Image via Hollow Da Don/Instagram
Steven Louis met Bill Nye, The Science Guy when he was five years old.
A sentiment once reserved for trite cranks and nostalgiaheads is unfortunately gaining a lot of juice these days: the music everyone’s talking about just doesn’t hit like it used to. Maybe we can charge it to the sinewy tentacles of disaster capitalism, and the Rolling Loud-ification of live performance. Or, maybe it’s the exhaustive presence of sponsored content and data harvesting. Sure, there will always be thrilling music made beyond the dead-eyed scope of commercial interest, but rocking with smaller artists can be a solitary enterprise by design. At the end of it all, it’s fun to be in on something real together. Remember when every major magazine lazily published something like “how do we solve the crisis of male loneliness?” That was stupid, because it’s really, like, six words: go to battle rap league events.
For those uninitiated, the past 15 years have been a golden era for the art-turned-sport. Battling has always been a spiritual baluster of hip-hop practice, but mass cultural recognition didn’t come until that Brittany Murphy movie with “Shook Ones” at the end. Eminem had indeed gone through the battle rap gauntlet before signing to Aftermath and Interscope; a year prior to his triple-platinum debut, he came in second place at the Cincinnati-based Scribble Jam. Similar freestyle competitions were incubating at New York’s Fight Klub, London’s World Rap Championships, Toronto’s Proud 2B Eh Battle MC and on screen with special Friday episodes of 106 & Park.
In the late aughts, smaller stages like the Elements League in Halifax, Nova Scotia, adopted a strategic twist to rerock the product. Good freestyle rapping is a tremendous technical achievement, but it also has limited entertainment value; impromptu punching against an unknown competitor requires a broader canvas. Rather than explore the many spontaneous ways to say “I had sex with your girlfriend, who I’ve never met,” battlers chose premeditated matchups, carving space for sharper bars and more personalized angles. With weeks of prep time to research an opponent – on Facebook and MySpace, across their battle catalog and studio music, through exes and opps – the resulting matchups were more weighty, self-referential and laugh-out-loud funny. By 2009, the “written era” was in full effect.
The Ultimate Rap League, run by bearded host Smack White, quickly built a stacked roster of Tri State street traditionalists. Out west, obdurate backpackers and Project Blowed congregants formed Grind Time Now. Both leagues were simulcast on World Star hip-hop. And in Canada, Elements plus other freestyle serieses merged into King of the Dot. These leagues had divisions and kept win-loss records; they sold the fights through blogs and grudgemaking. It was all an undeniable labor of love. The effort to write and memorize as a studio rapper can be recouped later, in music downloads and live shows. But battlers do decidedly less with their finished work – recycling bars is a cardinal offense in the culture, verses are structured to be acapella, and artist ownership of battle footage was wholly unheard of until recently.
“Battle rap takes the most brain power. We come into a wild crowd and have to win them over with three rounds of shit they’ve never heard before,” says DNA, a URL mainstay since his teenage precociousness in the freestyle era. “It’s hard to come up with a hit record, but if you get it, you can run that for the rest of your career. No disrespect to industry rappers, but it’s way harder to come up with enough material for a classic battle.”
The first battle I ever watched was at the dawn of the written era, during a boggy summer afternoon in uptown Manhattan. My new friend Avu pulled up YouTube and showed me Portland’s Illmaculate vs. Queens’ Hollow Da Don. I needed an index for a few lines – Illmac alludes to Hollow’s pricey lean addiction, and Hollow responds by mentioning Illmac’s $500 loss from a previous battle – but the sense of community hit me with centrifugal force. These early battles felt like watching your older brother with his friends, volleying around their inside jokes and shared stories. Even if you didn’t get every part, you felt included in something meaningful. And with early tournament purses rarely exceeding a thousand dollars, it also felt desperately real.
“I think it’s the last fully untarnished art form in hip-hop. Battle rap still doesn’t have an agenda,” says Marv Won, a far-reaching Detroit battler who shot a scene in 8 Mile and dropped a new album on Mello Music this year. “It’s just about who is the best, who is the smartest, who is the meanest. And that’s why it really resonates with people.”
I had a good entry point: Illmac and Hollow are both all-time greats. The former is a hyper-genius Indigenous Pacific northwesterner, cool enough to roast opponents with impressions but bookish enough to have a famous “Hattori Hanzō” rhyme scheme. The latter is my pick for the LeBron James of battle rap with his lasting greatness, from winning freestyles on BET to heavyweighting on multiple written leagues.
One of the principal appeals of the game is in its diverse, messy modules of humanity, so here is a very limited and incomplete list of major characters from the battle rap multiverse:
Geechi Gotti, a Nutty Blocc Compton Crip who defended his three Champion of the Year belts with the zeal of a prime 90s wrestling star
Bigg K, reigning Champion of the Year, a formerly-incarcerated scarface from Norfolk, VA who barks down challengers and looks like Dusty Hill
Nu Jerzey Twork, a church kid-turned-block bully who towers onstage, bobbing through his multiple famous haymaker refrains like a megachurch preacher on speed
Dizaster, a Lebanese immigrant who drops nuclear physics and modern warfare history with sibilant fervor, while also saying the crassest shit imaginable and promising to punch anyone whose phone pings during his round
Loaded Lux, a shadowy and mystical Mach-Hommy figure who frequently evokes the Black Panther 10 Point Program; the more sophisticated fanbase gets loudest when he takes off his jacket and reveals a plain gray hoodie
Real Deal, a public school teacher in Pittsburgh who advocates for medical malpractice legislation and proudly out-drinks every opponent
Real Sikh, a swole Punjabi New Jersian who can seemingly rhyme entire sentences without strain
Soul Khan, former Fat Beats cratedigger and self-described “bisexual lightning” who recently ran an abolitionist campaign for the New York State Democratic Committee
Emerson Kennedy, a practicing Muslim from Salt Lake City who often does the battles’ cinematography
Kid Twist, a scrawny Canadian supernerd who now writes episodes of The Last of Us
Dumbfoundead, a silver-tongued hero of LA’s Koreatown beat scene who has since acted on screen and hosted a podcast with Sasha Grey
There’s a battler who works as a public defender, and a whole crew of battlers concentrating in Christian divinity. There are battlers who just beat the carceral beast, and battlers still behind those decrepit walls. There are robust leagues in Mexico, the Philippines and across South America. There’s a women’s league run by Remy Ma. There are spaces specifically for the hood-stamped, who bully their opponents with coded references to the hustle. And there are spaces for the more clever nerds, who create open-loop matrices of jokes about your hairline and memorize all your bad posts.
Like most mass cultures, it has not been immune to tropes of homophobia and misogyny, and like most mass cultures, it’s getting incrementally better there. But maximal crassness is pursued in equal measure as originality and ingenuity. The breadth of text cited in this arena is dizzying – to be fully-equipped, you need to know past battles and controversies, plus catch extraneous references to sports, cinema, ancient history, current events and street culture.
“The things my peers and I can come up with, it’s astounding,” former King of the Dot champ Real Deal says, one month before his K-5 teaching job starts again and one minute after I buy him a Red Stripe/tequila combo. “Tsu Surf, for example, is as poetic as anything you’ll read by Robert Frost or Mark Twain. Eddy I is funnier than most professional comedians. Rum Nitty moves like Sun Tzu. It’s not always the coolest to come off poetic and intelligent, but you really have to know a lot to survive here.”
That doesn’t mean it’s hard to jump in. Live battle rap events can feel like a hip-hop Comic Con, a bizarro family reunion and a basement house party all at once. There are some big-name supporters – Kevin Durant thinks Twork is the best to do it, Drake guest hosted Geechi vs. Lux for his birthday party, and even former deputy mayor of Toronto Norm Kelly was once a Kid Twist prop.
But crowds are modest and welcoming. At a Geechi vs. Illmac title card in Los Angeles this spring, I went alone but ended up with a cadre of random new friends; as one of them told me, “we’re going to see grown men read poems about each other, and that shouldn’t be too serious.” Because battles haven’t been formally judged for years now, it’s common to see fans by the bar or to the side of the stage after each matchup, debating strangers about who won each round. Some take physical notes, like a boxing judge with a scorecard. Others run live highlights on the battle rap subreddit.
The artists themselves are eminently approachable. At a 2023 event in Oakland with Avu, who is still my closest friend a decade and a half later, we dapped up battle luminary Charlie Clips, only for him to ask our advice on fantasy football and where to eat after the battles. What’s especially striking is the fraternal network of emotionally-intelligent friendships on display, because all battle rap leagues inevitably resemble a touring wrestling company. It’s a collective intimacy that I find so affirming – battlers needing to get as salacious and cutting as possible to sell their fight, while relying on their opponent to do the same to them.
“People like to see clashes of material and substance, not just style,” says A Ward, whose “turn to Isaiah 57, now turn the Glock 40 on your bitch ass” rebuttal won 2023 Moment of the Year. “Battle rappers bring a certain genuineness, an awareness of their surroundings. And battlers have become some of my best friends, because they’re open books by nature. They will always pick up that phone and tell you what they really, truly think. That’s a rare thing nowadays.”
How many of your friendships would survive if you called each other out for the world to watch? Illmac humiliated his best friend with details about confidential conversations and a hotel meltdown on the road. Pat Stay taunted Arsonal for breaking up his family by cheating with a stripper (complete with details of butt stuff, I fear). T Top revealed that Rum Nitty worked a day job at Wal-Mart, then got a packed Atlanta crowd to chant “self-checkout” back at him. Battlers have brought up dead relatives, failed relationships, drunken regrets and money problems. On any given night, they find themselves as either the Harlem Globetrotters or the Washington Generals. React in any capacity and get hit with the evergreen “look at him, emotional!” that all but seals an L.
The camaraderie was particularly pronounced at the recent LA card. The headliners, Illmac and Geechi Gotti, each run their own battle platforms – and accordingly, the league owners are giving footage directly to the artists. MyVerse, the bilingual battler who calls herself Jennifer FLOWpez, immediately put her match with LA’s Danny Myers on her website for a $5 PPV. “If he mansplains, I’mma cut this man’s spleen,” she taunts, before shaking the room with “you can’t say shit about women / when your bitch looks like Grimace.” Myers fights back by calling her a “bootleg Selma Hayek,” and jokes that with her b-boy stance and Bronx-style delivery, her bedroom dirty talk must be verses from Marley Marl’s “The Symphony.”
Geechi drops a steely and snarling performance, backed in the pit by what looks like half his neighborhood set. “This a gangster vs. a skater, I’m not a hater but the grind different.” Illmac reads the defense and flips the energy. “That last round was kinda extra king / looks like someone forgot to wear their friendship ring.” He calls out Geechi for no-showing a recent New York battle and returning the booking deposit. “I know life can get hectic / shit, I would’ve kept it,” he jokes. The crowd is full of paying fans and cerulean-dripped OGs, but the livest reactions seem to come from the fellow battlers themselves. Real Sikh has muscled his way to be in the front; Bigg K cracks a rare smile, lighting joints and taking photos with his phone; MyVerse and Danny Myers go crazy for haymakers, like NBA bench players after witnessing a poster dunk.
Despite its aggressive design and competitive nature, it’s here in the encircling audience that battle rap reveals itself as a kindness. As the world descends further into some sort of banal chaos, it’s unlikely that music will respond in any meaningful way. Some folks thought hip-hop and the arts at large would fundamentally change after 2016 or 2020; they truly, really have not. Rather, it’s battle culture that will answer the moment, in all of its strangeness and incongruence. Battlers will challenge the ways we pay for stuff we like, and wage thankless wars against the streaming business. Battlers will have weirder second jobs to make rent, and they’ll hail from backgrounds and identities wading out from the fringes. Maybe there is some comfort, knowing that when the insurrection comes or if the planet freezes into nuclear winter, battle rap will at least have the quickest rebuttal.
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