Job well done
Could this year's big Fringe hit be a Biblical hip-hop musical from Canada? ROGER COX meets its makers

In the autumn of 2001, while they were still undergraduate students at Brown University, Jerome Saibil and Eli Batalion thought it would be fun to write and perform a few rap songs about things that had never been rapped about before - cleanliness, speech impediments, the finer points of cooking chicken .

Then, the following spring, the two men from Montreal decided to take the exercise to a whole new level - and created a full-length hip-hop musical based on the biblical story of Job. With their finals looming, they made arrangements to perform the nascent show at a series of Canadian fringe festivals in the summer and then hit the books in earnest. It was only after they had graduated that the duo realised they had bitten off substantially more than they could chew.

"We graduated on 31 May," says Saibil, "and our opening night at the Montreal Fringe was 14 June, so we were just freaking out. We had no words, no music and no choreography, and in two weeks we had to perform a hip-hop musical that had to have a lot of words and a lot of music and a lot of choreography."

With the clock ticking, the boys put in an SOS call to a DJ friend from Massachusetts, Paul Bercovitch. He agreed to travel to Montreal to lend them a hand on the condition that all the words were written by the time he arrived, so for three days Saibil and Batalion worked around the clock to complete their script. When Bercovitch showed up they worked for another three days to create the soundtrack.

"By this stage Eli and I were just passing out," Saibil says. "We were tag-team sleeping." ("Literally high-fiveing before we fell asleep," confirms Batalion.) "It was really kinda biblical, we wrote the whole thing in six days." And on the seventh? "On the seventh day," Saibil chuckles, "we started working on the choreography."

Convinced that JOB: The Hip-Hop Musical was going to bomb, Saibil and Batalion were prepared for the worst on opening night, but it became a massive hit, selling out its entire Montreal run and garnering rave reviews from the critics. People loved it in Ottawa too. And Toronto. And Winnipeg. A sequel, JOB II: The Demon of Eternal Recurrence, premiered in 2003, and the two shows have since been combined to form the two act play, JOB: The Hip-Hop Saga.

By the time I arrived in Montreal last month to meet Saibil and Batalion and watch them perform at the Just For Laughs comedy festival, JOB, in all its various incarnations, had been staged more than 300 times in 15 different cities across North America, and its creators were getting ready to take the prototype to the Edinburgh Fringe. The show has become such a big deal in Canada that a film crew from CBC (the Canadian equivalent of the Beeb) has been following them around for the last 12 months making a documentary about their lives. They have even flown out to Edinburgh this month to record the latest leg of the JOB journey, and currently seem determined to film the duo reading their review in The Scotsman.

The fusion of hip-hop and Good Book that has provoked all this media attention is like nothing I've seen before. Dressed in shiny retro tracksuits and colour-coordinated headscarves, Saibil and Batalion star as MC Cain and MC Abel, a pair of duelling rappers who transport the Job story from the ancient world to a 21st century record label by way of a few catchy tunes and some seriously sophisticated wordplay. Occasionally the two MCs overstretch the English language somewhat - once Abel attempts to rhyme "office" with "falafel" - but for the most part they spout verses that Eminem would be happy to call his own.

In this parallel hip-hop universe, Job is Job Lowe (as in Joe Blow, geddit?), star employee at a world-beating music label called Hoover Records. Things are looking pretty rosy for our hero until his boss J Hoover (alias Jehovah) and the company's finance chief Lou Sapphire (that'd be Lucifer then) decide to test his loyalty, first by removing his benefits and then by removing his job.

Will UK audiences enjoy JOB as much as their North American counterparts? It's impossible to say, but considering how hip-hop savvy most people this side of the Atlantic have become in recent years, and bearing in mind the runaway success of the hip-hop/Shakespeare crossover Bomb-itty of Errors at the Fringe two years ago, there's no reason why Saibil and Batalion shouldn't enjoy the same kind of reception in Edinburgh in 2004 that they enjoyed in Montreal in 2002.

One thing the duo are very anxious to point out is that they are not trying to make fun of hip-hop. "People like to be able to categorise things," says Saibil, "so when they see two white guys doing hip-hop - especially because it's in a theatrical context and especially because there's comedy in what we do - they'll put us in their pre-existing category of satire and assume that we're satirising hip-hop. That's a little unfortunate and something we're trying to overcome. There are some people who do satirise hip-hop, but we're actually not trying to do that at all - we see hip-hop as a really interesting musical and verbal art form. "We do take the piss out of the hip-hop industry in the play," he says, "but that's us making fun of the corporatisation of hip-hop rather than hip-hop itself."

In Montreal I had the opportunity to see another show by Saibil and Batalion that runs even greater risks than JOB of being construed as hip-hop satire. In Hip-Hop 4 Dummeez, MC Cain and MC Abel are replaced by Bushman and VowelMovement, a pair of cartoonish fashion victims who provide a spoof introduction to the genre that encompasses such pivotal topics as the history of hip-hop and the significance of bling. To begin with, it really does seem as if they're taking the piss, but after a couple of minutes it becomes apparent that the entire skit is driven by their enthusiasm for (and considerable knowledge of) hip-hop music and hip-hop culture.

Even the closing number, with its knowing reference to the obligatory "catchy hook" that crops up in all rap songs, has more to do with Saibil and Batalion indulging their love of the music than it does with sending it up.

In fact, Jerome and Eli may well end up making their fortune as bona fide hip-hop stars before they make it in theatreland. For Bushman and VowelMovement aren't simply characters dreamed-up for a single sketch show, they are the hip-hop alter-egos adopted by Saibil and Batalion for their real-life group, The Grafenberg All-Stars. The All-Stars' first full-length LP, G Marks The Spot, is due out in the not-too-distant future, and judging by the excerpts I heard while driving around Montreal in the Grafenberg-mobile with Jerome and Eli, it will be well worth investigating.

"We're constantly re-assessing what we want to do," says Batalion. "Ultimately, we want to get involved with mass-media projects where we have more distribution potential and where we can get more exposure . and also make better pieces of art. Everything we've done up until now has been dictated by limited finances, but with a big budget behind us there's a lot more we can do."

Such as? "One thing we'd really like to do is a rock musical," Batalion grins. "This is something we're really itching to write and have been for a while. It's something we'd like to put on a large stage - not in a Fringe setting - but that would take some money." Not to mention at least six days to write the words and the music.

Job: The Hip-Hop Musical is at the Pod Deco from today until 29 August. Saibil and Batalion will also perform as the Grafenberg All-Stars at the PRS Music Stage in the Meadows on Fringe Sunday (15 August).

- Roger Cox