Now, I'm no rapper. In fact, I'm not a performer of any kind, although I did use to break and pop in public but that was a long time ago – if I tried it now I probably would break and pop, but I digress.
Like Rakim, I believe the definition of an MC is to move the crowd. Not just physically but intellectually and spiritually too. In my not so fucking humble opinion, there are very few rappers who are able to do any one of these let alone two or all three!
I've tried rapping (immersed in Hip Hop from an early age, I've tried most things related to it) and I can tell you it's not easy. Even for those that have a natural talent for chatting/rhyming it still requires, amongst other things, great timing, breath control, concentration, determination (especially in a battle scenario) and I still haven't mentioned the obvious things such as flow, lyrical content and the tone of the voice itself.
Personally, I fall down on almost all of these criteria, however, at least I recognise that about myself. There is a large (and ever increasing) number of rappers out there, some of whom you've heard or heard of, many of them with deals and joints on the street, that do call themselves MCs and fall pretty fucking hard on my criteria too.
It's not all doom and gloom (although we could do with some more MF DOOM) as the many talented MCs on some of the social networking sites proves, but we can't afford to be slack in our defence of the real Hip Hop or the WMD (wack mic deviants) will force us to go to war.
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