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Rap Lyrics: Battles
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Stylistically, rap occupies a gray area among speech, prose, poetry, and song. Rap is derived from the griots (folk poets) of West Africa, and Caribbean-style toasting. It ... has precedents in traditional Gaelic music. Modern rap battles, for instance, bear a striking resemblance to the Limerick Game, a traditional Gaelic drinking game in which people compete for notoriety by making up insulting limericks about each other the loser having to buy the next round of drinks. Likewise, puirt a beul, a form of Scottish mouth music was incorporated into Appalachian music and is an early ancestor of modern mouth percussion, or beatboxing. The influence of Scottish and Irish music on hip hop is not direct, since virtually all of the originators of hip hop culture were African American, but were transferred indirectly by way of American roots music.
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Kitwana said rap vocabulary is misunderstood by people unfamiliar with hip-hop. Battle rap ''can get pretty nasty in terms of the language," he said, but the words don't lead to violence. ''It's absolutely a verbal challenge," he said.
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According to Kool Moe Dee, a successful battle rap focuses on an opponent's weaknesses, rather than one's own strengths. Television shows such as BET's 106 and Park and MTV's DFX host weekly freestyle battles live on the air. Battle rapping gained widespread public recognition outside of the African-American community with rapper Eminem's movie, 8 Mile.
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