Create For You
Rating
Event Recapped by staff Writers France, J Smo & Titus Majors
Waiting For Talent To Show Up...
Let’s start the evening by first saying, we lost 2 out of the 5 battles on this card, and the news was announced the morning of the event. T-Top could not battle due to an illness (Covid) And Kitchen Qleen missed several flights, and Qleen didn’t advise the league owners that he wasn’t going to make it to the event, until the morning of the event.
A no-show by Qleen almost feels like the right of passage of entering battle rap.
Wait, it gets better, we receive a stream that not only has poor quality in terms of video and audio, but it doesn’t even work! Fans ended up paying $30 for a PPV and only got 1 battle…Yeah, you can only imagine the outrage of the community with an event of this much dysfunction.
When the stream started, we saw two individuals providing commentary, who were unfamiliar faces of the culture. And while the commentary was subpar but serviceable, the commentators were speaking about the canceled battles, as if the battles were still going down. So you mean to tell me, your commentators aren’t even in tune with what’s going on ??? This was one of the many red flags of what type of night we were headed towards. Some of the people in attendance at the venue showed us videos of the event, and there were about 50 people at most, inside the venue…50 ??? All of the star power on this card couldn’t bring out more than 50 people. This speaks volumes that battle rap fans don’t just pour their trust into a new company that comes into the culture just because they got the bag or top-tier names.
2 hour a delay before we start the first battle, then another hour delay before the stream completely dies. And for the cherry on top, It’s been 48 hours since the event, and we don’t even have a Video On Demand (VOD) available yet.
Calling this event a failure isn’t enough, this is Battle Rap Malpractice.
When you don’t have much cache with the battle rap culture or a foundation of support, your margin of error is slim. It takes months and even years to build the trust of the battle rap culture, and only seconds to lose it. Satisfaction is a rating, but trust is a brand. And we know many battle rap leagues have had a rocky start, but with the product that was presented and the way the missteps were handled, you would be hard-pressed to find people that will be comfortable with spending their money on another event.
Legend has it, if you log on to the website at this very moment, you will still see the “Waiting For Talent To Show Up” Screen
Ace Amin vs Craig Lamar
Recapped by J Smo
The only normally streamed, and decent battle from the card, Ace vs Craig was a battle that focuses on unorthodox and high-quality rapping. While both MCs had good this as well as good content, the separation created at different times in this battle mostly had to do with cleanliness, something each battler has had trouble with as well.
Ace 1st for example, is very good, but riddled with consistent tripping over his own words. While this could be debated if it’s truly from memory or just rapping to fast, its simply not acceptable especially at the higher levels where many of us aspire to see Ace at. The punches are as polished as ever but the multis, specifically those that kind of use 1 word or phrase 6 different ways, consistently seems to put speed bump in Aces delivery. On the other side, Craig starts his 1st with a room shaking rebuttal and went on to deliver his cleanest round, starting with a 1-0 lead.
The 2nd and 3rd were very easy to call, as Ace wrote uphill and gave 2 great rounds while Craig pretty much lost all momentum, cutting his 2nd insanely short and stumbling through a 3rd that he also cut somewhat short. Props to Ace, his angle punches about Craig being a Mailman hit very hard in the (basically empty) building. His patterns were still present but not as elongated, leading to cleaner delivery, as well as great layered writing with schemes scattered throughout (i.e. the Florida Rappers scheme). Solid battle, clear result, with Ace basically outlasting Craig and winning with uphill writing.
Round 1 – Craig clear
Round 2 – Ace clear
Round 3 – Ace clear
Ace Amin in his bag 🔥 🎯 pic.twitter.com/oHycZnJXxR
— Let’s Talk Battle Rap (@LTBRpodcast) March 25, 2023
Jaz The Rapper vs RX Takeaways
Recapped by J Smo
The irony, King Bau spent so much of his promotional rollout expressing his frustrations and displeasure with Instagram. He would mention how he was shadow banned on Instagram and even in the face-offs the night before the battle, he looks into the camera and says “Fuck Instagram!” And yet, Instagram was the only way we were able to see the Jaz The Rapper vs RX battle…Do you believe in a parallel universe? I’m sure king Bau does.
We’re unable to give this battle a winner, due to only being able to watch two rounds of this battle via E-Ness’s Instagram live. Think about that for a second, a battle rapper that is on the card has to bootleg a battle that is happening and has over 1400 people from the culture in his live, which may have been more people to have purchased the PPV. And to add more insult to injury, Kitchen Qleen, who no-showed E-Ness, was in the live! This is the peak battle rap experience. Live and for FREE on Instagram. (Beasley Voice)
You are also being able to watch multiple snippets of this battle from various media channels, such as 15 Minutes of Fame or on Jay Blac’s Youtube Channel. While we can’t give a verdict to this battle, what we can say from what we were able to see is that Jaz definitely has a bounce-back performance, following up her battle against Charlie Clips. This performance seemed to be a complete 180 from her last showing 6 days ago. You can see all of Jaz’s best attributes on full display. Crowd control, her pristine sense of timing within her delivery, the anticipation as she builds leading up to her punchlines, good name flips, but most importantly her methodical method of attack.
Jaz has been on a remarkable run since her return in 2021, and in a span of 17 months, she has given us 8 battles. And in all of these performances, the one glaring aspect that makes Jaz special is her very keen attention to detail when it comes to connecting references for a simile or a metaphor. She possesses this special ability to make an abstract comparison with a concise and accurate setup, that represents a complete overview of the main points before the punchline. And sometimes she does this with a reference that’s right in it’s in your face and it’s so simple that it isn’t. And this formula is consistently dynamic because she writes every bit of her set-up bars with purpose.
Of course, some punches land harder than others but there’s an ability to consider concepts beyond what we observe. Jaz recognizes patterns, analyzes ideas, and synthesizes the approach that she wants to use to attack her opponent. Jaz had a room of 50 people sounding louder than a room full of hundreds, in a previous performance.
RX takes full advantage of this opportunity and gets to add another legendary name to her resume. On paper, RX almost has an infinity gauntlet worth of names of some of the greatest female battle rappers to ever touch the stage. You can see her against names like Bonnie Godiva, Shooney Da Rapper, Gattas, & Now Jaz The Rapper. One of the biggest takeaways from watching parts of this battle was to see the level of poise in RX’s demeanor while Jaz was rapping. Jaz was shaking the building from time to time and RX’s defense was on point because she did not look rattled or phased. And that’s a testament to the confidence she has in her preparation for this moment.
When it’s RX’s turn to rap, she gives maximum effort and fights back. RX stays committed to all of her punchlines and delivers her material with the most emphasis. When a bar didn’t register with the crowd or garner any reaction, she didn’t get flustered and she kept her foot on the gas pedal to move on to the next bar. RX doesn’t have a voice that overly projects, but for the lack of volume and bass she is able to compensate with the potency of her writing, as she has one of the heaviest haymakers of the night with the LA/Brooklyn dodger bar.
Also worth noting, you can visibly see RX implementing more performance in this battle. As she walks around the stage and circles Jaz, she takes moments to look into the crowd while delivering some punchlines, making sound effects, and adding a bit more theatrics to her Bars. It was evident she took this match extremely seriously as she should, and RX was able to enact as many battle rap attributes as she could for performing on a stage. Once some of her haymakers started to connect with the crowd, you could visibly see how much more comfortable she felt on the stage, and it made for a very fun battle between both emcees.
Are We Done Here ?
Recapped by Titus Majors
I have no interest in spending a ton of time speaking on that debacle of an event Saturday night. I had no expectations, yet somehow the “Ownuership” Card still managed to finish below my wildest dreams. My actual question is, are we done with this? When I ask this question, I don’t mean, are we done with the 31-year-old who treats attention as currency and puts his middle finger up in front of cameras more than an edgy middle school child. What I mean is, are we, the culture, done falling for every new shiny person that shows up here with delusions & silly things to say? Are we done giving money, chances & time towards ventures we know good and well are going to flop? Understand I’m not rebuking any of you, even though I wrote the piece stating my skepticism of that event; I will admit I was down the rabbit hole as well, wanting to see how badly this could go.
That time spent railing against that event could’ve been more helpful by offering alternatives, using my platform to support other, more trusted grassroots leagues instead. As a culture, the lesson that we should take from this is that we could have spent our energy giving love to our trusted faces who run events at a lower level but on a more consistent basis. The next time someone like this pops up, we as a culture HAVE to be above it. Instead of hate-watching & cracking jokes on it, which are hilarious, we need to spend that energy giving attention to the people who work hard to provide us stable streams and successful cards.
Cortez dropped an album on Friday named Filthy Karma; unfortunately, that didn’t get much light. The irony of that title is that karma came for us, as many people lost $30 on this potentially non-refundable debacle Saturday night. Multiple battle events were happening this weekend. I’m not saying watch everything because that is impossible. I am saying that in the future, as a culture that loves this weird thing called battle rap, please invest in the people who have invested in us. What happened Saturday needs to be the last time a face out of nowhere comes in and takes the culture by storm.
Writers note: In our initial editorial about this event, we mentioned how create4u had an NFT model planned. King Bau refuted this in our Instagram comments despite multiple interviews with him describing an NFT model. Yesterday during his media run, he told Angryfan that he wasn’t sure how they planned to distribute refunds. What he mentioned was he was discussing giving people a founders token, which is an NFT that would grant access to whatever future events they have planned. This is just another contradiction in the long list of them that has been spewed during this time.
