[Inno]

Vote 1:

MR J

I feel this is a completely competent piece of writing - my main issue is, I’ve sort of read this piece a lot times, in fact I’ve written it a lot of times, and I feel like for it to work I want to hear your personal version / what is your emotional experience, as in layering in a level of insight and truth that you can offer and this will stop it from being so vague.

The flow was very hot and cold, easy and polished at times then lazy the next few bars.

Basically what I got from this piece is that - you can write and that you can probably write a lot better than what you presented.


symetrik

Your lines are quite wordy but the flow still works, but do you rap quite quickly or work with slower beats? Just curious.

This piece was rich in imagery - at times I had to re-read to catch what exactly you were saying / going - that’s not necessarily the worst thing.

I think the specificity of your vocabulary from the picture gave the piece a great texture and flavour that was felt. Again this wasn’t an incredibly emotional reading this piece, it felt more like an interesting piece of art than anything but it did hold my interest and I think its length was apt.

VOTE: Symetrik - was just generally more engaging and a more visceral experience.

Vote2:

Mr. J: Interesting take on a interesting topic. Monkey see, monkey do kinda vibe to the whole verse. It's short and sweet, flow on point, the moral is a bit abstract but not too far off the handle and I definitely liked it.

Overall I enjoyed your piece but I'm left wanting for more. It's short and sweet, but for me it's a little bit too short. That said tho, it's dope but I still feel like it could have been so much more.

Symetrik: Starting out painting a vivid image with the first two sentences always catches my attention, specially when the rhymes are interesting as well. Prattle mouth/Antlers out definitely focuses on the vocals to make it work and it definitely does what it's intended to do and you keep that same style for the transition as well. Dope shit. The entirety of the first verse was beautifully executed in a morbid almost dystopian manner and I love that shit.

Second verse was dope af as well but I feel it couldn't quite uphold the quality the first verse had when it comes to flow and straight forward approach to what's happening. I'm not saying it's bad or not understandable, just saying I felt the smoothness of the first verse didn't quite follow through to the next but it's still upholding great quality to me. What the second verse does though is compiling what's going on in a more condensed form and wrapping it all up with the last sentence for that extra bit of bang for your buck. Pretty dark stuff but I'm enjoying it.

Vote: Two completely different styles clashing and I feel like they both did pretty well in what they were trying to do. In the end I got to go with preference and I feel like Symetrik comes out as a winner. A slightly deeper story filled with an overall better rhymescheme throughout, the simplistic flow in Mr. J's verse has its place and you could argue that it was clearly overall better but the complexity of Symetrik's scheme again outdo that in the end.

Despite enjoying Mr.J's abstract take on the topic he chose I feel Symetrik comes out as victor with a pretty vivid and dark portrayal of war with humanity at stake in the midst of it all.

Vote 3:

I don't really know what to make or take of either verse here to be real. Mr J had tightened up his flow somewhat, the shorter line lengths really helped him in that regard, but content wise I found this a little less linear than his usual stuff. The rose from concrete line was nice to me, a real standout in an otherwise muddled mid section IMO. That hurt him. The verse never really developed here like it has with him previously, it was just kind of there and that was it and the final closing statement had no association to the rest of the verse as far as I can make out. It was a poor early showing from The Joker here.

Symetrik always has a really prevalent flow to his stuff that you catch easily on first read without having to go back over it. It's definitely his biggest strength in the field and he utilises it well, you can see that from the line lengths he has here because although they're longer than Mr J's, I actually found Sym's to be the better read of the two. Rhyme placement helps him also in that regard with this piece, it bounced around and sometimes the scheme carried over but he did well in that aspect. Again, the story itself suffered slightly, lacking a focal point to get it from A to B coherently and it rambled somewhat in the middle but ultimately came off as having more substance to it than what J wrote. It's clear Sym won this one, but it was there for Mr J to have taken. Both were quite well matched up in terms of their flow being their strongpoints and them sharing the same weaknesses really but Sym had more to his content and that ultimately gave him the nod for me this week.