An Epic Rap Battle Retrospective, Part 11

 

After five seasons of nearly non-stop production on the Epic Rap Battles of History, and growing from a small production with clearly amateur costumes to a larger production able to turn EpicLLOYD into Teddy Roosevelt (it helps that he’s about as close to a human chameleon as you can get), it was obvious that the pair wanted a break.  After their second Peter vs. Lloyd battle, they stayed dormant for over a year.

But you can’t keep a good idea down and new videos would begin to appear once more.  First, though…

 

Alexander the Great vs. Ivan the Terrible

…I promised I’d come back to this one.

The battle is originally presented as a straightforward duel between two participants, as most battles are, but then it becomes increasingly interesting as it goes, since there are so many more participants than just Alexander and Ivan.

Alexander the Great vs. Ivan the Terrible
Winner: Ivan the Terrible

Although the battle begins as they always do, with Ivan delivering some disses and boasting about himself – “Try to serve Ivan?  No surviving.”  – Alexander goes on the offense and boasts a lot about his own accomplishments while delivering a diss or two at Ivan.  Ivan responds by surrendering and giving Alexander a drink, but the drink turns out to be poison and Alexander just straight dies.  Although it’s not the first time anyone died in the Epic Rap Battles of History, and definitely not the first time anyone was killed by another participant, it’s probably the first outright murder in the series.

In the past, a character would just shoot someone on a whim, like Bonnie shooting Juliet and then Juliet surviving the shot, only to find that Romeo already killed himself in grief and so she kills herself in response.  Bonnie and Clyde are killed by off-screen assailants, but given their history, it’s likely this is a reference to how they met their end in real life, too.

In the third and last Hitler vs. Vader video, Hitler kills Boba Fett because he doesn’t want Vader to get away with tag teaming out, and then Vader gets revenge by killing Hitler with his lightsaber.  This wasn’t pre-meditated murder, it was just tit for tat.

Way back in the first season, Hulk Hogan was blasted by a bazooka and he tagged out to Randy Savage.  We have to pretend it was a real bazooka since this was pretty much a wrestling match in rap form, but I’m pretty sure Hulk was okay.

The closest we’ve ever been to outright murder was when Doc Brown fatally shot The Doctor, making it attempted murder, but what Doc Brown apparently didn’t count on (or didn’t seem to care about) was the ability of a Time Lord to regenerate.

This is the first time in the Epic Rap Battles of History that someone actually plotted and successfully carried out a murder, and we’re not done.

Frederick the Great vs. Ivan the Terrible
Winner: Natural causes

At this point, Ivan has stopped attacking and takes a defensive position, proactively removing opponents by physical force rather than matching wits verbally.  After enduring a short verse which was light on the verbal jabs and somehow also light on the self aggrandizing, Ivan goes to physically defeat Frederick but apparently Frederick beats him to the punch and pre-emptively dies in his sleep.

Does that mean Frederick still loses this round, or does that somehow count as a win, too?

Pompey the Great vs. Ivan the Terrible
Winner: Catherine the Great

Pompey doesn’t even get a chance to battle before he’s assassinated by the next Great.  Pompey might be even more oversold than Frederick is!

Catherine the Great vs. Ivan the Terrible
Winner: Catherine the Great

And with this second victory, Catherine secures her place as the overall winner of the rap battle.  She even manages to make a few pointed jabs at Ivan, and although he tries to defeat her with another physical mishap, she sees it coming and shuts it down.

Perhaps Ivan should’ve resumed trying to defeat his opponents with words.

As a battle, this is certainly one of the most unique ones the Epic Rap Battles team has ever put together, with only the A Christmas Carol one featuring Donald Trump and Ebenezer Scrooge coming close.  The idea of one side taking the rap battles seriously and one side trying to undermine them by actually killing off his opponents is pretty creative.

Speaking of Donald Trump…

 

Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton

After calling this one an ogre, you’d think I’d not want to return to it so soon, right?  Well, after the last Epic Rap Battles post, I thought about something.  Donald Trump’s campaign got more and more unhinged, the further along it went, and it was for that reason that no one on the left took him seriously.  This was likely by design, so that he could basically pull off the upset against Hillary Clinton, who everyone expected would be able to coast to an easy victory.

Sadly, this was not how history was destined to play out.

Anyway, I realized that the battle represented this perfectly in the way that Trump’s promises and statements throughout his verse got more and more outrageous, to the point where it really sounded like things Trump might actually have said.  It partially reminds me of the fact that half of the things attributed to George W. Bush during his eight years as President of the United States were things that were actually said by either caricatures of him or someone else entirely, but which sounded so much like what the real person would’ve said that they’ve gone down in history as actual quotes.

For example, here are some actual Bushisms:

“There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, ‘Fool me once, shame on…shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.'”

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”

“You bet I cut the taxes at the top. That encourages entrepreneurship. What we Republicans should stand for is growth in the economy. We ought to make the pie higher.”

And here are some fake Bushisms commonly attributed to him:

“I don’t know why I should have to learn Algebra… I’m never likely to go there.”

“Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child.”

“The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century.”

So listening to this rap battle, it feels like they captured Donald Trump so well.  In order, here are all of Trump’s promises and statements he makes in this battle, from start to finish, and trust me, they get worse and more unhinged as we go:

-Trump makes reference to Clinton’s E-mails, which was a real life controversy timed specifically to help Trump while giving Clinton no time to recover when everyone realized it wasn’t actually that much of a controversy in the first place.

-Trump accuses Clinton of being “the mother of ISIS” before admitting that wasn’t actually true.

-Trump makes reference to Bill Clinton’s White House infidelity, as if that has any reflection on Hillary Clinton’s suitability as President of the United States.

-Trump makes reference to Clinton’s handling of Benghazi, a popular Republican talking point.

-Trump claims that he’s going to press his naked ass against the “glass ceiling” to deliberately mock Clinton and any woman trying to break through.

-Clinton’s going to lose to Trump in the Presidential Election like she lost to Obama in the Democratic Primary in 2008.

-And immediately after losing the election, Clinton is going to be thrown in jail for… I guess no reason, just because Trump thinks he can.  This was a common refrain during the actual election, that Trump was going to throw Hillary Clinton in jail for nebulous reasons.

-Clinton’s not that hot.  Trump rates her a 2, which given his massive levels of misogyny and womanizing, should probably come as a relief to her.

-Trump declares that Clinton only barely won the 2016 Democratic Primary to Bernie Sanders, whom he calls a “socialist Jew”.

-Clinton is apparently unaware that she’s very disliked by Americans.

-Americans want to be led by a strong male who is able to “stand up to China”.

-Trump is going to put more police on the streets and run all the Latinos out of the country.

-Trump is going to create jobs by tearing down mosques.

-The mosques will then be recycled, used as building materials for a wall that is going to be dipped in gold, with the bill for this project to be presented to Mexico, who will find themselves somehow compelled to pay for it.  This was another promise Trump built his campaign upon, the border wall between the United States and Mexico which in the end was incomplete (and given the lack of progress during Trump’s single term as President, would’ve likely remained incomplete at the end of a second term).  The gold was never a part of the actual promise.

-Trump will abolish Congress and “put Charles in charge”, something which I’m pretty sure Trump never actually said in real life, but which is possibly a reference to a television show from a couple decades ago.  It was, in fact, this line which caused me to start thinking about this rap battle again and inspired me to include it in this week’s post, too.

-And finally, as Clinton visibly reacts with disbelief and disgust when she realizes what Trump’s about to say, “Cause this whole system’s rigged, and we all know the riggers: for the last 8 years, this country’s been run by-” before he’s cut off by an eagle.

Some battles feel like not a lot of effort was put into the writing department.  With the entire history of Superman and Dragonball Z to dig into, Goku vs. Superman feels criminally short, even though it’s one of the more high quality battles.  Trump vs. Clinton doesn’t hold back and seems to cover a lot, and that’s why it’s one of the better battles of season five.

And now we’re caught up to where I last left off.

 

~     ~     ~

 

There’s an interesting statistic that comes to mind when talking about the Epic Rap Battles of History.  Did you know that they’ve yet to miss a year?  Every year since 2010, Peter and Lloyd have released at least one Rap Battle.  When they released the final battle of season five, it hit the Internet on the ninth of January, 2017.  It was their first battle of the year, and it would eventually turn out to be their only battle of the year.

2018 rolled around and there weren’t any battles on the horizon for quite some time.  Eventually, their next battle would be released as a bonus battle for the Christmas season, as they’ve been sometimes known to do.

 

Elon Musk vs. Mark Zuckerberg

This battle has a release date of December 7, 2018 and is the only battle in the Epic Rap Battles of History to be released in 2018, although this wouldn’t be the only 2018 release…

To be honest, I’m a bit tired of hearing about both of these people, especially since FaceBook’s been in such hot water over the last few years for how much influence it has on our society.  I don’t have a FaceBook account and likely never will.  I get the feeling that I’ve pissed off more than one person in the past because of this, but I really don’t trust the company.

I had a completely different reason for not jumping on the FaceBook trend way back when it first launched: I’d been following everyone around for a few years after I started using the Internet.  First, I joined Yahoo Clubs (later became Groups, and then it eventually was taken down), then LiveJournal, then people started going to alternate versions of LiveJournal before MySpace was the new and trendy place to go.  MySpace lasted so briefly that I’m not sure it even made that much of a mark on Internet history.  Anyway, after MySpace came FaceBook and by this point, I was satisfied with LiveJournal.  I didn’t like the notion that I was supposed to just keep on going to a new site when the rest of the Internet decided to abandon the old one and although I don’t use my LiveJournal any more, I’ve never taken the plunge and registered for FaceBook.

I do have a Twitter account, but FaceBook is still where I draw the line.

 

You might’ve noticed I didn’t mention what the best lines were in the battle.  This is not going to be the typical Epic Rap Battles post, partially because of the first two entries and partially because of the last three.  Because they’re the next battles chronologically, it’s time that I cover…

 

Flash in the Pan Hip Hop Conflicts of Nowadays
#1: PewDiePie vs. T-Series

I bet everyone remembers when PewDiePie’s YouTube channel was going to be overtaken by T-Series and it was apparently big news, a sign that corporations were going to be in total control of the platform soon.

Two years later and the corporate take-over of YouTube hasn’t seemed to have happened yet.  PewDiePie is now down to fourth place in subscriber count, but is losing out to two media companies from India (one of them owned by Sony, though) and one channel devoted to children’s entertainment that has become super popular.  Despite how much of a monolith Disney is turning into, they seem content with controlling the means of producing content and carving out their own niche away from YouTube, on a little site called Disney+.

Instead, much of the top fifty is made up of several current musicians, since YouTube is a great delivery method for music videos.  As an example, the new ABBA music video has had thirteen million views in just four days, and the lyric video for their other new song has had about half that number.

When it comes to succeeding on YouTube, I don’t think subscriber count is the best metric anyway.  A channel could have two hundred million subscribers, but if none of those people actually engage with the channel’s videos, then creating and uploading videos is a waste of time.

Instead, I like to think the successful ones are the ones who can keep uploading videos and supporting themselves, even if they don’t have more than a couple hundred thousand subscribers, as long as they pull in enough viewers and can be supported through other sites like Patreon.  Lately, I’ve been enjoying watching the videos of Josh Strife Hayes and Tom Scott, both of which are far from the top of the list, although Tom Scott is definitely much closer to the top.

 

#2: Ronald McDonald vs. The Burger King

I grew up in Revelstoke, where we only really had one choice for fast food.  A&W.  So I pretty much was conditioned from a young age to prefer one fast food restaurant over another.  Although I was never one for hamburgers, despite going far beyond the call of duty to try to make myself like them because of parental and societal pressure, when A&W started offering “chubby chicken” (basically, chicken strips, or “chicken tenders” as I’ve seen them called in the United States a lot), I pounced on it as my preferred meal option and never looked back.

McDonald’s gets so much flack for all of the sins of fast food and perhaps it’s not really all that deserved, since they’re just trying to maximize their profits like every other restaurant.

When I got my first job, I was working at A&W and I found out that they deep fry nearly everything in there.  I’ve often joked that if they found a way, they would deep fry their hamburgers, too.  The Revelstoke franchise was owned and operated by some pretty uncaring individuals, which definitely fits with the notion that they’re trying to maximize their profits.  Why should they care about their workers except as cogs in the money making machine?

Eventually, when I got pretty sick, they acted like they’d rescinded the sick days policy in order to try to force me to come in to work.  When I told them that I was physically incapable of coming in, they forced me to quit instead.  This did two things: it screwed me out of collecting unemployment benefits and it also screwed me out of collecting any kind of severance payment from them.  Because I was young and inexperienced, I didn’t know these facts yet and I ended up letting them get away with it.

The sad fact is that business owners will try to trick unsavvy workers into losing severance by quitting, but workers who do know the trick are also stuck because they don’t want to quit but can find themselves in a situation where they have no choice but to give in and do something they don’t want to do, like if they’re told literally at the last possible second that they need to come in, despite having plans to work a completely different job that day.  The shift they swapped is suddenly needing covering again and they don’t care that the worker has already made a commitment to working at a summer job after getting that time covered.  They basically have to bail on their summer job at the last possible minute and leave the summer job high and dry because they’re being forced to go cover a shift they’d thought was covered with zero notice that it’s not.  Yes, this has happened to me before.

Bosses, and not just at fast food places but in all customer service, also see no problem with scheduling people for both closing and opening shifts, knowing that sometimes, people working closing shifts have to stay past closing to finish things, but aren’t allowed to come in late in the morning.  They basically have to sacrifice their own sleep time if they need to stay an extra five minutes, ten minutes, even two hours past closing if the building floods and they’re required to help clean things up.

So yeah.  That’s why the service industry sucks.

 

#3: Larry Bird vs. Big Bird

I feel like the Flash in the Pan Hip Hop Conflicts of Nowadays were made because the match-ups would’ve been too difficult to film, due to copyrights or other issues (like, how would you dress up as a T-Series?).  I would find a surprise waiting for me in season 6, but for now, let’s bask in the glory of a battle between basketball player Larry Bird and Sesame Street character Big Bird.

From the start, I feel like copyright is a fine line that the Epic Rap Battles have played around with for their entire run, as far back as when they used a Darth Vader costume in the second battle.  Fair use for parody is definitely a thing, and I feel like these battles are very much parodies protected by law.  But this is YouTube we’re talking about, a platform which basically ignored “Where’s the Fair Use?” because they didn’t want to spend any money improving things for anyone but themselves, their advertisers and their shareholders.  I’m surprised someone hasn’t tried to sue Peter and Lloyd yet, given some of the ways in which they’ve portrayed people like Walt Disney and Donald Trump, and the ways in which they’ve shown material owned by corporations like Disney.

They might’ve gotten away with filming an actual rap battle featuring Big Bird, but maybe in this case, the costume would’ve been too complex, and so that would be a problem as well.

To date, there have only been three Flash in the Pan Hip Hop Conflicts of Nowadays, and as far as I know, there aren’t any plans to make more.  It requires the same amount of writing as an Epic Rap Battle, just without a lot of video production, and all their writing energy might just be going into the Epic Rap Battles instead.  Still, as a way to fill time before the sixth season, these three battles were very unique and interesting.

Sadly, things wouldn’t ever return to normal for the Epic Rap Battles, as I’ll begin to explore next time…