Rich Seng, creator and producer of Rhyme Spitters II, the freestyle battle tournament that took place last Saturday, was so confident about his favorite MCs that he had a couple camera crews for an upcoming DVD trailing them at ten in the morning. Prime, T-Scar, Jah Safe, Vitamen D, Shamgod, Jargon, Jitu–he expected them all to advance to the finals at the Note that night. But crowds always love to cheer on an underdog, especially one who can shake up a veteran. Only one of Seng’s freestyle titans, 25-year-old Jah Safe, made it to the final four. And he ended up pitted against an unlikely opponent–20-year-old Sketch 185, a junior at the American Academy of Arts who’d already been eliminated earlier in the day.
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The first Rhyme Spitters tournament, last summer, drew 64 competitors. This year the number jumped to 160, and the prize money doubled from $1,000 to $2,000. The initial rounds were held under the hot sun in Wicker Park, where contestants swarmed around four battle stations. An MC named Alpha Male got laughs from the crowd when he shot at a competitor “You’re dumber than not doing this shit in the shade!” Battlers faced off one-on-one: the first would rhyme for 30 seconds–timed by one of the judges’ cell phones–then his opponent would have 30 seconds to retaliate, and then they’d repeat the process one more time, for the most part working without musical accompaniment. The rounds lasted until the 160 were cut down to 32. By then, Seng, who runs the production company Cherry Bomb, had 16 cameras shooting the action.
It took 31 battles to whittle the 32 finalists at the Note down to one champ. A DJ was now providing backup for the freestyles. When the skills of two MCs were too close to call, judges and audience alike would call for an extra round where competitors traded blows every four bars instead of every eight.
Sketch’s most difficult win was over Doomsday, a smart MC who opened with a slam on Sketch’s microphone troubles: “Here we go y’all, it’s fight night / I’ve been watching you the whole time, you need to hold the mike right.” But Sketch kept chipping away at him, serving below-the-belt digs at Doomsday’s ethnicity: “Wanna mess with me? I spit a lipful / This what happens when a Puerto Rican fucks a pit bull.” When he was pronounced the winner much of the audience booed.
