by Ben Spatz
I saw a play called _Rhyme Deferred_ by the Hip Hop Theater Junction. At one point these two brothers were having an MC battle. One brother had sold out to the rap music industry and made it big, while the other had kept it real and stayed with his community. This was the big battle, where the keep-it-real brother defeated the sell-out brother with his phat stylz.
They did something really innovative here. Instead of actually writing good rap for one brother and bad rap for the other, both MCs just made sounds like "badda badda boom, ratta tat tat, kablam," etc. Onomatopeiac "battling" sounds. The expressions on their faces and on the faces of the onlookers made it clear who was winning and who was losing, who was feeling the flow and who was tripping up. In this way they avoided having to write the "perfect" rap which the underground brother was supposed to be hitting.
In other words, they set up a theatrical convention, which had hiphop as its content. They retained the flavor of hiphop while not actually doing oldschool hiphop. There was no actual rapping, there was just the representation of rapping. Hiphop was the content but the show was theater. This is an important step for hiphop theater, because as long as you are only willing to be genuine hiphop onstage, you can't enter the theatrical world that exists behind the fourth wall.