An Epic Rap Battle Retrospective, Part 7 (Day Two)

 

I don’t like the five-way battle format, as I’ve mentioned a lot on this blog already.  I’m glad that out of more than eighty battles, only three are formatted this way.  I’m also glad that most of the channels that have been inspired by the Epic Rap Battles of History haven’t used the five-way battle format, opting instead to keep each of their battles between two participants.  It just makes the most sense.  Did Eminem get piled on during 8 Mile or was he able to go one on one with his opponents?

Actually, I don’t know.  I’ve yet to see 8 Mile.  I guess that was a bad example.  But you see my point.  I don’t think the five-way is a format that is used in actual rap battles.

When season four was going into its mid-season hiatus, there was one final battle to go, and sure enough, this was what happened…

 

Steven Spielberg vs. Alfred Hitchcock

Yeah, you already know this is a five-way, so the title of the rap battle is very misleading.  And in fact, the battle copies the Russian Five-Way very closely.  In fact, it’s like they followed the exact same pattern to the letter.  Almost the exact same pattern.  There’s one difference and I think it might’ve been brought on by inadequacies of the format that the Russian Five-Way suffered from.

I’ll get to that.

Initially, Steven Spielberg and Alfred Hitchcock begin the battle as normal, taking pot shots at each other and acting like this is just a normal rap battle.  Alfred probably expects that Steven will respond to his points and will get a chance to respond to Steven’s second verse, but the five-way format doesn’t really allow that.  Maybe it should, but that’d make the battle go on for at least twice its length, maybe more, and at this point in time the Rap Battles had hardly been going over three minutes.

This is basically how the Russian Five-Way began.  Rasputin and Stalin were treating it like an ordinary rap battle and probably expected that they would each get a second verse.  Each took pot shots at each other and bragged about how good they were.

And then everything changed when the third participant attacked.

In the Russian Five-Way, that third participant was Vladimir Lenin, and he attacked both Rasputin and Stalin.  In this battle, Quentin Tarantino shows up and delivers criticism of both directors as well as bragging about himself.  It’s pretty much the format that a rap battle with one guest character usually takes, like when Abraham Lincoln crashes a presidential debate rap battle.

It’s Quentin Tarantino’s verse that clues viewers in to a pattern that’s beginning to develop.  Spielberg tells Hitchcock, “I rock the Academy and the DGA.  You rock as many Oscars as that schlep Michael Bay.”  Hitchcock responds with “You’re more horrible than Megan Fox’s acting in Transformers.”  The Transformers franchise being, of course, a series of movies directed by Michael Bay.

Tarantino tells Spielberg “Due to War of the Worlds, a failure’s what I label you.  It looked like some sellout bullshit Michael Bay would do.”  Even if you didn’t catch Hitchcock’s Transformers line and realized it was a Michael Bay slam, this second mention of his name should clue viewers in that the directors all view him as their whipping boy.

When Stanley Kubrick shows up, it becomes clear that this is going to be another five-way, but then it probably should’ve been clear in the first place since Spielberg and Hitchcock both get just one standard-sized verse before Tarantino interrupts them and at least Barack Obama and Mitt Romney got a lot more in their rap battle before Abraham Lincoln showed up.

And here’s the thing about the fourth participant in each of these rap battles.  They mostly talk about themselves except for a moment at the end of their verse where they remember they’re supposed to be battling someone.  Mikhail Gorbachev brags about shaking hands with “both Ronalds, Reagan and McDonald’s”, doing nothing to retaliate against defectors, and then at the very end, telling his opponents to take yoga and go have a shower.

Stanley Kubrick cautions his fellow directors that they shouldn’t use the word “genius” unless they’re talking about him.  He brags about his perfectionism, “Do another take and get it right.  127 times.”  He brags that he can induce Stockholm Syndrome, “I’ll make you learn to love me.”  And at the end, he takes his shots, like Gorbachev waited until the end.  “Like Clockwork, make you all hurt.  Beat Spielberg The Color Purple.  A.I. is the worst waste of potential since the Ninja Turtles!”

 

And if you correctly guessed that Michael Bay would arrive to defend himself, you’d be right.  The pot shots that everyone take at him while he’s absent is likely how Peter and Lloyd try to address a weakness of the five-way format, but it doesn’t address the fact that the very first participant can’t respond to the other rappers and in fact is at a major disadvantage since everyone can take shots at him but he can only really take shots at his first opponent.  He has no way of knowing that he’s about to be in a five-way battle and that sucks.

Michael Bay follows the same playbook that Vladimir Putin did in the Russian Five-Way and basically talks about himself for his entire verse, justifying it by claiming at the very end that “no director is my equal!”  He doesn’t come in to battle, he just comes in to stroke his ego, like Jack the Ripper does in his first verse until Hannibal Lecter calls him out on it.

Having the directors each say something against Michael Bay doesn’t really help, though, since Michael Bay doesn’t respond directly and in fact, doesn’t even address any of the other directors other than to tell them that he’s heard enough shit from them as he arrives, exactly like how Putin had said “Did someone say, ‘real power’?”

If you ask me, these five-way battles waste a lot of potential.  Each director doesn’t even get more than one verse and the video strays more and more from the rap battle format as each new director gets added.  Epic?  Maybe.  Rap battle?  Not any more.

As of today, there are only three battles in the entire series that are formatted in this manner, with two more battles that make use of five participants but are formatted very differently from the standard five-way format.  One of them was the excellent A Christmas Carol video and has been covered already.  I look forward to talking about the Greats vs. Terrible battle since it takes the early series format of the “tag team battle” to its logical conclusion (see battles like Billy Mays vs. Ben Franklin for what I’m talking about here), and is basically what the A Christmas Carol video would’ve been if it had been fully a rap battle.  I look forward to talking about the Comedians Five-Way since it tries to fix the format but arguably doesn’t address my biggest issues with it (plus, it does something else that I strongly disagree with).

Next week, though, I’m going to finish discussing season four.