MC Battle Blog

While currently battling an unfortunate and uncomfortable case of bleeding hemorrhoids, I was reminded of my dwindling love for rap battles. I then remembered I have a site about battles which still receives thousands of visitors each month, despite the fact that I never update it. After ruining 2 pairs of boxers due to blood loss, I decided, fuck it, let’s update this blog with some fun stuff for the fans!

So after researching bleeding hemorrhoids for hours online, I quickly realized that no matter how much I picked at it Within the last 2 or so years, the influx of scripted Grind Time matches has increased the popularity of battling as a whole many times over. While I still miss the now decaying on-stage freestyle battles, I cannot pretend that Grind Time isn’t a worthy adversary for battle mediums. Despite its awesome features, however, the league still has a long trek ahead of it when it comes to functioning wholly as a final replacement for all other rap battle platforms.

Here are 5 things I would love to see Grind Time implement for my own amusement, as well as some things I could definitely see aiding them in becoming an officially recognized league for battle rapping by major sponsors and other syndications.

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Here’s another cool article written by our official field correspondent R.J. Check out his thoughts on the battle below.

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Man, despite several no-shows and a couple of weak performances, I really had a great time at this event. All of the main event battles delivered really hard on both sides and I saw some of these guy’s best performances yet. The atmosphere was really fun and like always, the crowd was really cool down here at GTNW. They usually are really open to laughing at lots of shit, but they don’t overdo it like the KOTD crowd, making for a fairly even mix of cheers.

Continue reading to check the full breakdown.

Warning: The following post contains spoilers of the event, but are blacked out until they are hovered over. You can safely read the results of the event, but if you hover over the blacked out parts you WILL receive the results of the battles.

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Major props and thanks to MC Battle Blog field correspondent R.J. for this awesome and extensive breakdown of the recent KOTD Volume 14 event which featured the likes of Hollohan Vs. TheSaurus in a title match, as well as the 2nd round of the KOTD Grand Prix. If you haven’t already done so, make sure to go back and read R.J.s article on played battle concepts and how to execute them better as it’s a great read.

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For those of you who either know me personally or who have known me through my online antics throughout the years, you’re probably aware as to how critical I am about certain things with regard to battles. If I hate something, I really hate and conversely, if I enjoy it, I really love it.

Frequently though, you will find me bitching about something or another in a half-assed manner because I’ve given up on explaining certain things in detail. Over the years, after constantly repeating the same stances and opinions into deaf ears, I’ve grown sick of the process. I now instead opt to simply tell people to shut the fuck up because they are idiots.

Two of the most frustrating things that I experience in the battle community are as follows:

1)       People who are incredibly wack who somehow receive props from the general populace.

2)       People who are incredibly dope who somehow receive hate or apathy from the general populace.

What I’m trying to explain through this rambling preface is that instead of simply telling you all to shut the fuck up, which I’ll likely continue to do, I will instead explain thoroughly why I believe certain people are either underrated or overrated (more frequently I will explain the former). To sum it up, I think its criminal for certain people to never receive the props they actually deserve.

Alright, now let’s get onto the article.

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This is a guest article written by RJ, a fan of the battle circuit. It deals with common themes in the battle scene which can either lead to a great performance or an incredibly basic and boring approach, depending entirely on the user of such methods. It’s a solid read so check it out. It’s posted in it’s entirety after the break so check out the full post to read it.

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I’m constantly amazed at how large battling is becoming again. The recent influx of new videos by Grind Time is constantly exposing new people to our culture. It hit a huge (and unfortunate) boom when 8 Mile came out, resulting in tons of idiots being shoved into the circuit, but this new explosion seems to be positive.

At work a while back I was talking about rap with a coworker when out of the blue he asked me if I’d ever heard of these two battlers ‘TheSaurus and this one kid’ who he’d seen on Comcast. I immediately knew who he was talking about and told him that they were actually friends of mine. I went on to explain about the WRC’s and where they were from, etc. and he was pretty interested to hear about it.

It’s insane the type of exposure that battling has given some people. The ’06 battles from Jumpoff are STILL being played on Comcast and people who aren’t even into battling are seeing them and remembering 50% of the names of the battlers involved (maybe if Illmac’s name was Dictionary we’d be batting .1000 on this topic).

Each battler who wants to pursue a career in hip-hop or anything related to entertainment needs to take this growth seriously and market themselves as well as possible. People not jumping at the opportunity to establish themselves with a more permanent fixture is pretty alarming to me. Many of these guys are getting 50,000 views on YouTube per battle and they aren’t shouting out a web site in their opening credits. If they had a product like an album for sale, which many of them do, they are wasting a free promotional opportunity to receive free traffic. If only 10% of the 50,000 people went to your site, and of those 5,000, only 3% bought your album at $8 total, you’d be making $1,200 per battle. I ball parked these figures and used very low estimates to drive home the point of this rant: battle rappers are idiots and need to take advantage of the popularity that battling is giving them.

Anyways, you ever hit up a random party and have people talking about battles?

Recently there’s been much debate over the proper way to judge battles. Many battle fans think the current system is inefficient and leads to frequent jerkings. Certain aspects of the current Grind Time system are definitely flawed and with the scene picking up more steam and recognition with every battle, it’s best the Grind Time officials determine the most efficient battle scoring system and stick to it.

First and foremost, the most crucial element to judging a battle would obviously be to only use non biased and informed judges. Far too often you hear, “He had a lot of punchlines” as the main reason why someone was chosen as the winner. That’s like saying, “Dude said a lot of words… lots of them.” A punchline isn’t automatically good because it’s a punchline. Not to mention that most of the time people’s “punchlines” are simply super played jokes which shouldn’t be given any praise.

What ever happened to, “His presence was ridiculously strong and his lyrics matched his aggression and flow”? Why doesn’t anybody ever say, “It was a heated battle, but for me it came down to Rapper A using a lot of forced multis which ended up giving Rapper B the edge”?

Please choose well informed judges who are knowledgeable in battling to judge the battles.

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The battles from the Portland New Year’s Eve event were judged by myself, TheSaurus, Okwerdz, Al-One and DJ Nykon. As we were faced with some really thin decisions throughout the event, we definitely anticipated confusion with regard to the judging.

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Continue reading to read my breakdown  of the battle. TheSaurus and Okwerdz’ explanations will be available very soon.

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First of all, to those of you who missed the event: SUCKAZ!! Obviously the shit was beyond retarded, but that’s to be expected when you link together Cali, Washington and Oregon on one of the biggest party nights of the year.

Unfortunately only 3 battles popped off, but they were definitely above average and well worth watching.

XT Vs. Young Nate was another solid match up with both battlers coming well prepared. A few of you disliked Young Nate’s antics in his last battles, but they were a lot more toned down in this showing.

9DM Vs. Illusion-Z was definitely my favorite battle of the night. Each round was really close with a few small factors determining the overall winner. Both battler’s game plan seemed to be to target very specific things about one another and stick to it throughout, and with both of them being very complete battlers, the final verses were very sick. I can’t wait for the footage.

Franco Vs. Ex-I I somehow remember the least of, although I know it was definitely a good battle. Damn alcohol.

After the jump we’ll have tons of pictures and event recaps from those fortunate enough to be in attendance.

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