"I'm One Of The Best Entertainers Of The Face Of The Planet."- King Bau
He mentions his lyrical prowess often, has spit a couple verses on a few platforms but all the songs and verses he references are almost a decade old. He says when he was first coming into battle rap around 7 years ago people around him said he was like Loaded Lux but he choked in his battle because he didn’t care about battling. Sidenote, look up Joel Bauman vs Payback on YouTube and you’ll see the battle he’s speaking on. Bau is more actively known for being a professional MMA fighter where he jumped into the spotlight with some of the wildest things said from calling Jimmy Kimmel a pedo, to an admission of herpes. Just some outright wild stuff, he lost his last fight in January by unanimous decision, he mentioned it in one of his many promo runs & said he lost because he didn’t care about the fight, sound familiar? I’m not saying there’s a pattern there but there’s two moments of King Bau speaking on losses and attributing them to a lack of care.
NFTs Doesn't Have A Good Track Record In Battle Rap
King Bau comes into the culture with his own platform, Create For U (CFU). CreateForU is an all-in-one NFT, PPV, and streaming experience delivered directly from creators and influencers. Partnered with Groupi.
NFTs are all about utilities, but this isn’t the first act of an NFT/Crypto business model we have seen take place in battle rap. Previously we have seen leagues like Rap-Off dabble into the NFT model for their art and GTX has made a foundation surrounding the NFT model for battlers to have ownership of their content.
While there should be a level of encouragement for the idea of battlers having ownership of themselves & tapping into a potential opportunity to create a residual income stream for their art/animations, and performances, there is valid skepticism surrounding the NFT as a model from the detrimental effect it’s had on GTX.
in February 2022, Lush One & Dizaster meet with a Crypto Investor through one of their reps from SONY, and this investor commits to a deal for GTX, that entailed a percentage of the ownership of their company for an unspecified amount of money, that was over 6 figures. Lush One also gets another investor from a record distribution company, that gave GTX another 6 figure investment for their first event, The Prelude. Lush One notices the money from their Crypto Investor was depositing funds at a much slower rate than promised. But due to their operational cost being covered by their 2nd Investor, the GTX owners didn’t make an urgent case for this red flag and completely disregarded those funds not being received, with the anticipation that those funds would eventually come.
In May 2022, GTX hosted a press conference for a mega match announcement of Dizaster & King Crooked, and in a matter of days of the announcement the Crypto Market crashed and GTX’s main financial backers were now frozen out of their funds from Celsius (a Cryptocurrency bank). The Investor wasn’t able to provide any more liquid, while still maintaining ownership. Over Millions of dollars of assets have gone under, which prevents Ouroboros from being a 2-day event as scheduled. And as a result, this pushes back the Dizaster vs King Crooked event as well.
You can gain everything and you can lose everything. The NFT This may well be the apotheosis, the peak in the paradigm of everything. Upon research, from multiple financial industry tracking and reporting websites, it’s evident that this market has grown too big, and too fast under immense hype and speculation. NFT trading volume grew 38,000% year-over-year to hit $10.7 billion during the third quarter of 2022. Needless to say, there are some valid market research and history to remain skeptical about this business model rendering success for battle rap & battle rappers.
Return Of The Mask (Mark Morrison Voice)
On the other end of this spectrum, we have Daylyt, where the burning question is why are we doing this? The legacy of the Watts native in battle rap is a complex one to say the least, while being regarded as one of the best lyricists in the culture he has a history of just asinine antics and nonsense, dressing like a slave, undressing entirely(in two separate countries), attempting to take a dump on a stage, the list goes on. All that is without mentioning his interviews where he said some outlandish unmentionable things. In spite of all of this, and in large parts due to his stellar performance vs Tay Roc at NOME X which as someone told me might be the most powerful performance in battle rap history because of how much it altered the perception of Day and made people forget the years of questioning who he really was in this culture. He and Loaded Lux spent about two years building up a battle between the two of them, we still haven’t gotten that, but somehow here we are, with Daylyt vs King Bau.
Listening to their face-off on Champion was so curious, Daylyt seemed almost intrigued by the things Bau would say like he was a proud godfather of antics and outlandish statements and honestly, it sounds like this entire battle could be a spectacle of chasing a viral moment and who can be the biggest troll. Maybe I’m a pessimist, maybe they show up and just rap & we get a normal battle, but everything about this reeks of a moment we will all wish we didn’t see. I guess we’ll all just have to expect the unexpected.
