Tagged: QP

Battles of the month: March

QP-vs-QP

After a dry February that produced few quality battles, March has reaffirmed our faith in battle rap. URL ended its drought by finally dropping Cortez vs JJDD and will be back to weekly releases now that their Ultimate Freestyle Friday competition has started airing on BET. KOTD has been dropping their Blackout 4 videos weekly on the main channel and have been quick to release footage from Vancity’s Gastown event. Don’t Flop has released only U.K. vs U.K. matchups this month, and hasn’t made much noise with North American fans outside of a solid battle between Unanymous and Olde English. UW hasn’t made a peep about an official release of their High Stakes footage, but whatever, everybody already watched the PPV or a bootleg of it.

Even with all that going on, four of the five battles we’re highlighting below come from smaller leagues. Don’t sleep.

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Top 10 KOTD battles of 2013

Bigg K

King of the Dot spent much of 2013 trying to find a balance.

In Toronto, Blackout 3 had the biggest audience a KOTD event had ever seen, but the massive crowd meant that it was difficult to see and hear the battles in the venue. For Vengeance 2, the venue was too big for the smaller crowd and for World Domination 4 the venue was fine but the audio in the footage was hit-or-miss and the crowd was often unruly.

The California division rebuilt the West Coast battle scene to its former glory, providing a platform for both returning legends and a slew of new talent. Each event (Resurgence, Alcatraz and Takeover) showed progression, eventually culminating in the year’s best: Battle of the Bay 6.

Calgary’s Quarantine and Vancouver’s GZGP semi-finals events featured those cities’ best matchups to date and hinted at even bigger things to come.

But as for the battles, KOTD put out more classics than any other league this year. The quality of content from WD4 and BOTB6 was unrivaled and most of the big-name matchups lived up to or exceeded their expectations.

Honestly, picking the 10 best battles from KOTD’s releases this year wasn’t easy, so if your Top 10 list varies from ours, we won’t necessarily say you’re wrong.

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Battles of the week: June 2 - 8

In this week’s battles: new talent gets some shine, a rapper is interrupted by a crackhead, and TOBattleBlog gets its first reference.

B-MAGIC VS TAY ROC

This is a master’s class in street battle rap. Both guys draw deep on references from all over the world of sports, movies, history, geography, hip hop and battling and somehow manage to bring all of it back to shooting each other.

We’ll break down just one of B-Magic’s bars so you get a sense:

“I’m hella sick, boy/you get turned down the wrong road/I bet these 3 16s will leave him Stone Cold/So try again like you typed in the wrong code/I’m Shock G/I’ll leave you underground with this long nose.”

Both rappers get 14 “Don Demarcos,” tying Lotta Zay’s record against Tone Montana.

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