Language has always been a powerful tool, but more so in 2017, where once innocuous words and phrases have been elevated into rallying cries and twisted into dog-whistle insults by opposing ideologies and groups. No one can afford to be apolitical now, even in the literal arena of battle rap where politics apparently don't matter. Battle rap is about wordplay and crude jokes, most of which play into rap's culture of toxic masculinity by finding creative ways to cruelly demean the opponent. It's all understood as part of the competition, but those words still have the capacity to harm, and bringing the niche but dedicated community of battle rap into the boiling cauldron of the present is what Joseph Kahn's film Bodied seeks to do.
Advertisement
Produced by the notably battle rap-adjacent Eminem, the movie seems to initially be a battle rap sports narrative about a white college-going bookworm discovering his hidden talent at inventing punchlines. It eventually reveals itself to be a pitch-black satire about the Trump-era world, catching cultural dilettantes, trendy surface-level activism, and the all-consuming might of social media callout culture in its wide, tangled net. The script was penned by Alex Larsen, better known as Torontonian battle rap veteran Kid Twist. Larsen has been a prominent fixture in the now OVO-affiliated King of the Dot—Toronto's best-known battle rap league—and his knack for sharpening pop culture references into needles shows in the film's quick-witted and shockingly topical dialogue. "If you're gonna make a battle rap movie you can't take forever about it," says the 31-year-old Larsen in front of Toronto's Scotiabank Theatre, "because then the lines are gonna be irrelevant by the time the movie comes out."Bodied was premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, acting as something of a hometown triumph for Larsen and his first published script. "The crazy true story behind this movie is it started from a DM on Twitter," recalls Larsen, "[Joseph Kahn] saw a battle where someone said I was a writer as a line of attack and he was like 'Oh, I'm looking for a writer, let me holler at Kid Twist.'" The two worked on an unusually tight schedule and managed to land Eminem's support thanks to Kahn's prior video work with Em, along with starring roles and cameos from battle rap luminaries like Dumbfoundead and Loaded Lux. Larsen drew from some of his own experiences coming up in Toronto's then-DYI rap scene ("Shout out to HipHopCanada.com, that's how everything got organized back then"). His first battle was in 2005 against Prolific, an event that also got Larsen introduced to future KOTD founder Organik. Larsen ended up winning the very first KOTD championship in 2008, and he's a recognized face in battle rap internationally.
Advertisement
"When I really got into battle rap," says Larsen, "I thought it was perfect because it's just about the lyrics. I haven't struggled, I'm a middle-class white guy. I don't have an interesting perspective to bring to the table. But in battle rap that doesn't matter because you're just rapping about the guy right in front of you." Larsen takes great pains to say that he uses harmful words in the name of competition and that they're thusly not offensive because, as he says later, rap battles are paradoxically a safe space for being offensive. That take is certainly debatable, specifically in current times, and it's one we had a conversation about. Read on for the full interview with Kid Twist about Eminem's undying legacy, where battle rap draws the line, and if there any bars he regrets rapping. Also stay tuned for video of our talk.This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.Noisey: Did you meet Eminem?
Alex Larsen a.k.a. Kid Twist: I have not. I hope to. We have a movie together, so…Are you a fan?
Of course I'm a fan. He's considered by many, myself included, to be the greatest technical rapper of all time. There's absolutely nobody who can do what he does. I was 13 when "My Name Is" came out. A lot of people will try to cover up this up, a lot of white rappers will not admit to it but I'm not afraid to admit it: Eminem got me into rap music. I did not listen to rap music before Eminem. I am part of the Eminem generation, of the explosion of white rappers that happened after he came out. I wouldn't be here in many ways if Eminem was not who he was.
Alex Larsen a.k.a. Kid Twist: I have not. I hope to. We have a movie together, so…Are you a fan?
Of course I'm a fan. He's considered by many, myself included, to be the greatest technical rapper of all time. There's absolutely nobody who can do what he does. I was 13 when "My Name Is" came out. A lot of people will try to cover up this up, a lot of white rappers will not admit to it but I'm not afraid to admit it: Eminem got me into rap music. I did not listen to rap music before Eminem. I am part of the Eminem generation, of the explosion of white rappers that happened after he came out. I wouldn't be here in many ways if Eminem was not who he was.
Advertisement
When you first got into rap, did you know that you immediately wanted to do battle rap?
So I started rapping in high school as a joke with my friends. It's something we get into in the movie a little bit, how white people get involved with rap culture ironically at first because they're afraid to not be ironic about it. I just took it more seriously and I started getting deeper and deeper into it. All my friends stopped rapping so I was the one rapper left.When did you first bomb a match?
So, this was maybe a month and a half after my first match. I'm gassed. I've drunk my own Kool-Aid, I'm like "I'm fucking great at this." I drove to Ottawa for this battle. This was how it was in the early days in Canada. There wasn't events happening in Toronto all the time, there wasn't King of the Dot, so you had to drive yourself around the country if you wanted to go battle. I am so glad that no video footage exists of this. There was no one in the venue, like, 20 people there, so it was bad from the beginning. I get up on stage. First round, my opponent doesn't even show up so I get waved through [laughs]. Second round is against the battle champ of Ottawa: S-Croll. Shout out to S-Croll, he's actually a really good guy, I've met him a few times since. I come out, I think I have some good lyrics but they're playing weird beats, the sound's all wrong, no one can hear what I'm saying. And then he just gets on—I have no swagger, I'm just standing there with my mic—he comes up and he just murders me. The only line he said that I remember was "you wear women's jeans and look like you should join the swimming team." That's a tight rhyme. Off stage presence alone he killed me, and I walked off in shame. I sleep, wake up, get breakfast and leave Ottawa forever. Seriously, I haven't been back to Ottawa since then. [laughs]
So I started rapping in high school as a joke with my friends. It's something we get into in the movie a little bit, how white people get involved with rap culture ironically at first because they're afraid to not be ironic about it. I just took it more seriously and I started getting deeper and deeper into it. All my friends stopped rapping so I was the one rapper left.When did you first bomb a match?
So, this was maybe a month and a half after my first match. I'm gassed. I've drunk my own Kool-Aid, I'm like "I'm fucking great at this." I drove to Ottawa for this battle. This was how it was in the early days in Canada. There wasn't events happening in Toronto all the time, there wasn't King of the Dot, so you had to drive yourself around the country if you wanted to go battle. I am so glad that no video footage exists of this. There was no one in the venue, like, 20 people there, so it was bad from the beginning. I get up on stage. First round, my opponent doesn't even show up so I get waved through [laughs]. Second round is against the battle champ of Ottawa: S-Croll. Shout out to S-Croll, he's actually a really good guy, I've met him a few times since. I come out, I think I have some good lyrics but they're playing weird beats, the sound's all wrong, no one can hear what I'm saying. And then he just gets on—I have no swagger, I'm just standing there with my mic—he comes up and he just murders me. The only line he said that I remember was "you wear women's jeans and look like you should join the swimming team." That's a tight rhyme. Off stage presence alone he killed me, and I walked off in shame. I sleep, wake up, get breakfast and leave Ottawa forever. Seriously, I haven't been back to Ottawa since then. [laughs]
Advertisement
How much of the screenplay for Bodied draws on experiences like that from your own life?
A lot of it does. I think people are gonna read this movie as more autobiographical than it is because of the similarities between me and the main character but it really is drawing from what I've seen in the battle world. There's a lot of easter eggs for battle fans, they'll know exactly what I'm referencing at specific parts of the movie. It's not so much about me as it is the scene as a whole, but seen through my perspective. I hope I wasn't that much of a white kid growing up [as the film's main character Adam] but it was pretty close.Was being offensive a hurdle you had to get over when you started in battle rap?
I'll tell you this: the realest scene in that movie in terms of being autobiographical is where Adam makes a choice about what kind of material he's gonna use. He knows that one way, the crowd is gonna be on his side and the other way, he gets to keep his sense of morality. I'm not gonna say what he goes with but I know that it's a choice I've certainly had to make. I don't think I've always made the right choice and it is something that I think about and grapple with. I have to give a big shout out to my wife here, who is amazing and has incredible insight and is awesome at coming up with incredibly offensive rap lines but is also awesome at telling me when I shouldn't say a line. So it's a conversation I have with myself, it's a conversation I have with my friends, with my wife. That's what it is, man. These are conversations that do happen but we don't see them onscreen [in rap battles].
A lot of it does. I think people are gonna read this movie as more autobiographical than it is because of the similarities between me and the main character but it really is drawing from what I've seen in the battle world. There's a lot of easter eggs for battle fans, they'll know exactly what I'm referencing at specific parts of the movie. It's not so much about me as it is the scene as a whole, but seen through my perspective. I hope I wasn't that much of a white kid growing up [as the film's main character Adam] but it was pretty close.Was being offensive a hurdle you had to get over when you started in battle rap?
I'll tell you this: the realest scene in that movie in terms of being autobiographical is where Adam makes a choice about what kind of material he's gonna use. He knows that one way, the crowd is gonna be on his side and the other way, he gets to keep his sense of morality. I'm not gonna say what he goes with but I know that it's a choice I've certainly had to make. I don't think I've always made the right choice and it is something that I think about and grapple with. I have to give a big shout out to my wife here, who is amazing and has incredible insight and is awesome at coming up with incredibly offensive rap lines but is also awesome at telling me when I shouldn't say a line. So it's a conversation I have with myself, it's a conversation I have with my friends, with my wife. That's what it is, man. These are conversations that do happen but we don't see them onscreen [in rap battles].
Advertisement
How far is too far in battle rap?
That's an excellent question. You can log on to a few battle rap forums and see that question being debated every day for the rest of your life. [laughs] I think what it comes down to is that everyone has their line. As rappers, we have a line that we're not gonna cross. As audience members, people have a line of what they're not gonna laugh at. No two lines are the same, though, so that lack of a universal agreement of what we're gonna say or not say, that's where the drama comes from.Have you seen things go too far?
Yeah, I've seen it happen to me, actually. I had someone who was in the crowd be very angry at me and yell at me for an hour after I battled. The funny thing is that it was probably one of the least offensive things I've ever said. I was doing an impression of my opponent but [the audience member] was just mad that I would even mention the subject that I mentioned. I'm just thinking, "You don't understand! I'm saying it from his perspective." The complexity was lost in the heat of the moment. You can plan out this whole line of attack that's above the board to you but other people are not gonna feel the same way.What's the worst thing you've ever said?
All my worst bars are in the movie and I said all those bars. There are different vectors of awfulness but there was one really bad time where my opponent's girlfriend was in the room and my girlfriend at the time was also in the room, this was 2007. I said, "You're such an ugly person / watch me fucking serve him," and then I actually pointed at our girlfriends and I was like "you liked my girl so much you hooked up with the chubby version." They were kind of dressed similarly… It was bad, man. But people loved that line, it won me "Punchline of the Week" in the World Rap Championship so, yeah. I apologized to his girlfriend right afterwards.Is there a catharsis, a rush to be able to say the shit you know you can't say?
I don't really get a rush from the offensiveness specifically. For me it's more about the cleverness of the line. That's where my rush comes from and then I'm just kind of agnostic to the offensiveness of it.Okay, tough question. Right now, especially in North America, there's much discussion about what "free speech" means because you have visible Neo-Nazis using the term as an excuse to be racist, counteracted by language awareness activism from progressives. Bodied seems to be satirizing both sides of this issue, so what do you think battle rap has to say about that?
I think there's a really interesting point to be made about the idea of a "safe space." We have a very particular connotation for that phrase nowadays but in one of the Q&As, Joseph mentioned that battle rap is a safe space for saying offensive things to each other, which I think is a really funny reversal of how we view safe spaces now. It's true! When could there ever be an appropriate time to say these horrible things to each other except when the other person has explicitly agreed to say horrible things under specific rules and a specific structure. So if there's gonna be any time to make these jokes, I think battle rap is that time. That being said, what the movie hinges on is that you can never have a completely isolated safe zone. It always collides with the real world, especially now when everyone is constantly tuned in to everything on social media. That's where a lot of the tensions come from and I think we have seen that emerge in the battle scene and of course in society in general.Is that right, though? To have a safe space for being offensive using face-value stereotypes?
I don't know if it's alright. I don't think anything about the world that we live in now is "alright." Nothing is alright and that's the point of Bodied. What I wanted to do and I know that Joseph also wanted to do is not to say "here's a nice answer, here's our perspective on what we think should be the case." It was to say "society is fucked." Nobody wants to talk about how fucked up society is but we're gonna make you think about it and we're gonna make you laugh, too.Phil is on Twitter.
That's an excellent question. You can log on to a few battle rap forums and see that question being debated every day for the rest of your life. [laughs] I think what it comes down to is that everyone has their line. As rappers, we have a line that we're not gonna cross. As audience members, people have a line of what they're not gonna laugh at. No two lines are the same, though, so that lack of a universal agreement of what we're gonna say or not say, that's where the drama comes from.Have you seen things go too far?
Yeah, I've seen it happen to me, actually. I had someone who was in the crowd be very angry at me and yell at me for an hour after I battled. The funny thing is that it was probably one of the least offensive things I've ever said. I was doing an impression of my opponent but [the audience member] was just mad that I would even mention the subject that I mentioned. I'm just thinking, "You don't understand! I'm saying it from his perspective." The complexity was lost in the heat of the moment. You can plan out this whole line of attack that's above the board to you but other people are not gonna feel the same way.What's the worst thing you've ever said?
All my worst bars are in the movie and I said all those bars. There are different vectors of awfulness but there was one really bad time where my opponent's girlfriend was in the room and my girlfriend at the time was also in the room, this was 2007. I said, "You're such an ugly person / watch me fucking serve him," and then I actually pointed at our girlfriends and I was like "you liked my girl so much you hooked up with the chubby version." They were kind of dressed similarly… It was bad, man. But people loved that line, it won me "Punchline of the Week" in the World Rap Championship so, yeah. I apologized to his girlfriend right afterwards.Is there a catharsis, a rush to be able to say the shit you know you can't say?
I don't really get a rush from the offensiveness specifically. For me it's more about the cleverness of the line. That's where my rush comes from and then I'm just kind of agnostic to the offensiveness of it.Okay, tough question. Right now, especially in North America, there's much discussion about what "free speech" means because you have visible Neo-Nazis using the term as an excuse to be racist, counteracted by language awareness activism from progressives. Bodied seems to be satirizing both sides of this issue, so what do you think battle rap has to say about that?
I think there's a really interesting point to be made about the idea of a "safe space." We have a very particular connotation for that phrase nowadays but in one of the Q&As, Joseph mentioned that battle rap is a safe space for saying offensive things to each other, which I think is a really funny reversal of how we view safe spaces now. It's true! When could there ever be an appropriate time to say these horrible things to each other except when the other person has explicitly agreed to say horrible things under specific rules and a specific structure. So if there's gonna be any time to make these jokes, I think battle rap is that time. That being said, what the movie hinges on is that you can never have a completely isolated safe zone. It always collides with the real world, especially now when everyone is constantly tuned in to everything on social media. That's where a lot of the tensions come from and I think we have seen that emerge in the battle scene and of course in society in general.Is that right, though? To have a safe space for being offensive using face-value stereotypes?
I don't know if it's alright. I don't think anything about the world that we live in now is "alright." Nothing is alright and that's the point of Bodied. What I wanted to do and I know that Joseph also wanted to do is not to say "here's a nice answer, here's our perspective on what we think should be the case." It was to say "society is fucked." Nobody wants to talk about how fucked up society is but we're gonna make you think about it and we're gonna make you laugh, too.Phil is on Twitter.