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?
I met this kid who’s current roommates with an ex-roommate and we talk about some GT battles. He’s sorta new to rap (but isn’t conscious of this fact) so his opinions are usually hit or miss. He said Presence was awful at battling, but he puts Hollow in his top 5.
When we cypher, he says he hates how all our freestyles end up with me dissing someone or being negative so I guess he doesn’t get the battling spirit, lol.
“Anyways, you ever hit up a random party and have people talking about battles?” —-
Man i was living in a 1,700 pop. town on the border of Louisiana in East TX for about 8 months.I had at least a 1/4 of that town watchin GT battles.These people had never experienced anything outside of Hurricane Chris,Z-ro,Southside Reggie…etc.I literally had at least 30 people calling me every week to come watch new battles at my house EVEN the redneck kids LOL.I mean i even had fools getting internet for that reason alone.It kinda got annoying as fuck after having to break down the history evey single time.Anyways,good blog fam.