[Certain]

PancakeBrah: This piece, everything about it, is so distinctly PancakeBrah Getting Up For But Also A Bit Paranoid About A Big Battle. There was nothing nonchalant about this verse, and the extracts that hinted toward coolness were very clearly intentional. You had massive, massive ambitions. You aimed to literally move text rap storytelling forward with this verse, to prove that the cinematics that you and Richard Corey and me and a small handful of others have incorporated successfully into our stories could transcend the written word while still being the written word. I applaud the hell out of the audacity that you showed in this verse.

It just didn’t work. I found myself deeply confused by the lack of context clues. Even what I picked up as assumed and learned knowledge, the triggers that I know in no small part because I’ve read just about every verse you’ve written here for three years, what I got was a disconnected story that was missing major chunks. Artistically, that would have worked better had the writing been more interesting. You set up scenes and used a few cool techniques, but no single aspect of this verse stood out as memorable or individually enjoyable as I tried to piece together everything that happened.

You’ve pulled off very complex narration techniques —medium considered —in the past. Here, I think you felt the pressure you knew your opponent would bring and tried to do something new and different and risky.

RichardCorey: There’s a museum dedicated to lynching that is going up in Montgomery soon. There’s a black history museum from the Smithsonian that is getting a spot on the National Mall, too. The New Yorker has written extensive stories about both museums in the past month, and they’re worth seeking out. The slave trade seems like the next target. I lived in Alexandria for a year, and it’s a fascinating, segregated city with its own history and its own revised image. It’s the one suburb of D.C. that feels like something more.

You did a great job here of representing the suffocation that comes with this kind of story. The repetitive first three stanzas reinforced the overbearing load carried by those who walk these grounds and can’t help but feel the history in each step. There were times when, particularly because of the aggressive alliteration, the words came out in staccato. On first read, that made things clunky, but I began to appreciate it in the context of the content.

I loved that in the storytelling section, you had given us a duality of images. I think you perhaps could have more forcefully worked in the modernist setting into that closer. It was interesting to read about the slave trade with no outright villain portrayed, as though slavery itself was the villain (which feels like a very passive point of view on the issue, quite frankly). But overall, this was an excellent verse, showing its creativity in execution rather than concept.

Vote: RichardCorey