Beyond ‘your mom’: a brief history of rap battles

Particularly zealous battle fans, including some of those I meet in Europe, trace the history of the artform all the way back to ancient Persian and Anglo-Saxon poetry contests. The only place this argument really holds weight is in the Philippines, where battling’s mass popularity is linked to the century-old practice of Balagtasan, a form of competitive performance poetry.

A battle in the Philippines featuring North American battler Dizaster

‘The dozens’ is an African-American tradition of trading escalating insults, which has been traced to various sources on the African continent: the pre-Zulu practice of using verbal insults in lieu of physical combat, perhaps, or a Nigerian wordgame called Ikocha Nkocha. In turn, linguists view the dozens, with its witty ‘your mom’ puns and A-B rhymes, as a key influence on early hip-hop lyrics. While the contention that battling is the original source of all hip-hop does overstate the point a little, it is clear a battle mentality suffused hip-hop from its very earliest days in the Bronx in the 1970s.

When imagining a rap battle, people tend to think of freestyled, on-beat battles like those in the Oscar-winning film 8 Mile, starring former battler Eminem. (‘Freestyle’ is a nebulous term, referring either to improvised lyrics or to pre-written lyrics performed in a free-flowing, unconstrained structure.) These battles were in fashion up until the mid-2000s, but in retrospect these battles seem painfully outmoded. To a modern-day fan, they have the same vaguely kitschy air as 1950s sci-fi b-movies or tackily animated 90s computer games: impressive for the time in which they were created, and still enjoyable to a point, but ultimately limited in their scope and aspiration.

A modern remix of the Moe Dee/Starski clash

This type of battle was popular for a long time, as a way for MCs to hone their skills on the street or at open mics before moving on to records and musical success. Kool Moe Dee clashed with Busy Bee Starski in a seminal, ad hoc 1982 match, with Busy Bee’s chirpy party rhymes proving no match for Moe D’s direct, targeted attack. Moe Dee’s unplanned intervention was a crucial moment marking hip-hop’s turn from party rap into lyricism, and it set the stage for a series of famous battles and rivalries across the following decades. A-list rappers from Canibus to Jadakiss to Big L cut their teeth in the rap battle ring.

By the early 2000s, hip-hop was a multibillion dollar industry. Battling was only a niche part of this industry, mostly surviving in a pure freestyle form, with MCs spitting purportedly improvised lyrics at contests like the World Rap Championships and Jump Off, as well as on the American TV show 106 & Park. It developed an association with ‘backpacker rap’, or alternative, socially-minded hip-hop, rather than the big-money world of gangster rap.

But if rappers are expected to improvise their insults over a beat then even the most quick-witted performers find it difficult to string together anything more than a series of basic rhyming couplets mocking their opponent’s appearance. The best battles from the freestyle era are high-octane displays of hyper-quick thought, but the content is seldom more than superficial: The Saurus vs Justice is a classic of the era, but the best bars still draw on fairly tired stereotypes (“You must have used gasoline as acne cream”, Justice tells his acne-scarred opponent). Another problem is that there’s no way to tell if someone is actually freestyling, or just pretending to improvise while reciting pre-written material. Could The Saurus really have come up with the line “you’re in America, and here Justice is served” on the spot? Does it matter?

2006’s best battle: playful, semi-improvised, simplistic

Gradually, the format evolved. Without getting bogged down in the details, market leaders such as New York’s SMACK (Streets, Music, Arts, Culture, Knowledge), the pan-American Grindtime and Toronto’s King of the Dot all contributed to the development of a new style of pre-written, a capella battle. Ditching the beat allowed for greater complexity of lyrics, and the requirement for personally targeted lyrics opened up new vistas of creative opportunity. Marriages break down as affairs are brought to light, relationships are destroyed as rappers are blamed for the death of their friends, and — at the very top of the game — battles are used as the platform for a devastating critique of the impoverishing effect of the carceral cycle on African-American communities and its hypocritical glorification by these same communities.

Within these lyrics, double and triple meanings pile on top of one another. To take one example: when the rapper Daylyt says “If I feel like you a snake off top, I’m a deuce a ni***a”, the superficial meaning (that he’ll shoot or “deuce” you if he thinks you’re a “snake”, or a snitch) weaves in references to Greek mythology ( “I’m a deuce a n***a” can be heard as “I’m Medusa n***a”, the goddess with snakes coming off the top of her head) and to gambling (“snake eyes” in many dice games are a pair of ones, or a deuce on the top of the dice). This same battle sees Daylyt opening up about the violence which has surrounded him from birth, while his opponent Ooops takes the opportunity to rap about his battle with cancer. By the end, both rappers are in tears. The move into the written format has allowed for an exponential increase in intellectual maturity and complexity.

2012’s best battle: highly-wrought, serious, theatrical

In 2016, SMACK are the undisputed market leaders, purveying highly-stylised battles in which street credibility and aggression are key. They can sell 2000 tickets to a marquee event, at up to $300 dollars a head. The only league approaching SMACK in terms of mass appeal, and for my money outstripping it in quality, is King of the Dot, which offers a mixed bag of street and backpacker styles. Top British league Don’t Flop, meanwhile, has a uniquely diverse roster of personalities, from the garrulous surrealist O’Shea to the arch Shuffle-T to the insouciant Tony D. There are so many other English-language leagues putting out battles each day that watching them all would be a full-time job, to say nothing of the 30 or so other countries now offering battles in their own mother tongue.

Yet outside of SMACK, battling remains a pleasingly knockabout, open affair, with fans free to mingle with performers during and after events. Apart from the league owners and a score or so of the biggest North American stars, rap battles do not pay a living wage, and the vast majority of rappers are in the game for the love of battling and a bit of free promotion. It might be a stretch to say that battling is the original source of hip-hop, but many battle fans, myself included, would argue the original spirit of hip-hop is best preserved in the resurgent rap battle.