Review: End Of The Weak UK (@eodub) HEAT 3 featuring Apex Zero (ME) Live!

This review’s gonna be kinda mad…it’s kinda of my own event! 29^th June 2017 marked the third heat of the End of the Weak UK 2017 emcee chal­lenge upstairs at The Ritzy cinema Brix­ton. I think we can call this round the vet­er­ans heat! Three of the emcees in the chal­lenge I’ve been watch­ing and cypher­ing with since I first came on the scene and the oth­er, if not as well known in Lon­don, has def­in­itely been hon­ing the craft for a while.

1 – 2xplicit

One of my first exper­i­ences of a real, under­ground, UK Hip Hop event was one of the early Speak­ers Corners – those legendary nights that would even­tu­ally become the plat­form for EOW UK. On that night, one of the standout lyr­i­cists on the open mic was a broth­er called 2xplicit. Pro­found con­tent delivered with­in tech­nic­al, care­fully con­struc­ted flows and word­play was what shone light on him that night and has for over 10 years. Also an accom­plished free­styler and deep thinker my money was on 2X to take the win, but it wasn’t ever gonna be easy…

2 – Emerge MC

Anoth­er broth­er I’ve known for a long time, the Ginger Gen­er­al aka Emerge MC has a rich his­tory in our scene. One of the earli­est mem­bers of the People’s Army and hard­est work­ing sol­diers, he has pro­duced a lot of con­tent of the years and is always unashamedly him­self. He has been bat­tling since the begin­ning of his jour­ney and has become more and more accom­plished in both his song­craft and clash­ing in recent times. He just became the Battle Scars 2017 cham­pi­on and he said before the event that he was look­ing to do the double by tak­ing the EOW title too.

3 – Deekay

Anoth­er reg­u­lar mem­ber of the EOW, Battle Scars and open mic scene of Lon­don for years, DeeKay is an emcee with a long rela­tion­ship with bat­tling and free­styl­ing. As Mas Law will nev­er stop telling you, she’s one of the best to ever do the grab bag round. Hav­ing killed the round on so many occa­sions, she uses her quick wit, insight and lack of shits to give to make the crowd react every time. Deekay has pro­duced a lot of good tracks over the years and has also been fea­tured in TV documentaries.

4 – John Clarke

After being born and raised in dif­fer­ent parts of South Amer­ica for the early part of his life, John Clarke’s fam­ily even­tu­ally settled in the UK and he now lives in Brighton. He first dis­covered Hip Hop listen­ing to Run Dmc as a small child as he played and caught the vibe instantly. Since that day he’s known he wanted to write lyr­ics and he has been work­ing on his per­son­al ver­sion of Hip Hop and spoken word poetry ever since.

With this cal­ibre of chal­lenger, you’d expect the stand­ard to be high and the emcees held up that expect­a­tion. There wasn’t much to choose between any of them in the writ­ten round. 2xplicit came with some soul­ful, insight­ful vibes (man even sang!), Deekay kicked a jokes verse about her neigh­bour who’s a crazy bitch, while John Clarke showed why he shouldn’t be under­es­tim­ated in this line up of vets. Emerge took the round though, with a deep track about bat­tling him­self and his inner demons, talk­ing about a side of him­self that he’s spent his adult life try­ing to control.

The a cap­pella round was the best of the heat, show­ing just how good these emcees are. Each one was so dope I wouldn’t say there was a win­ner. Deekay star­ted it off spit­ting with her with her sig­na­ture wit and punch­lines, flip­ping up her into double time and back. The verse was straight bars but she touched on sub­jects, the most inter­est­ing being her dis­like for the term ‘fem­cee’. Emerge put the type of polit­ic­al com­ment­ary he’s known for as a People’s Army mem­ber, explain­ing his views out on the fuckry done by the sys­tem that’s oppress­ing us and cri­tiquing our own atti­tudes and action in try­ing to com­bat those issues. John Clarke took us on a deep, dark trip into his memor­ies and per­son­al his­tory – spit­ting in a folk-poet style to delve into his psyche and show it to the world. 2xplicit took the mic and opened with the expres­sion ‘you are love’ before describ­ing the inter­con­nec­ted­ness of human­ity and the uni­verse and what that means for indi­vidu­al­ism and col­lect­iv­ism. It was a ser­i­ous round and prop­erly showed that we had prop­er lyr­i­cists in this heat.

Black Santa Kissy K hit the stage for the grab bag round…and shit went down! John Clarke and 2xplicit did their thing, had no prob­lems and man­aged to hold the levels up, but Dee Kay showed why she is a mas­ter of this round. With every item she kicked a punch­line that kept the crowd laugh­ing – the best being about a car­rot and a dildo! She was only out­done by Emerge, who was in is ele­ment. The Ginger Gen­er­al in full geez­er-rap­per mode used the items per­fectly, rip­ping into Kissy and him­self and had the whole crowd bus­sing up. The best part came with a mag­ni­fy­ing glass, with Emerge say­ing it’s what ladies need to see Kissy’s…manhood! Killed it.

The next 2 rounds kept the stand­ard high, Jazz T suc­cess­fully try­ing to trip up the chal­lengers in the DJ vs Emcee round. Jazz is the best/worst at this, but all the emcees handled it and nobody chocked or gave up. The cypher round was dope, with again no one really stand­ing out – just 4 dope emcees free­styl­ing off each other’s last word, with a lot got said about Deekay and Emerges ginger hair! The con­test was ser­i­ous and extremely close, and like heat 1, it showed just how good this con­test is when you have this level of par­ti­cip­at­ing emcees.

While the judges com­pared their score­cards, myself, Apex Zero, hit the stage to per­form tracks from my upcom­ing EP ‘All and Noth­ing’. Along­side me were my broth­er OMeza Omni­scient from First and Last and a broth­er who’d flown in from Beijing to be part of the show – NY nat­ive Jack­son Turn­er. Now I’m not the kinda dude to be writ­ing about how dope I am or how lit my show was…so I’m just gonna say I was happy with how it went down. The ven­ue was full of fam­ily and sup­port­ers who got involved, which I love, and I received beau­ti­ful energy from the crowd – espe­cially dur­ing my new tracks ‘21^st Cen­tury Enslave­ment’ and soon to be released ‘Fly­ing High’. My broth­ers both killed their parts, with OMeza per­form­ing on ‘Key to Our Sur­viv­al’ and Jack­son join­ing me on ‘Fly­ing High’ and our next col­lab­or­a­tion ‘Face the Morn­ing Sun’ that’ll fea­ture on his new pro­ject. Look out for videos from both those tracks com­ing soon on Glob­al Fac­tion, and the EP ‘All and Noth­ing’ that will be released soon on Design Chaos and DB Bros Records.

After our per­form­ance the res­ults were announced. Sim­il­arly to heat 1, where the level was equally high, the scores were ridicu­lously close. Each emcee had been con­sist­ent, which is the key to win­ning this chal­lenge, so with that point made, it was about who had stood out the most in each round. The win­ner was rightly Emerge MC. He’d taken more rounds than any­one else and had shown just how much he has matured as an emcee and an artist. He now fully owns his polit­ic­al-geez­er per­sona and can move between ser­i­ous top­ics and com­edy like it’s noth­ing. He won a really dif­fi­cult heat here, and has put him­self in a great pos­i­tion to win EOW UK 2017 – what he describes as UK Hip Hop’s Cham­pi­ons League. He’s def­in­itely at that level and this per­form­ance proved it.

The next heat, which was actu­ally per­formed before this was pub­lished (due to time con­straints – I was tour­ing China fam…low me!), fea­tured an EP launch from Frshrs and anoth­er dope line up of emcees on July 27^th. It’s too late to say make sure you reach, but def­in­itely check out the review and foot­age com­ing soon.

The fifth heat will be on August 31^st back at the Ritzy and the 2017 EOW UK final – with the line up for the cli­max of the UK EOW Sea­son shap­ing up to be dope as fuck – will be on Septem­ber 15^th at Hootanany, Brixton.