[Certain]

oats: I was just telling a friend that my Illmatic CD probably has been played 500-plus times since I bought it 16 years ago and still never skips. I liked this verse a lot because I related to it so closely and because I thought it was a unique way of looking at the topic. The writing wasn't as tight as you typically go, and I think part of that was your half-attempt to write with Nas' flair. A few of your rhymes were slightly off, and there were some unusually awkward phrasings that required getting used to on a reread. My biggest qualm is I think you could have developed that last line better in tying the verse to the topic. And here's the issue as a whole: You took a topic I really relate to but didn't execute it with your normal degree of cleanness. There were a lot of loose strings in this verse, never brought back to the central purpose. It was a cool exercise, but it doesn't match your best work.

timeless: I'm not sure what this was about. So we have a character who is suffering from extreme paranoia and refuses to fall asleep. Is that it? This didn't seem to go anywhere except further into that abyss of paranoia, unless I'm missing something. But the problem with that is we need more to ground this character and give us a sense of who he is, how he got here and why we should care about him. As far as the writing, you've really progressed in that area. You definitely forced some of your rhymes, but your verse was very readable, even as I was struggling to find more depth in the story line. So you've managed to increase your degree of difficulty without sacrificing natural diction, which is a major step most people struggle with. And you've done it in about three months' time, which speaks well to your skill. Unfortunately, the content here was just so thin or so clouded that I couldn't get into your verse.

Vote: oats