Poetry is Dead, Long Live Battle Rap

Not-a-Sonnet 114, Dec 7, 2023

The Uber turns onto a side street just past a MacDonalds and a shop advertising cheap, no-fault divorces. It’s already been an adventurous trip after I mistakenly get on the N train to Brooklyn and have to backtrack to make the 2:30 ferry to Staten Island with seconds to spare. Garbage-strewn sidewalks are flanked by patina-dulled cars, a few of which look like they were stripped for parts years ago. Tattooed, bearded, and muscled young men bustle around a roped off door to a sagging warehouse. They are dressed casually but carefully in sculptural sneakers and symbol-emblazoned hoodies. Many of them have bling twinkling in their earlobes and gold curb chains draping around their necks. A massive, baby-cheeked man in a red tracksuit and a wiry teenager with spiky red hair give amped-up interviews about their upcoming battles. A frisson of adrenaline spikes through my body: I’m alone in a foreign land.

Penny and Alan arrive, tripling the number of middle-aged white people in the crowd and dampening my sense of alienation. Penny is a dear friend, modest and warmly kind while also needle smart and fiercely determined — she’s the head of vaccines at one of the leading Pharma companies in the world. Her husband Alan, an ecstatically goofy, 60-year-old, market research executive, is the instigator of this adventure. He started painting battle rappers six months ago after he saw an article about them in the New York Times. He posted his paintings on Instagram @ahsoart – vibrant, color-block, live-action portraits captured from videos on iBattleTV. The battle rappers tracked him down and asked him to do more. Since then, he’s painted over twenty portraits of the rappers in the iBattle league, trading them to their subjects for swag. Today, he’s attending his first event in-person and delivering a couple of portraits by hand. These young men love him for it: he’s welcomed with full-grip handshakes that pull him close for body-encompassing hugs. We take obligatory selfies with the new owners of the portraits before being ushered as VIPs into the venue.

The warehouse is narrow and dim, barely the size of an expansive kitchen in a suburban house. There is a table at the far end where a panel of judges preside, notably the burly, statesmanlike owner of the League, Lexx Luthor. Cords hang from the open rafters and AV equipment clutters the table while cameras extend into the faces of the rappers. The rappers perform as much to the camera as to the spectators, who provide an animated backdrop to the lucrative videos that are posted online. There are no chairs so we stand close, peering between heads and shoulders to catch glimpses of the two rappers pacing in anticipation of battle. Its only 3pm but most people are rolling joints and passing bongs that look like monstrous parsnips. The man standing next to me has a large bottle of VSOP brandy tucked into the back pocket of his sagging yellow sweatpants. 

The best rappers are on the card later in the evening, so we are astounded at the quality of these early rap battles. The first contestant is a tall, attractive rapper from London who disparages America in his opening sequence. He’s witty and crisp, and the lilt of a British accent makes his crude insults seem almost elegant. His opponent, a member of the local league, is soft-spoken and blurs his words so he’s hard to follow. Nonetheless, the crowd is on his side against this foreign interloper and cheer wildly whenever he manages to land a good line. After their opening sequence, the opponents circle each other, gesturing aggressively and throwing down insults throughout two more rounds of “rebuttals” until the battle is over. Their bodies visibly drain of tension as they gulp water and hug each other warmly.

Each battle is at least 20 minutes-long and the raps are complex, epic poems prepared in advance and memorized, with room for improvisation, especially in the rebuttals. It’s incredibly to think about how much effort goes into composition and memorization, a practice I can’t imagine my highly educated children doing. Occasionally, the contestants lose their train of thought and must pause and repeat a line to remember where they are in the sequence. The crowd is patient, knowing how much courage it takes for these guys to expose themselves in this way. There is no shame in this occasional faltering.  

Similar narratives repeat within the rounds and between the contestants. Tropes of guns, violence, neighborhoods, and families are woven with pop culture references, political commentary, and inside gossip about the league. At the beginning, the rappers warm up with easy jabs, often with racist insults and misogynistic quips – I physically jolt at an especially crude reference to violating a white woman. But as the raps progress, the lyrics morph into vulnerability about the chaos of their lives, their fears, their defiance of oppression and poverty. Emotions play across faces that exude the luminosity particular to intense expression of self. The crowd engages with this intensity, the rhythms of words a heartbeat of shared feeling that releases with woops of laughter and appreciative curses upon the landing of a particularly witty line.

After three rounds, my feet hurt, and my throat is dry. Neither Penny nor I want to brave the sketchy bathroom at the back of the warehouse. We head for dinner at Enoteca Maria, a famous restaurant on Staten Island where “Nonnas” from around the world cook alongside the original Italian Nonna. She’s an ancient, tiny, cheerful grandma who comes out of the kitchen to hold our hands as she thanks us for coming and tells us about the movie being made about her. Penny and I down a bottle of Nebbiolo to calm our over-stimulated brains. We feast on the best meatballs and lasagne we’ve ever eaten while inventing corny raps about RNA therapeutics. After dinner, Penny and Alan light Davidoff cigars that Penny brought from a recent trip to London. We walk back to the venue rolling smoke around our mouths that tastes like the smell of Penny’s grandfather’s shirts from the tobacco farm in Kentucky where she grew up.

The second half is more intense. The warehouse is crowded so we press against each other, becoming one mass of swaying people responding to the rhythms of the raps. These rappers are confident in their lines, so they are able to use their bodies and voices as instruments to perform their raps. They pound out words in a drumbeat of increasing intensity, then slow down purposefully to land meaning. They circle rhythmically, the gesticulations of shoulders, arms and hands acting out their stories. They turn words inside out and juxtapose conflicting ideas in a sophisticated manipulation of language to generate visceral emotion. The crowd becomes an integral part of the rap, intoning Psalm-like responses to the call of each cresting verse. The best lines are chanted back by the crowd with reverence, the rapper becoming a reverend of communal self-expression.

The final rapper Tay-Roc is a phenom – a towering wizard of energy transmitted in rhythm and rhyme. I don’t remember anything he says. By that point, my mind has entered a fugue state, no doubt influenced by the unusual (to me) combination of Nebbiolo, nicotine, and secondhand cannabis. But I do know that his poem spirals, looping phrases and ideas, cycling through a range of emotions, in increasing waves of energy that the crowd mainlines. As they immerse in his poetry, the faces in this audience of mostly non-descript, rough-looking men open into strange, compelling beauty. It feels like Tay-Roc’s rap is magically transcending the closely held identities and individual stories of every person in the room. I too am part of this collective consciousness: laughing, dancing, and chanting ecstatically, at one with all of this vital humanity. After Tay-Roc finishes, he makes his way through the adulating crowd. I uncharacteristically demand a selfie, which he gently obliges. He is a surprisingly slight and shy man.

On the ferry back to Manhattan, we pass the Statue of Liberty and her twinkling lights reach out to me across the Hudson River. I feel delirious with hope for this country. Where else can an affluent white guy be welcomed into a community of rappers? Where else can grandmothers from around the world became famous for cooking comfort food? Where else can the granddaughter of a tobacco farmer from Kentucky become one of the most influential vaccine developers of our time? Where else can poetry be liberated into the kind of language that transforms alienated young men into brilliant artists? Where else can a nascent poet, over-exposed to the erudition of dead white men, find transcendence in the words of uncouth youth? I think about writing a battle rap to celebrate this experience. But I know that rap is form-fit for their stories, voices, and truths. I need to keep finding my own.