It’s a terrible habit, but late at night, after everyone has gone to bed, I usually watch between one and three hours of YouTube content before falling asleep. My viewing habits, which alternate between old boxing matches, poker streams and battle rap videos, feel pretty retrograde, and I’ve been wondering if this has just become my version of fishing or carpentry or any other performative male ritual to which fathers perform. prove to themselves that they’ve still got it, whatever it is.
Battle rap in particular feels like it falls outside of acceptable tastes. This feeling is not just mine; battle rappers usually make fun of each other because they are stuck in battle rap. Their embarrassment is somewhat understandable: here’s a community of troubled boys meeting on stage and insulting each other for an audience of other troubled types.
The modern form of battle rap, which you can find in various scenes, be it King of the Dot, Ultimate Rap League or Gates of the Garden, and which was recalled in the 2017 film “Bodied”, is more in closer to slam poetry than what you might remember from 1990s mixtapes or, perhaps, “8 Mile,” the 2002 movie based on the life of Eminem, who emerged on the battle rap scene from detroit (He also co-produced “Bodied”). In the previous incarnation of the form, contestants rapped to the beat for a minute or two and traded rounds; in the iconic final scene of “8 Mile,” for example, Eminem’s raps about Cranbrook, a private school, are accompanied by the instrumental track “Shook Ones, Pt. by Mobb Deep.” II.”
Today’s wrestlers are much more, for lack of a better word, literary. The battles last more than half an hour and are fought in private; almost everything is pre-written. The references are usually insular and often refer to the personal lives of other battle rappers. Everything from facial expressions to inflections is rehearsed beforehand to maximize the effect of each insult. “There’s a bit of ridiculousness to the premise,” Rone, a rapper who works for Barstool Sports, told me. “It’s basically men writing poems about each other being aggressively yelled at.”
Offensive humor is almost always at the forefront. Dumbfoundead, a Korean American rapper from Los Angeles, routinely gets jokes about the “Wuhan flu,” massage parlors, and wonton soup; Dizaster, a Lebanese American, is used to hearing about terrorism and taxi drivers. But there are opportunities for rappers to bring the troops back to themselves. When Dizaster confronted a fellow Middle Easterner, he asked, “Where were you when we were taking flight lessons before 9/11?” In Dumbfoundead’s recent battle against Rone, who is white, Dumbfoundead said, “Korean Jesus is home / All these lazy rappers with Asian accents / Finally leave me a Rone.”
There are unspoken rules that dictate whether something has crossed the line or not: a white rapper, for example, was punched in the face for saying the N-word during a recent battle. “When it’s clearly from someone who’s ignorant or has no taste, we notice,” Dizaster said. But he also explained that while the battle rap community might frown upon jokes that seem to come from a place of real hate, it will also rarely kick someone out of the scene or ban them from competition. Instead, he believes it is up to the other people in the community to “destroy” the offender, humiliating them in future battles and eventually driving them from the scene. Setting clear boundaries of what can and cannot be said, he told me, creates a community of “weak-minded people.”
Babs, a battle rap veteran and head of Queen of the Ring, a league that includes mostly black women, noted that some wrestlers will write contracts that say certain topics are off limits. But he also sees the value in testing how much an artist can take. “They sign up,” Babs said of the women who compete, who are often subjected to misogynistic slurs directed at their bodies. “I can’t really sympathize with the fact that she doesn’t want to be called fifty-something when she knew what she was getting into. Like with an MMA fighter, how can you feel bad that her arm is broken?
But the standards for what counts as a creative insult, as opposed to tired stereotypes, are not universally agreed upon. “What always pissed me off was the hackish kind of Asian lines that still worked with the crowd,” Dumbfoundead said. “I hated when they got a huge backlash, what I thought was, like, a terrible Asian joke.” Watch any battle involving an Asian, Middle Eastern, or Latino rapper and you’ll hear, along with some uplifting and genuinely funny lines, plenty of tired references to kung fu movies, dog food, and Home Depot. The joke line about black rappers tends to be a bit higher, as you’d expect, and white rappers generally get roasted for being nerdy, racist, or whatever. But the age-old problem with any kind of racial verbal war still exists in battle rap: There isn’t a very satisfying insult for white people, at least not one that shocks the audience.
If all of this sounds terrible to you, I understand. But these battles also provide a pretty honest look at how identity is talked about in much of America. “I really have a clear understanding of how a lot of other non-Asian people see Asians,” Dumbfoundead said. “We were only known for, like, four or five different things, I mean the same three, like, Asian celebrities, you know, whether it was Bruce Lee, Lucy Liu or whatever.” Racist jokes about Asians and Muslims are rampant in battle rap; Homophobic slurs are less ubiquitous than they once were, but still common. And while the entire culture of battle rap, like all other cultures in this country, stems from black art forms, which may offer black fighters a bit of a buffer against overtly racist lines, it also tends to elevate white rappers to places of prominence. This was the scene, after all, that Eminem created.
But even if the point of battle rap is to trade increasingly offensive insults, it all works with a certain trust system. Dizaster and Dumbfoundead, for example, have known each other for nearly twenty years, which has fostered a sense of familiarity as well as a need to outdo each other. In a battle nearly eight years ago, Dizaster disguised himself in monastic robes that he described as “a cross between the Dalai Lama and ‘The Last Airbender'”; Dumbfoundead blew white powder into Dizaster’s face and called it anthrax. Again, the appeal is not so much in the specifics of the gags as in the fact that they can be examined on their own merits.
Dizaster told me that the wrestlers are just actors and that the whole production is just “Broadway.” But the absurdist, combative theater still seems to capture something much more real than, say, Hollywood’s push to make diverse TV shows and movies, in which no one in the beautiful, perfectly demographically balanced cast says a damn thing about the strange it is is that they have found themselves together in a deeply segregated country.
