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.
