Battle rap

Battle rap (also known as rap battling) is a type of rapping that includes bragging and boasting content. Battling can occur on recorded albums, though rap battles are often recited or freestyled spontaneously in live battles, "where MCs will perform on the same stage to see who has the better verses".

Battle rap is described by 40 Cal in the book How to Rap as "extracurricular" and he compares it to the dunk contest in the NBA. Rap battles are often written solely for the purpose of impressing people with technically inventive rapping, and knowing a wide variety of rapping styles and a wide range of MCs is recommended. Some MCs started out writing mostly battle raps and battling other MCs before they began making records.

History

The modern rap battle is generally believed to have originated in the East Coast hip hop scene in the late 1970s. One of the earliest and most infamous battles occurred in December 1982 when Kool Moe Dee challenged Busy Bee Starski - Busy Bee Starski's defeat by the more complex raps of Kool Moe Dee meant that "no longer was an MC just a crowd-pleasing comedian with a slick tongue; he was a commentator and a storyteller" thusly, rendering Busy's archaic format of rap obsolete, in favor of a newer style which KRS-One also credits as creating a shift in rapping in the documentary Beef.

Freestyle rap

Freestyle is a style of rap, with or without instrumental beats, in which rap lyrics are improvised, i.e. performed with no previously composed lyrics, and "off the top of the head". It is similar to other improvisational music such as jazz (Myka 9 of Freestyle Fellowship describes it as being "like a jazz solo") where there is a lead instrumentalist acting as the improviser and the rest of the band providing the beat. Rap battles are improvised in this way.

Original definition

In the book How to Rap, J-lyric and Myka 9 note that originally a freestyle was a spit on no particular subject – J-lyric said, “in the 2000’s ‘ when we said freestyle rap, that meant that it was a rhyme that you kick that was free of style... it’s basically a rhyme just bragging about yourself.” Myka 9 adds, “back in the day freestyle was bust[ing] a rhyme about any random thing, and it was not a written rhyme or something memorized”.Divine Styler says: “in the school I come from, freestyling was a non-conceptual written rhyme... and now they call freestyling off the top of the head, so the era I come from it’s a lot different”.Kool Moe Dee also refers to this earlier definition in his book, There's A God On The Mic: