In what has to be one of the more unusual concepts for a concept album, the Genomic Dub Collective in Birmingham (UK) is using the text of Darwin’s The origin of species as lyrics in their reggae inspired drum and bass. They apparently premiered this last Friday as the closing event on Darwin Day at the University of Birmingham (where we spent a wonderful year on sabbatical 4.5 years ago). I wish I could have been there.
To quote Professor Pallen (one of the creators) from this article:
When I was thinking about this year’s celebrations, I was very keen not to just play to the creationist versus evolutionist thing.
I wanted to make it very broad.
Both Charles Darwin and his grandfather Erasmus were profoundly affected by the slavery they witnessed in places like Brazil and wrote poetry speaking out against it. I invited the poet Benjamin Zephaniah to read the poems last year and that gave me the idea to do something different.
Kudos to WeatherGirl for pointing this out to me.
One Comment
Woot! Genomic Dub Collective must have found this through some sort of web search, and added a pointer to my blog in their media section. I’ve clearly hit the big time :-). Turns out they have a whole fancy web site and everything, so check it out.