[Certain]

NYCSPITZ: Sometimes it seems like you dust off vocabulary more to prove you can than anything else. But it works with your style, particularly when you combine it with more traditional storytelling, as you did here. You developed your lead character very well, in a style that works really well in text rap form, with a combination of straightforward description, imagery and even a little flashback. A few of your rhymes were forced, particularly as the verse went on, but they were complex enough and stretched long enough that it's impressive the diction wasn't even more choppy and unnatural. I liked this approach to the topic because it spun it around a little bit but still hit it directly. This was a man who, by all of our Western values, had come of age years ago and was doing good things with his life. But his internal passion and his people's poisoned history wouldn't let him settle for the white man's ideals of success and happiness. More could have been done to set up why he snapped at that very moment, but I don't think that was the purpose of the verse, and you easily could have lost your momentum by making that choice. I probably would have had the police lay waste to our protagonist in that final scene, as I'm not sure how he would have escaped and think it would have been a fitting end to this version of a coming of age story. But you did a lot here, with the rhymes standing out as elite and everything else well above average.

breathless: When I read your first four lines, my immediate hope was you didn't attempt to keep up that rhyme scheme throughout the verse. Don't get me wrong, the scheme was impressive. But all the pauses made the writing feel choppy, and when you're pulling that many rhymes out in tight spaces, you're bound to force. But you indeed kept it up, and those problems indeed dominated the verse. The rhymes, really, were the focal point here, but there were so many awkward moments that they really took away from the content, which wasn't great to begin with. You let this difficult scheme of weaving two rhymes together with usually three (and maybe even occasionally four) in a line at a time basically dictate how this story had to be written. Phrases such as "young and bold days" and "dancing around may (many?) poles with friends and braiding ribbons" and "notions of maturity" only exist to match rhymes, and that unnatural writing made this much more difficult to read. As far as the plot itself, that virgin line at the end really did nothing for me. I get the feeling with all the ellipses that you wanted that to be a surprise, but it never hit that mark for me because it didn't seem important. So she's a virgin? Is that a surprise based on the verse? Not really. Is it important in context? Not at all. So that combined with a mostly undeveloped character swooping in to save our damsel in distress gave me a bit of a distaste, even (or, perhaps, especially) with the happily every after ending. Shortening your lines and stripping down your rhyme scheme would be a big help at the moment. There were just too many here.

Vote: NYCSPITZ