Another “Best of Battle Rap” list has dropped and this is the one that people look to as the Granddaddy of them all, Champion of the Year.
Congratulations to Rum Nitty for becoming Champion of the Year!
Champion of the Year is the equivalent of Battle Rap’s Grammy Awards. Not only do they drop around the same time, but the achievement is evaluated by the votes of industry professionals.
We will remove our #1, which is Pat Stay, to make for a more equitable comparison. We will break down sets of 5.
In their Top 5, they have The AllHipHop.com list has four of the same emcees in our Top 5. Seems like the fans might know a little something. While Champion and their judges include Bill Collector, we include Jaz the Rapper. Bill makes the Top 20 on our superlatives.
In their Top 6 to 10, they have Swamp, JC, Danny Myers, Fonz, and A. Ward. When looking at our Top 10, AllHipHop.com, we only have two from 6 to 10. We have Swamp and Danny, with them falling respectfully in basically the positions, We include Tsu Surf (who had a spectacular year as a rapper), Shooney Da Rapper (another person who dominated), and Geechi Gotti. JC, Fonz, and A. Ward do appear on our list later.
In their Top 11 to 15, they have Jaz the Rapper, Nu Jerzey Twork, Ms. Hustle, DNA, and Geechi Gotti. At this point, our lists start to really go different ways. We do include Ms. Hustle and two of the artists, Twork and A. Ward, we have in this section of our list appear higher in the COTY. We also include C3 and Viixen Da Assassin, say what you want the women put on this year better than most of the men.
In their final Top 16 to 20, they have Calicoe, Sheed Happens, Snake Eyes, Charlie Clips, and Kid Chaos. We missed this totally. Our list had Kyd Slade, JC, Bill Collector, Fonz, and Casey Jay.
To be fair, we have other lists that applaud all of these same artists.
And this year, the COTY, which like most overall lists, is very male-heavy, could not deny Jaz or Hustle. It also was contested with many of the artists and fans thinking the panel got it wrong.
Either way, we celebrate the list and all 20 of the amazing artists that made it. They are all worthy of acclaim and shout out to Rum Nitty, the UR-alien, who captured the belt for his crew, EFB.
