A Roll Call of My Rap Personas! (for your face)

This has got to be in the third person. Pretentious I know, but sorry. It's too confusing otherwise, dealing with these multiple personae. Did you know both "personas" and "personae" are correct? I typed "personae" in the post title and I just couldn't bear it. It was like, you can't put the Latin plural on there and then front like you're all streety and stuff. Gotta go with "personas" instead - more indifferent, more aloof-who-gives-a. Whereas "personae" is too hoity - it feels like it should be in italics always, like a foreign word. But then down here in the text, it's no holds barred! Personas, personae - I just go with what fits best in context. Example: "multiple personae" - that sounds like a disorder or something, so the Latiny-diseasey plural works perfect!

That's enough by way of introduction! Here it is, bam: a roll call of my rap personae! Albeit, some of these dudes are seriously more hip-hop than rap:

MC Voltage - the original, and best rhymer of the bunch by far. Affiliated with the P-Ville-based Organization Of Rhyme, Voltage would sit in the corner scrawling endless rhymes into his marble composition book, just waiting on his crack at the mic while Thadd G and Mike D (those were their rap names) rapped/cut/scratched/sampled/produced/trumpeted and rapped/played the keys/arranged/taught me dance moves respectively. Halcyon times. Sweet fucking times. I was duly mentored.

Boss Banja - Boss Banja means well. He's an irrepressible scamp. Clueless as he is on some, nay, many scores, he does bring the flavor hard, he knows how to rock a heavy-handed socially-conscious message, and he knows how to jump, jump up, shake the party. Persistent with the malapropisms, such as "Coming at you from the island of Af-ri-caaaah!" and such head-scratching self-sequitur boasts as "You know I have a hand in what I dooooo!", his legendary lost debut disc Shantytown Jams is block-rockin'-chock with charm on such hard-hitting tracks as "Call Me Boss Banja", "They Call Me Boss Banja", "Pickup Game", "Down With The Black And White", "The Boss Banja Roll", "Look Out! For Boss Banja", "Back To Africa", "Support The Troops", and "The Way Boss Banja Do It". Actually that's the whole track list. It hath its charms.

Evil I - this dude has some unimpressively f'd up material. Let me tell you. Just a sample: "As my beats flat out flatten whole sections of manhattan, people run screaming from my terrorist rappin', I'm badder than Anthrax, my raps makes good tracks go bad - and you knew that it would happen! from my utterly perverted skills-on-the-mic-like Fatty Arbuckle cold molestin' a tyke I strikes fear into the innocent - with just one hand, I types fifty words a minute and they all said: DAMN!!!" I'm not holding that up as a paragon of anybody's genre frankly. It's not "edgy" or "envelope-pushing," it's just b, to the a, to the d. Set to a Huey Lewis sample, and don't tell me you don't know the one I mean.

MC Ogynist - you can just about guess. I could never get my heart into this persona, it was really just for that one song. I am not EVEN going to glorify it by mentioning what it was called. Beneath me.

MC Grammatical - this dude's shit was HARD. To write, I mean! Every couplet rhymed properly, all verses parsed properly and strung into complete sentences, not an infinitive split, not a preposition left dangling. MC Grammatical came correct, you could say that much for him. He spent most of his time boasting of his grammatical skills, and chastising other rappers for their lapses. Highly entertaining, but forget about trying to freestyle!

MC Irregardless - this dude is like, MC Grammatical's worst enemy. They hate each other - their relationship is all beef.

Big Poppa Rocka - okay, this guy is not much to talk about. He doesn't even have a song, all he has is one line, and it doesn't even make much sense: "They call me Big Poppa Rocka 'cuz of how much I roll." There might be some deeper interpretation there, but I'm not seeing it. Heck, there's no rhyme! Big Poppa Rocka has not even got one rhyme. He's included here only for the sake of completeness.

Illegal D - Occasionally I'll freestyle a bit, as a verbal intimidation tactic, when playing a friendly game of street hoops. That's where this guy comes in.

MC Funkee Duncan - totally fictitious persona. Goes to local coffee-houses and competes in poetry slams under the misapprehension that they are basically the same thing as rap battles. He does, however, roundly destroy his opponents. See Interview.

So that's it! A Roll Call of My Rap Personae. Or Personas. Or perhaps, Personas Non Grata - some of them, certainly.

I'll let you know if any others surface. Meanwhile, I'll close it with a dope-ass line, a line so dope it's ass:


"I gots more styles than a model's got smiles"

- me.

I forget which persona. It gets complicated, that particular line gets passed around a bit. Everybody covets that line.