Judging systems in battle rap
Rap has a long history of competition. Rappers compete to spit the best verse on collaborative songs, make diss tracks, and challenge each other to battles where they pit improvised or well-prepared insults against each other to settle disputes or decide who’s the better rapper.
Rap battles aren’t like physical fights, because no one is decisively knocked out or submitted. Then again, not all fights end with a knockout or submission: some are settled by judges. And in an effort to decide the outcomes of rap battles, spectators, arrangers and fans have used a variety of judging systems too.
While I’m writing this mostly for the already-initiated, I will not assume you are. Here is a quick rundown of useful battle-rap terminology for the uninitiated:
The thing that rappers, battlers or (perhaps old-fashioned) emcees do is rap or spit. The smallest units they spit are bars or lines: meters or bars as in music and poetry, that usually end with a rhyme. The word ‘bars’ can also refer to the quality of their content, and so be reserved for actually good bars: someone who “doesn’t have bars” is someone who is bad at rapping. ‘Rhymes’ can similarly be used not to refer strictly to “things that rhyme” but a rapper’s bars.
Example of a bar (free from its context):
My shit’s more beautifully imagined than you can even fathom
Here, beautifully imagined and you can even fathom are multi-syllabic rhymes in a sense anyone “in the know” will agree with, despite not being perfect rhymes: the three emphasized syllables in the rhyme pattern have vocalic qualities that match, and the quality of the unemphasized syllables is reduced and the consonants that the rhymes end with near-irrelevant: [ˈbjuɾəˌfli ɪˈmæd͡ʒɪnd], [ju kən ˈivən ˈfæðəm]. For a brilliant primer here on Substack on rhymes, especially as used in hip-hop and battle rap, see Cam Peters’ Rhymes: From Dr Seuss to Dr Dre.
Bars can make up schemes, rhyme schemes, n-bar patterns or n-bar setups, which can be compared to “paragraphs,” or defined as groups of bars (from 2 to as many as the author wants), especially that follow the same rhyme pattern or whose content has a particular theme. Setups are bars leading up to the last one in a group, which often contains a punchline. Not all battlers necessarily use ‘schemes,’ especially if their style of rap is free-form, but generically, bars are grouped into 4-bar patterns.1
Example from Bender vs. Fredo Algebra (1:57–2:09):
My shit’s more beautifully imagined than you can even fathom
after doing a sheet of acid on the moon with Peter Frampton
Put Fredo in the ring with me, now you can see what happens
in a brutal reenactment of when Zeus released the Kraken
When a battler gives up his turn, he has spit a verse, which is to say a complete selection of bars, most likely composed of many schemes. In hip-hop music, the average verse is 16, 24 or 32 bars long, but the typical battle-rap verse is measured in minutes rather than bars. A verse can be as short as 1 minute or as long as 30, but some common lengths are 2, 3 and 5 (and anything beyond that typically falls under unlimited or ‘no time limit’).
If a battler chokes, he has forgotten his coming bars or otherwise become distracted and comes to an abrupt stop, or (rarely) he stumbles on his words. In the worst-case scenario, if he doesn’t recover or if recovery time is not allowed,2 this means he gives up his turn prematurely. If recovery time is allowed and a battler who has choked cannot recall his bars and decides to freestyle, it means he improvises bars. If the transition to freestyle is executed skillfully and seamlessly, some won’t call the failure to recall the rest of the verse a ‘choke’ per se, whereas others will view such a failure as synonymous with a choke no matter the recovery.
When both battlers have taken turns to spit one verse each, the round is over. The next round can commence. Sometimes, a ‘round’ can also refer to one rapper’s verse—the rhyme scheme quoted above came from Bender’s first round versus Fredo. In a round, one rapper can address points made by the other in their last round, which is called a rebuttal (even as a verb!).
A number of rounds constitutes a battle. There can be as few as 1, and as many as 20, but the average battle has 3.
A battle where one rapper wins decisively is a body (short for bodybag) or a landslide. The rapper who lost decisively ‘got bodied.’
There is any number of possible criteria to judge the outcome of a battle. Some people focus mostly on the bars, which is to say how well-crafted they are: whether the wordplay is clever, the punchlines hard-hitting or funny, the cadences intricate and flashy, the rhymes multi-syllabic, and the verse in its entirety well-organized. Some people focus mostly on the content: whether there were sufficient disses aimed at the specific opponent rather than general braggadocio and material that could’ve applied to anyone no matter how well-crafted, the quality and effectiveness of the disses, story-telling ability, etc. Some people focus on the performance: whether the battlers brought sufficient energy, made a convincing case as the threats they portrayed themselves as (believability is often important in battle rap), made clever use of props or antics, were able to control the crowd and use psychological tricks to their advantage, improvised or wrote their material, etc. Some people count chokes as the other rapper’s win of the round—no matter how bad his round was or how good the choker’s round was before the incident—or even their win of the whole battle by default.
But either way, 9 times out of 10, people will judge the outcome of a battle by the number of rounds won.
When a martial-arts fight goes the distance, which is to say last all set number of rounds without anyone getting (T)KO’d, submitted or disqualified, points are scored per round, for example by highest number of significant strikes and highest ratio of hits compared to whiffs. The terminology of the number of rounds won by one fighter over the other has carried over into battle rap: a battler wins a three-round battle either 2–1 (pronounced “two one” without the “to” in the middle) or 3–0. Or it’s a toss-up (draw) or ‘debatable’ (it will come down to individual style preference). But let’s criticize the logic of this system.
Both competitors’ efforts in a physical fight occur simultaneously, until the round is over to briefly allow for rest and rehydration. So naturally, points scored within each round make sense. The specific ways one fighter defends against the other’s attacks in a round, and vice versa, matter. But the competitors’ efforts in a rap battle occur sequentially, and the ‘rounds’ are just a way to divide the battle into phases rather than logical breaks between verses which are strictly pitted against each other. Really, the sum of all of one rapper’s verses are pitted against the sum of all the other’s.
The origin of a round in battle rap, I speculate, may well have been a simple side effect of hip-hop verses generally being a certain number of bars. I doubt the competitive spirit within the early rappers who first started to improvise disses to each other in rhyme would have allowed them to call it quits after an exchange of 16 bars each, totaling something like three minutes. They would have kept going, and exchanged insults until either one ran out of steam or couldn’t outwit their opponent and conceded. And I think this necessitated a turn-taking system, which itself does not presuppose any particular judging system.
Consider the fact that in a battle, one rapper has to go first. There are few advantages to doing so, so who will is most often decided by a coin toss. This means that whoever loses the coin toss relinquishes the opportunity to address points that his opponent makes in his first round, because he has yet to hear it and is forced to spit all of his own first round before really having an idea what his opponent will say.
Unlike a boxing match, where one fighter can immediately try to gauge what the other is doing as he instigates his offense, and react defensively, retaliate or plan a counter-strategy, the first rapper out in a battle cannot do anything defensively except try to predict what the other will say and preemptively rebuttal it. So it makes little sense to judge the top of the first round by its interaction with the bottom of the first round, and yet the bottom may directly interact with the top in a way that can undeniably impact how one scores the exchange, for example by way of rebuttals.
This begs the question: why, then, when the first round is over, do we hold them against each other and make a call as to which rapper “won the round?” Sure, you can have a distinct idea of which verse you liked better regardless of their interaction. Whoever spit the best verse won the round.
But the first rapper out in the battle is not precluded from making rebuttals in his second round of things said in his opponent’s first round. Yet when the second round is over, we will make another call as to who won that round. “Rapper A is winning 2–0” or “It’s neck-and-neck, it comes down to the third round.” There might have been an interaction between Rapper A’s round 2 and Rapper B’s round 1 which isn’t properly accounted for; we can say that the rebuttal in the top of the second was fire and made Rapper A edge the round, but we’re neglecting the fact that it was a move that effectively countered something in Rapper B’s previous round. No maneuver in a boxing match will ever score a fighter a point for defending against an attack made by his opponent in a previous round. This is a problem with judging battles by rounds.
Consider another. We may want to compare verses spit in a battle in some way. There is no widely accepted scoring system for rounds, but if we devise one for the sake of argument, we may score both battlers a total of 10 points per round, and the ratio will tip each of them in one battler’s favor. An even round, where both battlers are equally lackluster or equally brilliant, would be scored 5:5, and an absolute smokefest where one gives the performance of a lifetime and the other chokes within 5 seconds and waives his round would be scored 9:1. Let’s say that in Rapper A vs. Rapper B, A has a fairly consistent round 1 and 2, and edges them over B by a ratio of 6:4 both rounds. But then B has scheduled his most devastating material for round 3, and A loses all of his steam, so it’s 3:7 in B’s favor.
A scenario like this will, 9 times out of 10, be considered A’s win. 2–1. But by points, it’s a draw: 6 + 6 + 3 = 15 points for A and 4 + 4 + 7 = 15 points for B. Assume B wins the third round even more convincingly—2:8—and it’s 2–1 for A by rounds but 14:16 in favor of B by points.
Taken together with our previous point about verses being sequential and therefore not just interacting with each other within the same-numbered round as fights do, but being parts of a non-negligible whole, this hypothetical point-scoring system should make us curious as to how each of the battlers’ rounds compare to all of the other’s. That is, the score ratio of A’s round 1 to B’s round 1, 2 and 3, and A’s round 2 to B’s 1, 2 and 3, and so on. This will both give you the freedom to award a verse extra points for the effectiveness of a rebuttal even across “round boundaries,” and allow you to compare the general quality of one verse with another even if they coincidentally didn’t occur within the “same round.”
Here is a hypothetical scenario.
In Rapper A vs. Rapper B, the rounds play out as follows:
A-1: okay.
B-1: good.
A-2: good but a significant choke with successful recovery.
B-2: very strong.
A-3: incredible, best verse in the whole battle.
B-3: horrible choke and ended prematurely.
Here is what a matrix comparing all verses to each other could look like. 1 through 3 represent the round number and A the rounds by Rapper A and B the rounds by rapper B. The ratios are between the points scored to the round indicated in the column and those scored to the round indicated in the row (or A:B).
··· A-1 A-2 A-3
B-1 4:6 6:4 7:3
B-2 3:7 2:8 6:4
B-3 7:3 8:2 9:1
Let’s take stock of what we can glean from this.
Basically, in the diagonal line from the top left to the bottom right, you have the three ratios that would matter if you only cared about how each verse fared against each other within the same round: 4:6, 2:8 and 9:1, for an outcome of 2–1 in Rapper B’s favor. He may have lost round 3 decisively, but he edged round 1 and got round 2 clearly.
By points, however, it’s a total of 4 + 2 + 9 = 15 points for A and 6 + 8 + 1 = 15 points for B, so a toss-up. This alone reveals a paradox.
But you also see how each verse compared to all others, for a more representative score of all the one rapper’s output versus the other’s. Yes, sure, A’s round 2 was good but he choked, and B’s round 2 was very strong, so B won that one. But what about B’s 2 versus A’s 3, which was incredible? Any number of things could have factored into each rapper’s choice as to which verse to schedule first, second and third, and it might as well have been any other order.
Add all of A’s points together and you get 4 + 3 + 7 + 6 + 2 + 8 + 7 + 6 + 9 = 52 and with B’s you get 6 + 7 + 3 + 4 + 8 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 1 = 38, showing a win for A by a ratio of almost 6:4. The coincidence of which of each rapper’s verses ended up in which order and how they matched up against each other within each third of the battle is now controlled for, so though that helped tip it 2–1 in B’s favor in the traditional view, this shows that the outcome could’ve been different even in the traditional view merely by jumbling around the order of the verses, and that the score is shifted in the opposite direction when looking at the battle as a whole.
There is yet another fault with this judging system, in my opinion, which is the assumption to begin with that the verses need be directly compared to each other. Say we grant each verse a score from 0 to 10 based on whether it meets certain criteria, but independently of the content of any other of the opponent’s verses. This means that an even round—5:5—could either be a 0/10 versus a 0/10 for equal suckiness, or a 10/10 versus a 10/10 for equal excellence. We could then decide which rapper won the battle by adding up those points, rather than the ratios. Each verse is to be judged on its own merit as a “work.”
Let the previous outcomes of our hypothetical battle correspond to the following scores:
A-1: okay = 5/10
B-1: good = 6/10
A-2: good but a significant choke with successful recovery = 5/10
B-2: very strong = 7/10
A-3: incredible, best verse in the whole battle = 9/10
B-3: horrible choke and ended prematurely = 2/10
Here, it is useless to compare A’s round 1 to B’s rounds 1–3 and so on—either way, A racked up a total of 5 + 5 + 9 = 19 points and B 6 + 7 + 2 = 15. There was some back-and-forth action, and highlights and rough spots for both rappers, but in the end A won. Divide those scores by the number of rounds and you get arbitrary but handy numbers (in reality representing “average score per round”) that can be compared with the same scores for performances in other battles with a different number of rounds, for an estimation of which performances you liked better. For example, A’s average per round in this battle would be 19 / 3 ≈ 6.3 and B’s would be 15 / 3 = 5. If A has another battle versus Rapper C, which has five rounds instead of three, and scores 7 + 6 + 5 + 3 + 8 = 29, it’s not comparable to his score of 19 for the three-round A vs. B, but divide it by 5 and you get 5.8—an indication that he might have given his stronger performance vs. B than vs. C. Hey, you can even get a score of how good a battle was in general by adding together each battler’s score and dividing it by 2: A vs. B in our example gets (6.3 + 5) / 2 = 5.65. Useless when it comes to bodybags, but useful when it comes to classics (debatables with top-notch performances).
The 2–1 and 3–0 terminology has its charms. It has become the de facto way to score battles, and sometimes jokingly even to evaluate battles with fewer than three rounds: if A beats B decisively in a one-rounder, fans might clown B and say “How are you gonna lose 3–0 in a 1 round battle?” 3–0 has even morphed into a verb to mean ‘body’ (even though, as I’ve implied, you can technically edge all three rounds, which is to say win 3–0 by a hair), and it has even been shortened further to 30 (‘thirty’) in common parlance, which Norfolk, VA battle rapper Bigg K has embraced in a third-round finishing slogan that lets his opponents and crowds know that this was yet another battle where he denies losing a single round: “Another 30 sack of work, the dawg strikes again.”
But taken literally, the round-by-round judging system is bad, for the reasons I’ve tried to explain:
It assumes a magical boundary between exchanges of verses that are artificially paired together as an accident of how battles in general evolved, and as an accident of which verses in a particular battle happened to come first, second and third.
It doesn’t account for the difference in quality between these exchanges of verses in its scale, or the difference in quality between the one rapper’s total output versus the other’s, but only who won what round.
It doesn’t indicate how well either of the competitors did all-in-all, but only who won the battle.
My suggestion to calculate average scores per verse is nowhere near as sexy, but it may help elucidate, if nothing else to oneself, which battles, performances and rounds one enjoys the most, and it may come in handy when the outcome of a battle deserves more elaboration than a ‘2–1,’ ‘3–0’ or ‘debatable.’ And I’m sure similar terminology could in theory grow out of a point system, such as a bodybag being at least a 7–3 and at most a 10–0, or a lackluster debatable being 5–5.
The real difficulty then comes down to which criteria to use to decide outcomes rather than the mathematics of score-keeping.
R.I.P. to Pat Stay, one of the world’s greatest battle rappers:
For a room-shaking moment in a battle where Hollow da Don parodied Charlie Clips’ approach to rhyme schemes, which is so formulaic as to telegraph the punchlines, see Hollow’s first round vs. Clips (9:05–10:40):
After describing Clips’ approach, and establishing that it is simplistic and predictable, Hollow builds on a climactic rhyme scheme of his own,
I ain’t saying your shit wack
But bro, it’s the same move every time you kick that
Setup, punchline, setup, punchline … that’s how you spit that?
Just a candy rapper with 4 bars, you a …
but unbeknownst to the crowd, he won’t say the last word of the bar. The wordplay revolving around candy rapper (a rapper whose bars are simplistic and corny), candy wrapper and candy bars (raps that are simplistic and corny) is so well-known and overused that Hollow trusts that the crowd will anticipate KitKat to be the punchline—rather ingenious since that is of course a chocolate candy composed of 4 connected bars, and he is deriding precisely Clips’ over-reliance on segments of 4 connected bars to write his verses. To demonstrate how little skill it takes to do that, he lets the crowd finish the bar, before adding the final touch:
Just a candy rapper with 4 bars, you a … [crowd: KitKat!] See how easy it is to predict that?
Devastating.
There are no circumstances I’m aware of in an established, modern battle-rap league where time to recover from a choke is not allowed, but in parts of the U.S. especially in street battles in the 2000’s, crowds pretty much unanimously agreed that a choke was a sign that the turn was over. Even if it was a minor stumble and the rapper recovered immediately and kept rapping, crowds would often start to holler, completely drowning out the rapper. Alternatively, his opponent would immediately start rapping his next verse upon recognizing the stumble, loudly so as to steal his turn.
In this example from the classic Loaded Lux vs. Murda Mook in Harlem, NY, Lux loses his bearings for no more than a second and Mook immediately interrupts, the cameraman alludes to the “rule” that his turn is up, and the crowd starts hollering (11:57–12:25):
In the modern era, recovery time is always allowed, but it is sometimes painfully awkward to watch a battler struggle and fail to recover, so the round will eventually be cut short as an act of mercy.