Smack White Says He's "Trying To Design A Credible Judging System"

In a recent interview with VladTV, URL's Smack White addressed the place of judging in battle rap and announced vague plans to return to either a polling or judging system for his own league.

“When it comes to this battle culture we started off with polls,” he said. “Basically giving the fans the opportunity to actually come on a website to vote for who they felt won the battle at the end. Then we got some criticism from some of the emcees ‘cause what was happening was [that] ... some of the emcees with higher profiles, even if they lost they just got so much fans it’s like they would [overshadow] in the polls. A lot of people would vote for the most popular. It started becoming like a popularity contest as opposed to who actually won the battle. So we took the polls off and just had the people decide who they felt won. I liked the polls. I’m thinking about bringing the polls back so we could see and get a gauge of who actually won these battles."

“The UFF, we got the celebrity judges that we bring on just to get an opinion from,” he added, talking about the URL segment on BET's "106 & Park." “Experienced artists that make music, to see what their level of insight is on who they thought won ... It gives it a different feel. I think that it’s so many different ways to judge battles, it’s kind of difficult for one person to judge a battle. Some people might judge a battle on crowd reactions where you might judge a battle on punchlines. You might judge a battle on who’s the funniest. It’s kind of difficult but I’m definitely trying to design a credible judging system.”

Smack’s comments on judging come just months after recent news that KOTD plans to return to the judged format for battles at the upcoming World Domination 5 event. Elsewhere on the scene, Total Slaughter’s inaugural event and lead-up reality series featured judged battles. At the event, Poison Pen, Drect, Mz. Gracie, Star and Kid Capri sat in as judges for battles like Murda Mook vs. Loaded Lux and Hollow Da Don vs. Joe Budden.

During the interview with Vlad, Smack also shared his support for PG battlers and detailed hopes that the upstart competitors get a chance to rise into the battle rap elite.

Watch the full interview below: