A strange, warm, fuzzy feeling should set in when, at the start of the third round, you can watch this guy grab a notebook to recite his own rhymes, which he couldn't memorize. Not being able to memorize a text is a common thing that can happen to anyone. However, it's not common for a guy to read his own rhymes during a rap battle. This is what Germaine "Canibus" Williams did in the famous challenge against Dizaster, anno domini 2012. Nobody took his choice well, for some his career is over, for others he's dead, metaphorically. People are cruel. At the time of writing, his wikipedia page stops at that battle, although he has released six other studio albums, including one with the Horsemen.
It's like he hasn't moved on, but in fact he's moved on. Among those records, there's also what looks to be an interesting collaboration between the rapper from Kingston and the producer Bronze Nazareth, both part of the group The Almighty. Guests are the rappers of the Horsemen Killah Priest & Kurupt, Bronze, Raekwon, Craig G, Pete Rock, Pyrit, his brother Classic Pak and Dizaster. Yes, that Dizaster, on one of his first guest tracks on an album. The song is "Battle Buddies 4 Life", you might think Bis is over the trauma, but it's much more complicated than that: he puts three skits from the film series of "Rocky", comparing himself to Apollo Creed and Dizaster to Rocky Balboa. Then he gives the honor of the first verse to his rival: if Canibus isn't good in freestyle, Dizaster isn't good in the studio, his flow comes out messy, aggressive and casual. It might sound like revenge if it weren't for the fact that the same C doesn't sound much better than the guest and closes with another diss line against his all-time enemy double M, implicitly stating that he too would have lost against Dizaster and perhaps forgetting that Mathers emerged from a battle rap competition.
The guests keep the effort tight in part one, notably Killah Priest ("Bronze Horses") and Raekwon ("The Kings Sent for Me"), plus Bronze himself, find themselves at home on these beats, Kurupt and Craig G do a nice job in their song, and Pete Rock makes "Concourse P" one of the last listen-worthy tracks on the project. In fact, the disc presents a second half perhaps excessively occupied by Canibus, who can no longer hold an entire disc, for some reason. If you listen to it on a good day, it's tolerable just as Patrique writes, on a bad day it's an indigestible journey to take: Bronze Nazareth's production feels wasted on Canibus' style, and arguably, within shortly after of the excellent "The Living Daylights", it would have been a quality album in the hands of any Wu affiliate.
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