The Bible on a hip hop beat

JOB: THE HIP-HOP MUSICAL
Written by Jerome Saibil & Eli Batalion

"Long time ago Noah built a big ark, busted his a-- outta tha trailer park ... it started to rain so he fingered his Glock, said, 'You (bleeping) animals betta' pick up and walk."

The above rap lyric is made up, of course, church still has a way to go before it hires Swollen Members to write their new edition of Praise for the pew shelves.

But believe it or not, a trio of artists out of Montreal, Toronto and New York are doing something akin to this, taking a universal biblical tale and setting it to rap lyrics. Hot idea. Opening tonight at 8 at Azimuth Theatre (11315 106 Ave), Job: The Hip Hop Musical might not be for grandma. But then again ... "It's the story of Job on a superficial level," writer, director and rapper Jerome Saibil says with practice. "We're playing two narrators, sort of an MC Cain and MC Abel. They correspond with each other by telling the story of Job, set in modern times at a hip hop label. Job is the general manager of Hoover records, God is personified by the president of the label, Jonathon Hoover, and the devil is personified as the vice-president of finance."

That fits. "MC Cain and MC Abel break down and argue about the best way to tell the story, and in their argument they raise issues about belief in God, the corporate environment and the financial realities of our time," Saibil explains.

"They're rapping the whole time, the meta discussion takes the form of a contest for better flow, better rhymes, but also a better interpretation of the story itself."

Saibil's partner in rhyme is Jon Paterson and the play was co-written by Eli Batalion.

Saibil, though not religious, takes the subject seriously. "There's a lot of scholarly debate about the story of Job because it makes us question whether God was intended to look like the capricious idiot with an ego that would make the bet with the devil at the sake of a man's life. People who take this point of view don't really understand the point of the story that maybe God made the bet because he has a master plan that we aren't able to understand.

"I think the Bible is so much more than just a religious artifact. We're trying to join hip hop and appropriate it and morph it and marry it with the Bible, Elizabethan drama, Homer's Odyssey and so on, retelling the stories in new, interesting ways. That's what people did in ancient Greece; they were essentially freestyling on the corner."

— Fish Griwkowsky