Learn To Rap

When you listen to emcees such as Big, Pac, Pun, G Rap, Big L, Canibus, Eminem, Sticky Fingaz, Wu Tang etc. and actually listen to the content they produce, the witty things they say, and how they deliver it, you can't help but want to grap a pen and a paper and just start jotting a bunch shit down.

Real Hip Hop, real rap is not about the guns, the drugs, sex, violence, its not about the clubbing and the partying (remember that I said real Hip Hop). We only use those topics as our niche to showcase our skills of rhyming, our lyrical abilities, how we use punchlines and metaphors, the witty lines we come up with, the stories we produce. When you can implement all these factors into a verse, you'll never fail to amaze people on how great of a rapper you are.

I was around 10 when I wrote my first verse, my older brother who was 19 at the time told me to write a rap. I showed him it later on and he was all excited for me, maybe that was due to me being only ten, making me feel good, which it did, it was probably a piece of junk rap. But that moment in time stuck with me til this day. I wrote a lot in my early teens but it was just regular verses with no skills in it, just simple rhyming.

In ninth grade, I started listening to two of my close boys rap, two brothers, both in there mid 20's when I was only 15, but one of them was a lyrical rhyming genious on the mic, complex rhyming, wonderful vocab, witty lines, this really sparked something inside me that just made wanna spit, this was the first time I started to display actual skills in my verses. But it was the other brother who actually taught me how to format my verses.

During ninth grade, french class was the first time I actually battled someone, it was actually a team battle, but I dissed both of them, the verse was about a page, front and back, long. I basically destroyed both of them. Later on we got into more battles, mainly off the top of the head, a few lines the most. The first off the top of the head battle I had, he mentioned something about being able to beat me in a battle, and I responded with "You sure you can beat me, are you positive, cause if I had your flow i'll call myself anonymous" and one of my best friend didn't let me finish, he just hugged me like if that was the greatest thing he ever heard, I just think it caught him off guard that I had an actual good response. But from there on, we had battles almost everyday, and almost everyday i'll get kicked out of class because of it.

By tenth, I had people always wanting to battle me, always trying to spit a verse at me to get me to respond, but I wasn't to open like that, so I never really got into it. But being older and wiser, I was able to listen and pick up on why rappers like Canibus and Big Pun were considered so great, it wasn't the music itself, it was the content and how they were delivering the content that seperated them from a normal rapper, they were considered by many as the greatest rappers. So I implemented everything these rappers had to offer, my writing skills were on point.

My brother got locked up when I was around 10 years old for a gun charge, then manslaughter. I had joined a rap group in eleventh grade, and the first beat I wrote to, I tested it out on my brother, so I spit this verse to him over the phone, and he had me repeat it like 3 times, was trying to call his boys in the jail over to hear this verse I wrote, this dude was amazed, and not cause I was his little brother this time, it was cause I had real skills. By twelth grade, I had the highschool basketball team wanting me to go to there games and battle the other schools after the games. People wanted me on there tracks ro join there group, my poem assainments were always the best in class, as a matter of fact the teacher would have me read it to class, and one of them she kept so she could use as an example of a creative writing poem, more like a rap to me.

I never was into rapping on the mic, but I also figured out how to rap on mic to stand out and not seem plain and boring. I was always into just writing, so this is where the internet comes into play. I started hitting up the internet, mainly rap sites, but none actually had any battle spots, just talk. So this one dude who was also starting off wanted somebody to battle, so I jumped in since I had some shit in my head, some of the lines I remember
"But he aint a geek he more like a dumb ass but he run fast,
Or it must've been because of the sound of the gun blast,"

he mentioned something about the indent in my pance only getting 2 cenimeters bigger so my response was
"And this faggot got excited writting about dick he a fronter,
2 cenimeters bigger he must've got that information from his mother,
But let me explain why, the pussy was to wide plus was to dried,
But whos dick would get hard when pussy starts to attract flies."

he said his mom robbing me, so my response
"Your mom robbed me that night diggin in my pance looking for bread and dough,
So when I catch her Ima Kill and Rob her and really leave her Dead Broke,"

"Aight you a legend but in the future people are going to say Lot was a myth,
Cause somebody that lyrically amazing couldnt have possibly exist"

"Tellin these dealers how he’ll suck dick for coac,
Might as well put your face between two ass cheeks the way you sniff blow"

That wasn't a voting battle, the first voting battle was in a tournament we were throwing, and for some reason I thought it was going to be a few rounds with an opponent, but after I dropped a testing the water verse, voting started, so I was assed out. I was also speaking in general to everyone in that verse
"I'll go first in this text tournament,
Cause if I lose theres goin to be
seven dead emcees hanging off trees like ornaments,"

I lost that battle, but after that battle, my opponent mentioned my name in one of his verses, so of course I had to counter attack, this is what one of the voters said
"Lot Murdered dat verse.... das inferno right der.. if we votin im givin my vote direct to Lot.... das 2 lyrical"

That was just my first time battling online which is a whole different ball game when it comes to battling, cause you can't joke on the opponents shoes, or the gear he got on, or the personal attacks that would make a crowd laugh at the person, you actually have to be creative with your punchlines and metaphors to joke on the opponent which I wasn't really up to par with. So the more I started battling, the more creative I got with my punchlines and metaphors, added on that I was a already a real good rhymer and can think of witty things to say, but now I had metaphors and punchlines intergrated in my verses which is a big plus.

That first site helped me a lot with my writing skills to the point I had someone who worked with sony music wanting me to write for his artist which I turned down, let them write their own stuff. So I began hitting bigger sites, and man, some of these emcees are unbelievable, some of the things they come up with will have you wowed.
"kid's done with.... but he's a known leader, & I got proof/
cuz Black run's shit.... down his leg & into his boots//"

So I knew I had to step it up, so I began battling, I won my first battle and then lost my second battle, then after that, I went about 10 to 12 in a row without losing, lost another to someone I had already beaten and later on beat'em again, and the third time I lost was in a team battle where I had the best verse out of the four battling, but my opponent had the weakest verse and since it was a team battle, they other team got it. Oh yeah, and we had already beaten this team in a previous battle. By the time I had finished battling, I was 21-3, one lost to someone I would destroy right now, another lost to someone I beat twice, and the last lost was to two people my team had already beaten, oh yea, and one of the opponents on that team was the first person I ever battled online, you probably already had read about if you got this far.

But after that, I hadn't really battled much, stuck to just plain writing verses, practicing on my off the top of the head freestyles.