THIS STORY ORIGINALLY APPEARS IN THE MARCH 2011 ISSUE OF XXL. ON SALE NOW.
Cassidy spent his formative years in North Philadelphia dreaming of becoming a rap star. But there were a few problems: He couldn’t afford studio time. He couldn’t write a song. He didn’t know how to build a reputation. “It wasn’t like I could get people a mixtape or a record on the radio,” he says of the time, around the late 1990s. “The best way to get my name known was to battle.”
He battled on street corners. He battled at the Broad and Olney train station. He battled classmates at Central High School. And he destroyed the competition at a battle hosted by Philly’s 103.9 The Beat. The scrapping paid off when, in 1999, Swizz Beatz’s father, Terrance Dean, who was scouting for talent in Philadelphia, requested a meeting with Cassidy in a barbershop. By the age of 18, Cass signed to Ruff Ryders, and eventually moved to Swizz’s Full Surface Records, when the producer got his own imprint on Sony through J Records. Cassidy’s big break didn’t happen, however, until May 2002, when he battled Roc-A-Fella Records artist and fellow Philly MC Freeway at the Hit Factory in Manhattan. Luckily, someone had a camera.
With Jay-Z, Swizz and Beanie Sigel looking on, the two upstarts went back and forth for 17 minutes, until Cassidy pummeled Freeway into submission. “Put a beat on,” Freeway wheezed. “I want to spit over a track.” When the tape leaked online later that year, Cassidy’s stock soared. Today, he isn’t so sure it was all such a good thing. “The people that might want to hear songs from me might have thought of me as a battle rapper even though I had much more to bring to the table,” Cassidy says today.
Cassidy released his gold-certified album Split Personality in 2004. The title reflects the struggle most battle rappers endure: crossing over from the take-no-prisoners battle world into the big-business major-label hip-hop scene, where crowd-pleasing punch lines take a backseat to songwriting and marketability.
With his four solo albums and two hit singles (2004’s “Hotel,” featuring R. Kelly, and 2005’s “I’m a Hustla,” which featured production from Swizz Beatz and a prominent Jay-Z vocal sample), Cassidy has had a respectable career. He is also the last battle rapper to make a successful transition into the mainstream. When hip-hop started out, in the late 1970s and 1980s, battling (think Jimmy “B-Rabbit” Smith [Eminem] vs. Papa Doc [Anthony Mackie] in 8 Mile, not rap beefs like Eminem vs. Benzino in real life) was a rite of passage for aspiring MCs. Even superstars who aren’t thought of as battle rappers, such as Jay-Z, The Notorious B.I.G., Cam’ron and Ludacris, came up lyrically sparring with combatants.
It’s an indispensible part of the culture, but these days, battling is a niche sport.
When the pioneers battled during hip-hop’s early days, they weren’t directing rhymes at the other MC. It was about getting the bigger crowd reaction. That all changed on December 30, 1981, at Harlem World, when Kool Moe Dee manhandled Busy Bee Star Ski with rhymes accusing Busy of biting the MC/DJ Lovebug Starski: “Now, to bite a nigga’s name is some low-down shit/If you was money, man, you’d be counterfeit.”
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, battles were organized coast to coast at events such as the New Music Seminar, Skribble Jam, Rap Olympics and Lyricist’s Lounge. Rhymes were spit over a beat and were typically freestyles (original impromptu rhymes). “If you spit a written rhyme, you were ridiculed and shunned,” says Poison Pen, the former battle rapper who now runs the East Coast division of the battle organization Grind Time. “I had written rhymes but only [used them] in four-to-eight-bar bursts, to weave in with the freestyles.”
The 2002 release of Eminem’s semiautobiographical film 8 Mile thrust battling into the spotlight even more after the critically acclaimed flick grossed $116 million domestically. (Craig G wrote the rhymes for Eminem’s fictional rivals.) Battling was already enjoying a resurgence at the time, thanks to the battle competition Freestlye Fridays on BET’s wildly popular 106 & Park, where every Friday, two unknown MCs squared off for two 30-second rounds. Afterwards, celebrity guest judges decided the victor.
“The battle community embraced it,” says Harlem-born rapper Loaded Lux, who appeared on Freestyle Fridays in 2007. “I saw it as an opportunity, a way to bring what we did toward the masses.” Lux claims that he received calls from Diddy and “people from [Dr.] Dre’s camp” following his appearance in the competition.
Even though the format was kind of diluted—no cursing allowed?!?—Freestyle Fridays became a trendy new breeding ground in hip-hop, and major labels snapped up the program’s breakout stars: Ma$e and Nelly’s former manager Cudda Love signed Manhattan’s Posta Boy to Universal; Jermaine Dupri lured the Rochester, New York–born rapper SunN.Y to So So Def; and most notably, Ruff Ryders inked the Miami-born Chinese-American rapper Jin. None of them became stars. And following the disappointing album sales of 1990s battle stalwarts such as Supernatural, Skillz and Craig G, battle rappers were (unfairly?) stigmatized in the industry.
BET even briefly got out of the battle act after audition candidates sharply declined in 2005. “People were rhyming slower, and hooks started taking precedent,” says Pat Charles, senior writer of 106 & Park and Freestyle Fridays producer since 2008. “We changed the format and tried to do, like, song battles. I think we changed because hip-hop was changing a lot.” Freestyle Fridays were discontinued in 2007; a revamped version returned the following year.
WORDS BY THOMAS GOLIANOPOULOS
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