After a now-much publicized loss against Hollow Da Don at Total Slaughter over the weekend, Joe Budden spoke with Angry Fans Radio yesterday (July 14) about what happened at the event and why he reacted poorly to being booed by the crowd.
“I was a little disappointed,” he said of the battle overall. “I thought that him and I both underwhelmed. I know that he feels the same. There were major microphone issues which left us both with a decision to make. Hollow, his voice is higher pitched than mine, so he went with the hands-free mic which enabled him to have an amazing performance even if we couldn’t really hear what he was saying. But, I felt my words were really important so I went with the mic that you had to hold in your hand which threw everything else off. Horrible performance which went to a horrible delivery. It went to everything. Really the only thing that was good were my words and that was it.”
Addressing his struggle with the battle’s time limits, Budden added that he felt like he was just getting into a groove when his time was cut short.
“I didn’t understand how the time was being managed,” he said. “I had a lot more to go, I had a lot more to say in my first round and they stopped right when I felt I was heating up, I was cooking.”
During the interview, Joe Budden also detailed his own view of his battle performance and spoke about public consensus that his second round was his strongest.
“That’s the consensus,” he said. “Everybody is saying the second round is my best round. But going in the way that I had it and the people that I let hear had it, my first round was my best. My third round was my next best, and my second round was my worst. I think last time I spoke to you guys I said something about, ‘I’ve never done it so I don’t know how to gauge things. I don’t know what will work, what won’t work.’ I just didn’t know. My second verse was a lot to the point. It wasn’t all the fancy wordplay...It was just like talking to him and that’s what the people loved about it.”
Talking about the experience of getting booed during his third round, the Slaughterhouse rapper said, “in my profession you don’t rap over boos.”
“To be honest, I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I don’t know what happened then. It just seemed like they were ready to boo.
“It didn’t get to me mentally at all, which is the thing,” he added. “In my profession, you don’t rap over boos. It’s like Rapper 101 to know that if you at a show and niggas is booing, ‘Ya’ll, go ahead and boo. I got paid already.’ I’m either gonna wait for ya’ll to stop or I’m getting the fuck outta here. But in battle rap it’s very different. You gotta deal with it. You gotta rap over it. You can’t let it look like it is affecting you. It wasn’t that I was mad they was booing. I don’t give a fuck about boos. But my thing in my head was, ‘My mic is already bad and I really do have some shit in this third if I could just get it out.’ I can’t fight a bad mic and a million people booing. But once you threaten people that are booing, they’re just gonna boo more. That’s exactly what happened.”
Joe also responded to questions about his flow and cadence being an outlier amongst rappers on that stage.
“I wasn’t writing rhymes to beats at all,” he said of his writing process leading up to the matchup. “But, because I’m a professional rapper, it sounded like that. It sounded like there was a beat there. But to me, again I’m speaking from the perspective of somebody that has never [been] on that stage battle rapping. Anytime you’re rapping you should be able to tell it can go to a beat except for this stage.”
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