Already a big deal in hip-hop and beyond, it you haven’t seen this yet it’s pretty mesmerising.

For the last couple of years, battle rapping has been getting more and more mainstream, and in Dizaster the form possesses a bona fide maestro (his inspired 2011 battle with rhymester DNA has now been viewed by over a million people).

Enter – with an aging fighter’s muffled shuffle – Canibus. Although accurately considered one of hip-hop’s braver, smarter and more interesting writers, Canibus has a long habit of picking fights,having jump-started his career with a duel against LL Cool J, and relying upon rancor ever since when he deemed his fortunes in need of an especially strong shot in the arm. But during a King of the Dot pay-per-view battle last week – smoked out by what you imagine is an increasingly rare thing for him: a respectable payday – Canibus very definitely overdosed. Live by the sword, etc.

Just as tennis becomes increasingly harder and faster with each new professional generation, so does battle rapping, but the interim that divides Canibus’s battling heyday from the present encloses an evolutionary aeon. For the first couple of rounds against Dizaster, Canibus’s witless and mostly homophobic rhymes were the lyrical equivalent of a wooden racket, particularly in the face of all Dizaster’s fizzing, dazzling and highly personal spite.

Bad enough, but then Canibus found himself unable to remember his verses, and not only resigned the contest but whipped out his notepad, attempting to continue by reading aloud his prepared lyrics. Of course, most “freestyle” requires a partial suspension of disbelief from an audience, the line between preparation and improvisation being understandably vague… but you don’t pull out a notepad. Memory is a large part of the point. Reading aloud is a little like a ventriloquist moving their lips.

Worse still: despite having conceded the battle and alienated the audience, Canibus still had to endure Dizaster’s own third round, at which point the appropriate analogy is not boxing, or tennis, but bull fighting, as Dizaster buried his sword deep into the baby-soft flank of Canibus’s fairly ludicrous public image, while the victim looked on with the perverse smirk of someone staring catastrophe in the face…