It’s a drizzly Sunday afternoon and, in the bowels of Leicester Square Theatre, young children wearing gold-rimmed sunglasses and chains chant MC Grammar’s name. Their hero comes on stage and starts spitting bars: specifically, the words from Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes, the children’s picture book by Mem Fox. The crowd are on their feet.
“This one is a banger,” the rapper shouts before launching into Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s Each Peach Pear Plum to the beat of Eminem’s 2002 song Lose Yourself. “Mother Hubbard down the cellar,” he sings. “I spy Cinderella,” the children holler back.
My two-year-old son, Reggie, is entranced, if slightly confused. He loves Each Peach Pear Plum but this is his first taste of both Eminem and MC Grammar, an internet star who’s on a mission to lure children into reading through the art of rap.
Laura Pullman with Reggie
JOSHUA BRATT FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
The show included a dance-off for plucky parents
JOSHUA BRATT FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
For the next 90 minutes, the pint-sized theatregoers rap Michael Rosen’s classic We’re Going on a Bear Hunt to the tune of House of Pain’s Jump Around, Julia Donaldson’s Superworm to Will Smith’s Men in Black, and so on.
The showman, who is wearing his signature shades, gold necklace and light-up trainers, keeps hammering the point that reading is cool: “You can’t rap a book if you can’t read a book.”
At one point, a dozen children bounce around on stage rapping MC Grammar’s World Book Day Song. “Wowza/ I’ve just found this voucher/ Let me take a closer look/ Hmm, says I get a free book, no way,” they shout.
The world is falling apart, the budget is a fast-approaching bullet and shops are already flogging Christmas tat, but in this packed theatre it feels like we have cause for hope.
• Donate, volunteer, pledge: join the Get Britain Reading campaign
The following morning I meet MC Grammar, also known as Jacob Mitchell, in a café near Waterloo station. The father of four is a busy man. As well as travelling the UK for his Books, Beats and Barz theatre tour, he has just published his second children’s book, about a schoolboy, Z, who can only speak in rhyme.
A further five books in the same Rap Kid series are in the pipeline.
“Kids think books are like Netflix now,” Mitchell, 42, says. “They read the first and they’re like, ‘next one’. I want to keep them reading and I don’t want to feel like I’m letting them down.”
Mitchell’s own rhyming story is remarkable. In 2019 he rapped Julia Donaldson’s The Gruffalo to his young daughter and posted the video.
It quickly racked up 10 million views and, days later, he was flown to Los Angeles to rap Dr Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
Back then, he was a teacher in a primary school in Barnet. When he was tasked with getting his class through a new spelling, punctuation and grammar test, Mitchell decided to inject some fun. “They walked in the classroom one day and I was dressed up in a rap outfit and I said, ‘Stop! Grammar time,’” he says. The riff on the MC Hammer lyric from 1990 was lost on his audience of ten-year-olds, but they relished learning about adverbs through rapping.
Mitchell was soon travelling to different London schools once a week to spread his rap techniques. After DeGeneres came calling, the British breakfast shows followed and he landed his own educational TV show, Wonder Raps, on Sky.
Now working full-time as MC Grammar, Mitchell has performed everywhere from the O2 arena to No 10, from Great Ormond Street Hospital to Glastonbury.
He is also an ambassador for World Book Day. “You’ve got thousands of kids going to [school] dressed up as MC Grammar,” he says, grinning. “If that’s not impact …”
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His 16-year-old self wouldn’t have believed how his future career would pan out. As a teenager growing up in the north London suburbs, Mitchell dropped out of school after getting just one GCSE, and worked in a hardware shop.
He rediscovered a love of books, returned to college and studied psychology and sociology at university, where he focused on learning through writing raps. His mother, an early years practitioner, nudged him towards teaching.
These days MC Grammar has 400,000 followers on Instagram and TikTok, and 71,000 fans on YouTube, where he raps about metaphors, times tables, dinosaurs and, of course, books. He visits schools across the UK.
After one performance at an Ipswich primary school the head teacher was in tears. One of their pupils was a selective mute who had never uttered a word at school but suddenly, on stage, he rapped every word of an MC Grammar song. “For me, that was just a massive moment,” says Mitchell.
Passionate and speaking a mile a minute, it is clear that he is determined to help turn around last year’s depressing statistic which showed that only 35 per cent of those aged 8-18 read for pleasure.
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“Kids need to see themselves in books,” he says. “Do we have books that represent children today and the way they feel, look, speak?” His Rap Kid books contain slang used in playgrounds: peng (nice), drip (stylish clothes) and salty (angry). “Meet them where they’re at,” Mitchell says. “If they speak like that in the classroom, why would that be a negative when put in a book?”
Mitchell has skin in the game: he and his wife, Andrea, a brand ambassador for a haircare company, live in the capital with their three daughters, Ellie, ten, Khloe, eight, and Tia, four, and their son, Neeko, two. Unsurprisingly, their father has developed some novel tactics for the family; there is a bell at home and whenever someone rings it everyone must drop whatever they’re doing and start reading.
In Mitchell’s book, all reading is beneficial for children, whether it’s a comic book or newspaper football coverage. On nights when his older children want to watch television he has a compromise: subtitles on, volume off. “They’ll subscribe to that because they’re still getting KPop Demon Hunters or whatever they’re watching,” he says. “Literacy is all around us.” With that MC Grammar is up and off to rap the classics.
The Adventures of Rap Kid: The G.O.A.T. by MC Grammar (Simon & Schuster £7.99 pp288) Tickets are on sale now for MC Grammar Live — Books, Beats and Barz