Doc Brown (rapper)

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Doc Brown (real name Ben Smith) is an underground British rapper. He is a member of the London rap group Poisonous Poets. He receives regular airplay on national radio stations such as BBC Radio 1^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4], 1Xtra^[5] and BBC Asian Network.^[6]^[7],

In 2004 he released Donnie's Lament, a collaboration with fellow Poisonous Poet Lowkey, featuring the duo rapping over a sample of Gary Jules' hit, Mad World. The song garnered major critical acclaim and especially heavy airplay for a UK hip hop track, arguably helping to increase the popularity of the genre as a whole.

On 5 May 2006 he was featured in the BBC Radio 4 show Do You Know What You Are Saying?, a programme on the English language presented by Melvyn Bragg. The programme considered and analysed language in light of a recently developed computer system that analyses the language used by a person, and which offers percentages for its linguistic content and origins in such categories as "Everyday English," "Anglo-Saxon," "Norman," "Dutch", "Old Norse" and so forth. Subjecting one of his songs to this analysis, Doc Brown was deemed to be using an extremely high percentage of Everyday English (over 92%), up in the realms normally only associated with "conventional" poets. His work also scored extremely high in Anglo-Saxon (82.9%), which did surprise him, in view of his circles of association and domestic and cultural roots (South London father, Jamaican mother). He commented that a lot of rappers are "impossible to understand." So, for him, the deliberate use of easily understood short words is very much to do with their rhythmic flexibility and musical potential. He describes using short words with impact as being like using a percussion instrument.

Doc Brown is the younger brother of bestselling writer Zadie Smith.^[8]