An Introduction to Rap Battles: Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #71

Pret­ty Much Pop hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt are rejoined by our audio edi­tor and res­i­dent rap­per Tyler His­lop (rap name: “Sac­ri­fice”) to dis­cuss a form of enter­tain­ment close to his heart: Two peo­ple star­ing each oth­er in the face in front of a crowd and tak­ing lengthy turns insult­ing each oth­er in a loud voice using intri­cate rhymes, ref­er­ences, jokes and even some cul­tur­al com­men­tary and philo­soph­i­cal spit-balling.

So what are the rules? How does mod­ern bat­tle rap com­pare to free-styling, the beefs aired on rap albums, and clas­sic insult com­e­dy? What’s the appeal of this art form? Is it because of or despite the aggres­sion involved? Bat­tle rap is regard­ed as a free speech zone, where any­thing’s fair game, but does that real­ly make sense?

A few rel­e­vant films came up in the dis­cus­sion:

• Bod­ied (2017), a film writ­ten by Alex Larsen (aka Kid Twist) and pro­duced by Eminem, fea­tur­ing sev­er­al cur­rent bat­tle rap­pers doing their thing along with dis­cus­sion by the char­ac­ters of the eth­i­cal issues involved
• 8 Mile (2002), a semi-auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal film star­ring Eminem, which dis­plays the old­er, free-styling over a beat type of bat­tle rap­ping
• Rox­anne Rox­anne (2017) a biopic about Rox­anne Shante depict­ing hip-hop rival­ries of the 1980s.

Here are some match­es Tyler rec­om­mend­ed that also get men­tioned:

• Con­ceit­ed vs. Dumb­found­ed. Per­haps the most viewed bat­tle of all time
• A 2x2 bat­tle: B. Dot/Geechi Got­ti vs. A. Ward/Loso. Note that the lat­ter are “Chris­t­ian-based” rap­pers.
• A com­pli­ment bat­tle: Pat Stay vs. Rone.
• Immac­u­late vs. Soul. Immac­u­late is Tyler’s favorite bat­tler, and Soul is Scot­tish.
• More: Pat Stay vs. Char­ron, Rone vs. Big T, The Saurus vs. Day­lyt, Shot­ty Hor­roh vs. Arson­al, Cal­i­coe vs. Bigg K, Shot­ty Hor­roh vs. Tony D
• Not actu­al­ly rap bat­tles: Trump vs. Biden, Keynes vs. Hayek

More resources:

• The Bat­tle Rap Hall of Fame
• Wikipedia on Bat­tle Rap
• The Ruin Your Day YouTube Chan­nel where bat­tle rap­pers com­ment on notable bat­tles.
• “A Brief Hip-Hop His­to­ry of Rap Bat­tles” by Jake Hall
• “Fly­t­ing Was Medieval England’s Ver­sion of an Insult-Trad­ing Rap Bat­tle” by Tao Tao Holmes

Hear Tyler talk about his many rap albums on Naked­ly Exam­ined Music #24.

Hear more of this pod­cast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.