My take on Text Battling

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and there’s a lot of motherf**kers who are new to this text battling business, so I thought I would lay down some of my ideas.

I think text battles are very similar to acapella battles, a la the World Rap Championships, which you should check out at http://www.jumpoff.tv or just youtube WRC battles.. they’re f**king incredible. Anyways, when I personally write text, I almost always make my lines longer than I would if I were to spit them over a beat … I think it flows better, and you can hear that’s what people do when they rap acapella - they form complete sentences.

I don’t think I’m going to find a battle very interesting unless every rhyme is around 3 syllables & up, maybe with some exceptions.. but you get what I mean. I think punches are the most important element, but if they’re not using multis then, to me, the effect is lost.

Things I consider to be personals are things like: name flips, comebacks from their previous verses, and disses on their personal history or s**t you know about them. A lot of this can go over the heads of ppl who are new to this site and, say, don’t know the background behind the name.

Here’s how I write my verses: continuously throughout the day my mind is twirling over rhymes …. what rhymes with the London Bridge … and I’m trying to get Every Syllable down, for example I came up with … I’m a king in my country, he’s a bum in his //// no way I’ma lose to a guy who f**kin lives under the london bridge. Know what I mean? And I only put the bold text in here for emphasis; I think it’s annoying as hell when ppl do that in battles…

So what I do is I’ll immediately write down everything I know about the guy… his name, if I know where he’s from then I’ll write down some quick stereotypes about people from there, I’ll write down some of the famous s**t over there, and then as I’m turning this information over in my head throughout the day I tend to think of punchlines. I write down all my rhymes if I have a notepad handy, which I almost always do. I’ve got SHITLOADS of notebooks laying around with random s**t scratched on them. Some of it’s really good, some of it’s awful lol.

Out of all this random s**t that I’ve scratched together throughout the day I’ll come back home and try to count up 16 bars worth of s**t. Now, when I string together phrases, I’m looking to go Setup / Punch … Setup / Punch . Or, even better, Setup / Weak Punch / Setup / Strong Punch, all with the same rhyme scheme. An example of that would be:

I don’t like your name …. in fact, it’s a teaser

why you call yourself G-Pimp when you’re actually neither?!

Fuck your fake gangsta style, u ain’t packin a heater

Plus your album collects dust like the back of a speaker!

I think a lot of your problems is you guys are trying to turn these battles out one after the other … you get 48 hours for a verse.. IMO you should spend a day on it to make sure your s**t is tight. You’re not gonna get better just "freestyling" battles, you have to train your mind to think in this way:

1) quickly gather info about opponent

2) quickly see what rhymes with that info

3) quickly form disses using those rhymes

…. the more you do it, the quicker it comes. That’s why I think text battling is a really good way to get better at real-time, freestyle battling.. acapella or over beats. It’s the same process, just slowed the f**k down.

Want to know a good way to make a diss? Go to http://www.yahoo.com and check out what’s in the news, or read your local paper for a week before you have a local battle. You can use ANY big news items to form disses..

Last but not least, I think it’s important to understand that everybody has a different viewpoint on these battles… voting is always going to be slightly subjective and even if you feel like a vote is absolutely retarded, you have to at least consider the other person’s point of view. Nobody likes losing, so you’re definitely going to have a more biased take on the battle than a 3rd-party voter would anyway.

Just my .02