ERBoA Anno 2
My Personal Rank: #1 of 6.
Cons: Rachel’s maybe a little too mean in her first full opening verse, even allowing for the meanness of rap battles and the way she’s trying to provoke Frigg. (She did call her a fraud and a weakling in the original scene, though…that scene starts here.)
“Won’t amaze me” should probably be “doesn’t faze me.”
And uh…that’s about all I can think of!
Pros: John clearly enjoyed this as much as any of the six. Hee hee, “POOT.”
I think this one has strong use of “feminine” rhyme, by which I mean multi-syllable constructions: surgery/perjury, wood on her/good on her, hounds you/round two, grab it/habit, I am it/goddammit, shithead/it said. “Silent/violent” is a little cliché as rhymes go, but then “violent” plays off “violin” and hopefully all is forgiven.
The original was one of the best throwdowns we ever cooked up, and its structure is distinct enough that we can pretty much just repeat it: Rachel has the edge for most of the battle, and then she “wins by losing.” This inspired me to look for other ways we could diverge from the classic rap-battle structure, though as we’ll see, results of that were mixed.
(No FB.)
I don’t blame you for this, but these rap battles are really hard to follow. Whenever webcomics write songs for their characters I can never figure out what meter they’re supposed to use. It doesn’t come naturally to me. Even in Best’s first verse, I know it’s supposed to be based on Starman, but that’s a really slow song and it feels too draggy to rap over. I think the intro in this is the only one simple enough to get into the flow of it. I wish you had posted, like, karaoke tracks with these or something.
Oh wait, are they all supposed to be raps? I tried to sing the Best bits, and some of the passages worked fine, but I find some of the lines impossible to stretch/squeeze into the melody and meter of the original … so maybe that wasn’t intended to work?
If it’s just rap and nothing else, I can do *something* with it, but if I know there’s supposed to be a melody, and it has a different number of syllables than the original, it’s getting hard. One or two extra syllables I can usually account for, but after that it gets hard.