Ashante Infantry
Entertainment Reporter

It wasn't enough for Jerome Sable and Eli Batalion to perfect their hip-hop inspired shtick for the stage.

The duo, whose Dora-nominated play JOB: The Hip-Hop Musical was a big hit at the Fringe Festival in 2002, is back with a new show Hip-Hop 4 Dummeez, which opens at the Tarragon Theatre next week. They have also recorded an album.

G Marks the Spot, by MCs Bushman (Sable) and VowelMovement (Batalion) a.k.a. The Grafenberg All-Stars, is a cheeky, intelligent collection of songs meant to "hit the aural G-spot."

The record pokes fun at hip-hop's "keeping it real" tradition. For instance, the track "MC Amigos" spins the cliched rap battle of one-upmanship into a cloying repartee of mutual admiration: "We be the MC amigos lacking MC egos/ Each one of us praises the other wherever he goes/ I ain't being modest, Believe me he's the hottest to be honest... You deserve the Pulitzer prize/ You got mad phat internal rhymes/ It's so cool what's inside/ Don't be so in denial man, haven't you read your bio man/ You're Heineken, I'm wine in a can."

Influenced by innovative groups like OutKast, Jurrasic-5 and the Black Eyed Peas, the Montreal natives - childhood pals, trained pianists and Brown University grads - know their clownish and surreal approach to the music will raise some eyebrows.

"In the hip-hop world, half the people are extremely open-minded and the other half are extremely close-minded - they want their hip-hop in a particular kind of way, they don't want certain people to be doing hip-hop," said Batalion, 24, on the phone from Los Angeles, where the pair is working on an expanded JOB for a fall run.

"Others want to expand on the art form and have it go to other places, because God knows there's a lot of extremely repetitive and trite hip-hop out there. But some people are not willing to have their boundaries of hip-hop pushed.

"But that's fine, we're committed to doing something novel with hip-hop, because we have an intense love for hip-hop. And our obsession mainly comes from the wordplay and musicality of taking rhythm and applying it to spoken words, of taking sentences and making music out of speaking. We naturally gravitate to it almost all day and probably in our dreams."

Much of the disc is featured in Hip-Hop 4 Dummeez, which is described as part hip-hop lesson and part adventures of the Grafenberg All-Stars (named for the New York doctor credited with discovering the G-spot).

"We deal with the music, the culture, the style of dress, we go through the basics and things people may not know," explained Sable, 25.

"We get into detail a little bit on certain concepts of rapping - rhythmic patterns, rhyming techniques - because that's obviously our specialty, but we also give an overview of the whole culture and all four elements of hip-hop: breakdancing, graffiti, beat-making and deejaying. We get into it all - freestyling, bling bling, spoken word, what it means to be all pimped out in a car with hydraulics and 24-inch rims.

"It's for lovers and haters alike: If you love hip-hop it's going to be for you, and if you can't understand a damn word of it, it's also a play that can be enjoyed by you."

The show is the result of bits they've been workshopping over the last year at comedy clubs in New York, Montreal and Toronto. "It's really a new genre for us," said Sable. "There's always been comedy lower case 'c' in our work, but the comedy with capital 'c' is new.

"We had to learn a lot about comedy and how comedy operates with an audience, and how cabaret works when there's no story to what you're doing . It's got other challenges that theatre with a story does not have, in terms of making people laugh or sustaining momentum without a story, or without characters that people aren't necessarily invested in."

Out on the west coast, Sable and Batalion are also writing a TV series based on their characters.

"We're going to be pitching that soon," said Batalion. "Besides that (shortlived) Meth & Red show, that would be pretty unique for hip-hop. We know that we're different and we want to play that up. We want to go with our differences and use it as an advantage. We will go as far as we're inspired to go and as far as people are digging it."