---

Monkey Barrel 1
Aug 18-21, 23-27 (12:30)

Ligonem Ligonem Vocat

---

MC Hammersmith is a marvel & a geezer! He’s a pure Ego Spengler kinda dude with a ridculous gift. Nah then, according to peer-review’d neuroscience papers, we only use 10 percent of our brains. When we figure out what the other 90 percent is capable of I’m sure we’ll be off in intradimensional space trips & sh!t, but til then it’ll be down to pioneers like MC Hammersmith cracking the rocky crusted veneer of the psyche & excavating each half percent’s worth of mental possibility.

“Just like a window I’m an absolute ledge.”

This is what this plate-spinning mental acrobat actually does. He, & at the same time; analyzes a room, creates a plot around suggestions given from the audience, maintains a perpetual motionary flawless flow of freestyle hip-hop, & makes it all reyt funny at the same time! It’s absolute genius, like! Alright, his rapping is pretty monotone, but the way his mind manages to pull funny puns out of the aether is proper mental.

His show consists of several segments, a couple of which aren’t quite as spontaneous as he suggests, I’m thinking’, but it’s all very good & very, very clever indeed. We have questions for MC Hammersmith, for example, extracted from audience members prior to entry, such as today’s ‘is it cool to like Eurovision’ & ‘why does Mona Lisa have a subtle smirky smile,’ which he’d weave into his rhapsodic tapestry with ridiculous skill. Another segment saw him rapping to stuff from people’s pockets that they held in the air as he stalk’d the aisles among the seats – including a rubik’s cube.

“You look like you could snap me just like a poppadom.”

I remember chatting to a hip-hop guy at some poetry slam in Brighton about 20 years ago, & I ask’d him what’s the secret to freestylin’, & he said always get the second rhyme first. I tried it a couple of times myself, but couldn’t really manage it, it’s well hard, like, but MC Hammersmith is a total supersensei in the field, its quite astonishing. Over a full hour it’s a little one-trick ponyish to tell you the truth, but it’s all smashing fun & proper esoteric – he would have got burnt at the stake for that kind of malarky three or four centuries back!

Damo