In a recent interview with ThisIs50 Radio, Joell Ortiz addressed fellow Slaughterhouse emcee Joe Budden and his battle against Hollow Da Don at Total Slaughter on July 12. In the interview, the Brooklyn lyricist said the microphone Joe Budden was using during the match-up turned him “from a battler to a performer.”
“The mic was a gift and a curse, let me tell you why. It was clearer, but we tour,” he explains. “So it turned him from a battler to a performer. You get what I’m saying? People didn’t realize what happened so they were like, ‘Yo, it doesn’t seem like he battling,’ yeah, because it turned into a show for him because he had a mic and it’s what we are used to doing.”
Talking about the moment Joe Budden put the microphone down following boos from the crowd, Joell Ortiz says that was “a show response.”
“That was like a show response,” he says. “If we were on tour somewhere and kids in the front row were [booing], he would do that. That’s what he would do so that goes to show you [that] hand gestures, movements and everything it’s such an important piece of a battle.”
Nevertheless, Ortiz strongly believes if the battle was based solely on each participant’s ability to rhyme, Joe Budden took home the win.
“Let’s be real. If you remove everything, the crowd, the arena and then you just listen to both sets of bars, Joe [Budden] won,” he says. “If you’re talking about rhyming, just rhyming, like better rhymes, Joe won.”
Finally, when asked about entering the ring himself, Joell Ortiz warns battlers they don’t want “that kind of a problem.”
“Yo, they won’t stop! Everybody said they got something for me,” he says. “They want me in that ring bad. All of them want me in that ring bad. I don’t think they really want that kind of a problem though. I’ma tell you why. My whole career has been a battle. You know how hard it was for me to just get accepted by the Hip Hop community in general? For the first three years of my career it was, ‘He nice for a Puerto Rican.’ You know what I had to do to just be accepted by the masses? All those freestyle y’all love was subliminals at everybody. It was just like, ‘I hate everybody, man.’”
Watch the full interview below:
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