It’s a terrible habit, but, late at night, after everyone in the house has gone to bed, I usually watch anywhere between one and three hours of YouTube content before finally falling asleep. My viewing habits, which alternate among old boxing matches, poker streams, and battle-rap videos, feel pretty retrograde, and I’ve wondered if this has just become my version of fishing or woodworking or whatever other performatively masculine ritual that fathers perform to prove to themselves that they still got it, whatever it may be.
Battle rap, in particular, feels like it falls outside of acceptable tastes. This sentiment isn’t mine alone; battle rappers routinely make fun of one another for being stuck in battle rap. Their embarrassment is somewhat understandable: here is a community of problematic dudes who stand around on a stage and yell insults at one another for an audience of other problematic dudes.
Battle rap’s modern form, which you can find across a variety of scenes—whether King of the Dot, Ultimate Rap League, or Gates of the Garden—and which was memorialized in the 2017 film “Bodied,” is closer to slam poetry than what you might remember from mixtapes in the nineteen-nineties or, perhaps, from “8 Mile,” the 2002 film based on the life of Eminem, who came up in Detroit’s battle-rap scene. (He was also a co-producer on “Bodied.”) In the form’s earlier incarnation, contestants would rap to a beat for about a minute or two and trade 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 for Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones, Pt. II.”
Today’s battlers are much more, for lack of a better word, literary. Battles run upward of half an hour and are delivered a cappella; nearly everything is pre-written. References tend to be insular, and are often about the personal lives of other battle rappers. Everything from facial expressions to inflections gets rehearsed beforehand to maximize the effect of each insult. “There is a little bit of ridiculousness to the premise,” Rone, a rapper who works for Barstool Sports, told me. “It’s basically men writing poems about one another that they aggressively shout into each other’s faces.”
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, tends to hear about terrorism and cabdrivers. But there are opportunities for rappers to turn the tropes back on themselves. When Dizaster battled a fellow Middle Easterner, he asked, “Where were you when we were taking flying lessons prior to 9/11?” In Dumbfoundead’s recent battle against Rone, who is white, Dumbfoundead delivered the line, “Korean Jesus is home / All these lazy rappers using Asian accents / Finally they 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 that’s ignorant or has no taste, we notice that,” Dizaster said. But he also explained that, although the battle-rap community might frown upon jokes that feel like they come out of a place of real hatred, they also will rarely expel someone from the scene or bar them from competition. Instead, he believes that it’s up to the other people in the community to “destroy” the offender, by humiliating them in future battles and eventually driving them out of 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 the head of Queen of the Ring, a league that mostly features Black women, noted that some battlers will write up contracts that say certain topics are off limits. But she also sees the value in testing how much an artist can take. “They sign up for it,” Babs said, of the women who compete, who are often subjected to misogynist rants that fixate on their bodies. “I can’t really sympathize with the fact that she doesn’t want to be called fifty type of hos when she knew what she was walking into. Just like with an M.M.A. fighter—how can you feel bad that her arm is broke?”
But the standards for what counts as a creative insult, as opposed to tired stereotyping, aren’t 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 those got a huge reaction—what I thought was, like, a terrible Asian joke.” Watch any battle involving an Asian, Middle Eastern, or Latino rapper and you’ll hear, alongside some elevated and genuinely hilarious lines, a lot of tired references to kung-fu movies, eating dogs, and Home Depot. The line for jokes about Black rappers tends to be a little bit higher, as one might expect, and white rappers generally get roasted for being nerds, or racists, or whatever else. But the age-old problem in any type of racial verbal warfare still exists in battle rap: there just isn’t a very satisfying slur for white people, at least not one that will shock the audience.
If all this sounds terrible to you, I understand. But these battles also provide a pretty honest view of how identity is talked about in much of America. “I really got a clear understanding of how a lot of other non-Asian people view Asian people,” Dumbfoundead said. “They only knew us for, like, four or five different things, reference me to the same three, like, Asian celebrities, you know, whether it was Bruce Lee, Lucy Liu, or whatnot.” Racist jokes about Asian people and Muslims run rampant in battle rap; homophobic slurs are less ubiquitous than they used to be, but still common. And though the entire culture of battle rap, like all other cultures in this country, comes out of Black art forms, which may afford Black battlers a little bit of a buffer against overtly racist lines, it also tends to elevate white rappers into places of prominence. This was the scene, after all, that created Eminem.
But, even if the point of battle rap is trading increasingly offensive insults, the whole thing functions on a certain system of trust. Dizaster and Dumbfoundead, for example, have known each other for nearly twenty years, which has fostered a sense of familiarity, and also a need to outdo one another. In a battle nearly eight years ago, Dizaster dressed up in monastic robes that he described as “a mishmash of the Dalai Lama and ‘The Last Airbender’ ”; Dumbfoundead blew white powder in Dizaster’s face and called it anthrax. Again, the appeal isn’t so much in the specifics of the gags but in the fact that they can be examined on their merits.
Dizaster told me that battlers are just actors, and that the entire production is just “Broadway.” But the absurd, combative theatre of it still seems to capture something much more real than, say, Hollywood’s push to make diverse television shows and movies, in which no one in the beautiful, perfectly demographically balanced cast says a damn thing about how weird it is that they have found themselves together in a profoundly segregated country.