In a new interview segment with Dizaster, the battle rapper explains why he’s not a fan of the currently predominant "wordplay" battle rap style. During the sitdown in Los Angeles, Diz also touched on his upcoming match-up against Cassidy, the significance of race in the industry, and his own background splitting time between the States and overseas as a troubled youth.
Watch the clip below and read on for some choice quotes.
“Everything is trends,” Diz said of the current battle rap scene. “Everything is trends. People are bandwagoners. It’s gonna go back. This style is gonna die out and people are gonna realize, ‘Damn, these people were trash.’ Whenever you have a style, people are gonna ride it because it works. You hear every other day a little fucking faggot from like New York come out. Like a 16-year-old come out, like, ‘Yo I got bars man. Check me out. Yo, when I give you big macs that’s a Mickey D’s.’ It’s like, ‘Yo, you’ve been done before. Not just your style’s been done before, but the whole fucking structure of your existence has been fucking done before.’
"Like, yeah, it’s a popular thing right now because battle rap is a nerdy cult thing. All these guys are a bunch of fucking nerds, especially the fools that talk about shooting people and shit. They’re all a bunch of clowns. Every single one of them. None of them have ever fucking done shit. My boy’s the only real gang-banger in battle rap — Aktive, that’s it.”
Breaking down his own status in battle rap, Diz alluded to himself as a threat to the status quo.
“I’m a threat,” he said. “I’m just that dude that — I got just as much views and fans as all these motherfuckers on SMACK and I never had to battle there my whole life and use that as a platform. That’s one of my little battles. You could be yourself. These cats, none of them wanna be themselves.”
Speaking about the source of the current fascination with “street bars,” Diz pointed to the fans before saying “it’s the government’s fault.”
“It’s the fans,” he said. “They like hearing that shit, so the fucking rappers are feeding them that shit. But they don’t realize, all they’re creating is a bunch of fucking bullshit. There’s no message in none of this shit. You never learn nothing new. There’s no more educational value in battle rap like it used to. I used to have battles, I would be talking about all kinds of World War 3, all kinds of [stuff]. That shit’s considered nerdy now. It’s just how society is now. It’s the dumbing down of society. It’s like, if you have anything worth with anything [substantive] it’s considered nerdy. You’re supposed to think it’s not cool, you’re supposed to like all the fucking wack shit and the fake shit when really we came a long way from real rappers like The Roots and Common.”
How do you feel about the "wordplay" style in battle rap? Does it have staying power?
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