Part 2: If you don’t know what a rap battle is Part 3: More about battle leagues

I recently attended a battle event at the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor hosted by Boss Battle League, a relatively new battle league that started up about a year ago. My friend had applied to perform there and was accepted, which was the battle I had gone to watch. He had applied to other bigger leagues like KOTD in Canada and Grind Time in the States, but to no avail at this time, and discovered this small Michigan-based league in his quest to battle. The event was met with a moderate sized crowd of twenty to thirty patrons, half of them other battlers, but held a solid presence and was well received by the group of people who had come out to watch.

After leaving the event, my girlfriend (who I had dragged along to support my friend) sat in quiet contemplation for the first half of the drive home. I asked her what was on her mind, and she replied that she had become quite intrigued with the battle my friend had been in, and found herself strangely infatuated with rap battles. She caught herself making rhymes with my name and ways to diss me, which is not exactly normal banter for couples, for you lonely battle fans out there who think that your girl will just kick some rhymes for you after one event. We can’t all be Arkaic or Mos Prob (Don’t Flop fans will get that). She insisted she was really interested in rap battles (though I hardly believed her, considering no one else appreciated my rants on the subject) and said she’d like to see more. In this case, I decided then to test her by mulling through the history of the modern rap battle scene, starting back in ’07 during the WRC days, and even the Scribble Jam days before that, the collapse of Grind Time, and finally the rise of KOTD and Don’t Flop (the UK league). She held in there, so I decided to take it one step further and actually send her battles to watch in order to help her jump into the scene. She promptly accepted the challenge, and I was then set with the task of easing her into the battle culture, one battle at a time.

This, however, proved to be quite a daunting task. There’s almost a decade of material one would need to see to have my extensive and useless knowledge of the battle culture, so for me it’s hard to really know where to start. King of the Dot is always trying to rope in new viewers, and addressed this on several occasions, asking Twitter and Facebook followers which battle they’d show someone first who has never seen a battle (outside of “8 Mile”, of course). The popular answer was Kid Twist vs Dumbfoundead or Pat Stay vs Hollohan, which are good answers, as they are two of the all-time greatest KOTD battles. Grind Time’s Dumbfoundead vs Tantrum is also a great place to start. I think, however, that in order to fully encapsulate the modern era of battling, one should start with the people that made it so.

Battling has been around for as long as people have been rhyming. Once you start something, you always want to compare your talents to others. That’s exactly what rappers decided to do with their rhymes. Throughout the 1980’s, street performances of rap were not uncommon in the hip-hop culture. “Freestyles” today are commonly known as rhymes that are “spat off the top”, or made up on the spot, but back in the day the term was used to describe pre-written verses that were performed on or off a beat. This form of rapping was also complimented by the lyrical improv of actually “coming off the dome”, or using one’s stream of conscious and word-association to create lines, which became the definition of freestyle in the 90’s. It was from these happenings that the roots of battling emerged.

During the 90’s, people would see or hear about emcees rapping over beats in contests all over the country in an underground fashion. In 1999, two of the freestyle greats, Juice and Supernatural, got together in front of a giant crowd of hyped fans and performed a battle that no one had seen the likes of ever, popularizing the sport further.

Through the early 200’s, battles continued to happen a lot on the streets, but hardly anyone was capturing them on film. This is when we first see a move toward the battles on YouTube. The very first battle Smack decided to film was between Jae Millz and Sire Castro, which took place outside on a street with Diddy in attendance. It looks like they’re battling in front of his hotel or something in the video. Anyway, this battle became the first moment of street lyricism that was caught on film and shown to larger audiences via the Smack DVD. This inadvertently started a great wave to come of battles being documented more on film.

After the popularity of the video, Smack decided to give battle documentation another whirl. Calling once again upon Millz, he put together a battle between Jae and Murda Mook. Both rappers brought out an audience of about 300 people on the street, where they performed one of the first organized street events in battling. This battle was at the forefront of launching the modern culture of battling written acapella.

Meanwhile, from 1996 to 2008, Scribble Jam was a thing. Specifically, it was a hip-hop oriented festival that was founded by some kids with a rap magazine called “Scribble” in Cincinnati, Ohio. This festival, clearly named after the magazine, showcased the talents of emcees, beatboxers, DJs, and b-boys from all over the nation, and even other parts of the world (Australian emcee Justice won in 2005). Each year these people held competitions and tournaments in these categories, giving traction and fame to a lot of freestyle no-namers in the game. This is what gave some of these emcees names, like the two-time winner Thesaurus, his eventual WRC partner Illmaculate, NoCanDo, and others.

Hold on, you probably aren’t saying, that’s the second time you’ve mentioned WRC in this blog. What exactly is that? Depending on which dated term you are referring to, a blog is something people used to write on to share their feelings to the internet before Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter farted all over it. The WRC, or World Rap Championships, were 2v2 battles held in the US, Canada, Australia, and UK back in the days of 2006 and 2007. I was still learning about sexually transmitted deceases (infections?) while these grown men were rapping about other grown men having them. Thesaurus and Illmaculate won the competition twice in a row. Spoiler alert. It’s been a couple years. These 2v2s offered the opportunity for an emcee to take a brief break in between freestyles of calling his opponents gay for his partner to freestyle about how gay their opponents were. Effectively, your partner gave you a few lines to think about your next few lines and vice versa for a whole 60 seconds for three rounds. Very fun to watch, minus the stupid fouls issued by hosts for touching opponents or dissing the host (if they couldn’t take a joke). Although in the case that someone took too many fouls, they’d be benched for a round, as was the case for Organik in this battle, where his partner Knamelis was forced to hold his own for three rounds of awkward freestyling in one of two of my favorite 2 on 1 battles. It’s hard to watch because of how whack it really is, but back then that was kind of normal. You can’t construct lovely sets of amazing lines months before the battle if you’re just randomly going against people you don’t know all day. Ah, the era without writtens…

Writtens, you once again should be but aren’t asking, what are those? Writtens are lines written before the battle, as opposed to coming up with disses that rhyme on the spot. These started creeping into the scene as early as the WRC days, and emcees who partook in this were frowned upon by their opponents, but to no real avail. 1v1 street battles like this started to confirm those sorts of suspicions, but displayed the positive effects of thinking of lines beforehand.

Coming out of this short-lived but important era were a lot of eventual keepers in the coming years, including Kid Twist and PoRich from Canada (formally pooRich until everyone realized it spelled out to be poo-rich as opposed to Poor-Rich like he had intended), Thesaurus and Illmaculate from the US (of course), Organik and Knamelis from Canada as well, Eurgh and Arkaic (< controversial battle / fun times with Eurgh) from the UK, and many others who to this day are still involved in their respective scenes.

Two of the aforementioned (and formally more hot-headed) emcees, Organik and Eurgh, are particularly important to the culture.

These guys went off to form two of the biggest and most prominent battle scenes (KOTD and Don’t Flop, respectively). URL was started by Smack in 2009, and Grind Time was also formed, and became more established before the two, but crashed and burned after four glorious years of well-renowned clashes between top American emcees. The four battle arenas, Grind Time and URL of USA, KOTD of Canada, and Don’t Flop of UK, all strived to deliver the top talent of their countries through the wonderful video media of YouTube. They built their platforms through YouTube views and subscribers to gain notoriety, roping in more viewers and fans by hosting battles with big names at big events, as well as promoting undercards at the same events looking to build their names in the written scene. From 2008 to the present, these battle leagues remain at large, though the top American league is now the Ultimate Rap League, or URL.

But hold on once again, you the reader should be asking in your mind, what happened to Grind Time? Bad business between presidents and emcees alike caused most of the top tier to jump ship and get in bed with URL or KOTD. The West Division of GTN, lead by Lush One, made nice with Organik and let him take over the “Fresh Coast” division in California. Others, like Poison Pen, ended up staffing URL events across the east side of the states, making home base in New York. As you watch battles, you’ll pick up on a lot of that. There was a lot of behind the scenes controversy that battlers will bring up mid-battle, or you may hear about it more as well as in-depth details in the ESPN of battle rap hosted by Dirtbag Dan and Caustic. I swear they’re friends in real life.

Anyway, all drama and set-ups of battle leagues aside… if you’re still interested, here are some battles worth checking out (besides the twenty links I created above). There’s a lot of knowledge about the culture and battlers you can pick up on by just watching the battles. A lot of the basic stuff I’ve already addressed, but more specific things will be picked up on by just watching instead of reading. I’ll give a little overview with each one, but other than that please enjoy!

As you may have noticed, I am a bit biased towards KOTD in this post. When I first got into battles, I went to KOTD for my fix, and I recommend that for you lot as well. S/O to Organik for giving me quality entertainment through my time in high school. Check out the URL, Grind Time, Don’t Flop, and the little leagues in between’s battles as well. From there the walls of battle rap will be taken down and you will be free to move about YouTube.

-Midknight