Spittin' Bars

Here’s a weird sort of prediction that’s not really a prediction. I’m not really sure how it would come off to people. I suppose if they know you do magic, they’ll think of it as a magic trick. Otherwise, this is something you could play off in another way.

It’s a stage thing. Or possibly a party thing. I’ve never actually done it. It’s just an idea at this point. But you might want to take it and run with it.

I was watching videos of a well-known improvisational/freestyle rapper named Chris Turner.

And I say “well-known” as in “he’s well-known for an improvisational rapper.” He’s not, like, Obama or Kardashian well-known. Your grandma won’t come home and be like, “My pastor and everyone in my sewing-circle is just buzzing about Chris Turner.”

If you haven’t seen him, watch that video. If you can’t watch it at the moment, come back to it. He does wildly impressive spontaneous rap songs based on audience suggestions.

And after watching a few the other night, I thought, “You could fake this.”

Using an AmazeBox from Vanishing Inc. (or something similar) you could force the randomly chosen words for which you’ve pre-written an entire set of lyrics.

You could hand out, say, four different colors of paper slips. You tell the people (or have instructions on the paper itself) that if they have a red slip they should write down a famous real or fictional person, if they have a yellow slip they should write down a historical event, people with blue slips should write down an activity, and people with green slips should write down any object. This way, when you dump out the slips, you can have an audience member (or members) select one of each color, and you wouldn’t have to worry about them picking duplicates of your force words.

You could also, I suppose, only hand out one color of paper and then have the force slips folded in four different ways, and then you do the choosing yourself. But I think that’s weaker. I think you really want to have the audience do the picking.

Out of context—in a talent contest or an amateur night or something—you could probably play this off as a real skill.

I could see it as an M.C. thing too. Like maybe you come out early on and say you were hoping to demonstrate your talent tonight, but your talent is “speed learning” so it’s not really something that makes for a good demonstration in and of itself. “But I have this list of activities that I thought would make for an entertaining demonstration. I’m going to have you randomly select one and I will teach it to myself backstage and by the end of the night I’ll be the best in the world at it.” The list includes things like breakdancing, yodeling, contortionism, hula-hooping, etc.

The next time you’re back on stage, you had out the slips of paper. And then for the finale, you collect them and then proceed to bust a rhyme.

It would be fun to come on all quiet and trepidatious before switching over to hyper-confident and spitting fire when the beat drops. Like…

Okay… so what suggestions do we have here. Okay… uhm… this one says Candle. This one says Shrek. This one says ‘the launch of Sputnik.’ And this one says Choking. Oh god… this is going to be impossible isn’t it…I don’t know…

CH-CH-CH-CHECK YOURSELF, BEFORE YOU WRECK YOURSELF
CHOKE ON MY DICK UNTIL YOU’RE GREEN LIKE GODDAMN SHREK HIMSELF

You get the idea.

In a straight magic show, you’d probably need some other element to it.

Maybe you say you’re getting out of the magic game and working on your freestyle rap career. And you’re going to hijack this performance to launch it tonight. Do the rap, but leave out one of the suggestions (maybe get five suggestions instead of four for this). And at the end someone will say (or you have a plant say) “Hey, you forgot [the other suggestion].” And you hang your head in shame and mumble something about how maybe you’re not a good freestyle rapper. And you should go back to magic. And you flip over the seven-digit number you predicted earlier in the performance to show that it spells out the final suggested word that you forgot to include in your rap. (Cryptext style.)

That’s as far as I’ve taken the idea. If you end up pursuing it, let me know.