Aspiring rappers Mike Siehien and Erik Maldonado have never met. Siehien, 27, lives in Santa Monica in a one-bedroom apartment; Maldonado, 25, is a freelance Web designer in the Bronx.
Yet on a recent weeknight, Siehien spit out a furious rhyme that mocked Maldonado's rap skills, questioned his manhood and let him know where he stands in the vast hip-hop pecking order:
"You can't hold a candle to this vandal who manhandles you," Siehien raged. "Like a con off work release, your life has no worth to me -- certainly third-degree burns leave your verses in surgery...."
After a long day processing mortgage loans, Siehien uploaded the song to a free Web server, then posted a link to the song on Maldonado's website, www.hiphoppoetry.com, where the two MCs have been swapping vicious audio put-downs for more than a year.
It was the latest salvo in a classic MC battle, the kind that has long been a staple in the dog-eat-dog world of hip-hop. To a generation raised on computers, it seems only natural that the tradition has migrated from street corners to cyberspace, home to all manner of uncivil discourse.
Its practitioners call themselves "Net-cees," a takeoff on MC, hip-hop's "master of ceremonies." What started a few years ago as goofing around in rap and sports chat rooms, they say, has evolved into a unique offshoot of the rapper's art.
Some online rappers use cheap music-editing software to battle one another with actual songs; others, who call themselves text-cees, simply type their rhymes. Many troll for combatants on "battle boards" sponsored by sites such as www.rapflava.com and www.hiphoppoetry.com, which host strictly refereed tournaments and, in some cases, boast thousands of registered users.
Kids from the Bronx battle soldiers stationed in Iraq. Hip-hop heads in London square off against 14-year-olds borrowing their mothers' computers.
And on the Internet, rappers don't know if they're battling a thugged-out gangster or a mortgage broker home from work.
Some of the put-downs can verge on the erudite: Maldonado has called Siehien a "trickled down rapper like Ronald Reagan money."
But more often online battle lyrics -- like those of their real-life counterparts -- brim with violent imagery, machismo, put-downs and threats. They are occasionally homophobic and misogynistic, and they are almost always spectacularly profane -- like syncopated Don Rickles riffs grafted onto a Quentin Tarantino flick.
Last winter a text-cee named Kimball mixed it up with an opponent named Magoo:
My rhymes are complicated like group-porn flicks, with rhymes so fat they need aerobics
So I'll spit with militant aggressiveness, sever your limbs and put you on my dissed-membered list
In mainstream rap, words like these have contributed to headline-making feuds and, sometimes, violence. But the online MCs can happily taunt their rivals, safe in the knowledge that the insults are pure ritual.
"The truth is, how many real thugs get online?" said Maldonado, who raps under the name Advocate of Wordz. "Real gangsters are out in the street shooting people and fighting."
Some hip-hop purists see the Net-cee battles as a debased -- if not downright ridiculous -- take on the live rap freestyle battle, a cornerstone of hip-hop culture rooted in the cutting contests of the jazz era, as well as older African American word games.
At the real competitions -- famously portrayed in the Eminem movie "8 Mile" -- rappers improvise verses, taunting their opponents in front of audiences that choose winners and losers with ego-withering candor.
"Every heartless geek with a keyboard has come along and tried to cheapen my craft," a rapper groused recently on the hip-hop site www.rapverse.com. "People that would never get on stage and move a crowd, people that never go to block parties where the DJ's at, with the mike and tables and truly represent."
The Net-cees concede that spontaneity is sacrificed online: They typically have three days to compose and post their battle rhymes. But the best of them believe it is a legitimate form of workshopping that allows them to practice the craft without leaving their bedrooms.
"You can't replace a real, offline battle," Maldonado said in a phone interview. "But people are starting to recognize that a lot of hip-hop is happening online right now."
The earliest rap music was created on turntables, in part because inner-city kids couldn't afford musical instruments. Many text-cees are frustrated rappers without access to recording studios, or suburbanites who lack nearby places to battle other rappers in person.
Henry Long is a Navy seaman with musical aspirations who spent a few months of 2004 battling rappers from the computer lounge of a Texas military base where he was temporarily stationed. In his situation, he said, rapping on the Internet was the most practical way to keep his skills sharp.
