

You can score points with records mostly made by someone else. You can be a veteran who changed the game forever and get smoked in the court of public opinion because someone else’s music is fresher in everyone’s shared memory. You can be a legend with decades of hits and lose the crowd trailing too far away from radio. There’s nothing wrong with a slugfest, but it’s draining hearing people trash timeless classics. Playing a deep cut almost categorically loses you the point, even if it’s one of the greatest songs of all time. Regional bias and generational schisms creep up. The audience is mostly in charge of the scoring, and there’s rarely a consensus on points. Verzuz is fun, simple, and wide open - maybe a little too wide open. As it stands, each battle goes 20 rounds, with each contestant playing a hit and hearing a rebuttal.

ALL DMX SONGS BEFORE 1996 TRIAL
The rules came together on the fly through trial and error.

The premise is simple: Two prominent producers (or singers or songwriters) pair up live on Instagram and compete to decide who has the better catalog. Verzuz reimagines the DJ battles of hip-hop’s early days for the “one gotta go” set. Throughout quarantine, Swizz Beatz and Timbaland’s Verzuz battle serie s grew from a novel event bridging hip-hop’s past and present into uplifting excitement in our indoor spring and summer, joining DJ sessions by D-Nice, Questlove, and others (as well as Tory Lanez’s unpredictable, short-lived Quarantine Radio series) as the must-see remote-but-live viewing for rap and R&B fans while live shows and festivals were sidelined by COVID-19. The show’s overlords, Timbaland and Swizz Beatz, at their rematch.
