“In its full HD glory” – Canibus v. Dizaster [VIDEO]

By now you’ve heard what happened. And, by the second you arrive at this here comma, chances are you’re already sick of this post and no longer give a shit about the Canibus catastrophe.  But I wanted to voice a couple of last opinions on the matter (my initial thoughts), so here goes…

First. The press release containing this video was from Matt Conway. In the email Matt stated the brief line you see quoted above in the title. It’s priceless. He’s a publicist and his promotion of the video was one-hundred-percent tongue-in-cheek. It’s quite possibly the funniest email to ever find its way to the TECB inbox. Matt, if you read this, cheers to you. If only Verbal and I could cash checks for being smart-asses, too.

Second and lastly. I believe Bis did all right in the opening round. The whole reciting punch-lines from ten-years ago for crowd participation gimmick was actually pretty great. It spoke in a volume that Dizaster’s multi-syllabic, billion-bar-an-hour raps will never, ever fulfill. That said, Dizaster is obviously the clear-cut winner of this battle. The way he prefaced that one line about “putting my own dog to sleep” was perfect and that alone crushed everything Bis had to offer.

The end. Hopefully we’ll never talk of this again.

99% of Canibus fans no longer exist.

Although this will likely go down as the most historically embarrassing performance by emceeing and battle standards, I think the choke-job spectacle Canibus put on yesterday for the Vendetta competition is one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen. KOTD has yet to release all of the footage, but some of the stunned fans who purchased the live stream of the event had uploaded a few rough cuts onto YouTube. (See above.)

As you can see, he came strapped. Not in MC Eiht fashion with a glock tucked into his waist ready to season some broth, but on some dorky old senile man type shit with his right arm in a sling and rhyme-book in hand. Yes, after what I’m sure was a decent amount of money to appear, months of preparation time, and a decade-plus of spitting hundred-bar verses, Bis shows up to battle looking like the biggest pussy of a rapper of all time, and, on top of that, resorts to reciting rhymes from his notepad after not being able to recall the apparent thirty-pages of pre-writtens in his arsenal.

I’ve spent the better part of today preoccupied by this event, essentially by way of Bis’s awesomely awkward human metronome act being an unintentional mockery of what rap battles are today. Years ago, emcees had to improvise rhymes for competitors who weren’t known until it was time to square off. Now rappers sustain arm injuries from writing lines like “You just a funny guy with peanut butter-brown honey eyes” and read bars to the crowd like it’s story time in elementary school.  This whole Battle Royal event did nothing for the battle circuit but hold a magnifying glass above it so people could see how corny it has become.

All in all, I actually feel quite bad for Canibus. But I thank him for solidifying my opinion on the modern-day rap battle. Cats just aren’t doing it like this anymore. And it’s disappointing.

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