’s Festival.

Baba has taught creative writing workshops on science rap composition for groups of students, academics, scientists, and professionals. Each workshop summarizes the techniques of hip-hop lyricism, as well as strategies for integrating scientific concepts and making them accessible, followed by a hands-on composition session with participants collaborating to write their own lyrics, with a group performance at the end. In as little as an hour, Baba transforms participants from novices into rhyme technicians, sharing their voices and messages with the world. The experience is also a great team-building exercise, a refreshing way to brainstorm, refine and articulate a group’s core mission and message in lyrical form.

Beginning in 2018, Baba began offering freestyle rap workshops. His first one took place at Google’s headquarters in Palo Alto, and included world class computer programmers, physicists, cell biologists, and geneticists, but due to confidentiality rules no photos or names could be shared. They did, however, spit some very impressive rhymes about their research.

An avid freestyler rapper, Baba has been practicing and performing freestyle since 2002. In the workshop, Baba offers strategies for overcoming shyness and inhibitions to open the floodgates of improvisation, tapping into spontaneous creativity and flow. Participants begin with basic foundations and build their way up to a completely unscripted freestyle rap cypher (interactive rhyme session), amazing themselves with their hidden abilities and courage.

Baba is indebted to Freestyle Love Supreme for teaching him how to teach freestyle, and for generously allowing him to adapt some of their training materials.

Baba has performed for students at more than 100 high schools and colleges, including Harvard, Wellesley, Brown, Oxford, Cambridge, Yale and many others. Beginning with his rap version of The Canterbury Tales in 2004, Baba went on to produce educational hip-hop shows about Evolution, Religion, Climate Change, and Consciousness, delighting young audiences while informing and challenging them to think critically about science and society.

Baba has performed for audiences in the thousands at major industry conferences as well as government, professional, academic, and non-profit events. His conference sets usually combine clever science-themed rap songs with freestyle improv using word suggestions from the crowd, and “Rap Up” lyrics custom-written for the event (see below). Baba has performed at conferences for TEDx, DLD, Accenture, Alteryx, Tricentis, Insight Venture Partners, NRDC, BSR, World Parks Congress, Wildlife Habitat Council, and the UN Paris Climate Conference.