There's a good chance that in the past couple of weeks you'll have received a chortling circular email entitled something like: "CHECK THIS OUT! TEACHER BEATS PUPIL IN A RAP BATTLE!" Mancunian MC Blizzard is a 17-year-old college student, and although 30-year-old Peterborough supply teacher and poet Mark Grist does not directly educate him, some would argue that he taught him a thing or two in their rap battle on UK online battle video channel Dontflop.com. More than a million viewers have so far delighted at Blizzard's youthful upstartery ("I hope you drop dead/If I punch you in the face, who you going to call? Ofsted?") being shamed by Grist ("I don't care about the aggressive shit you spit online or that everybody's heard of ya/You'd still give yourself a hernia trying to assemble flatpack furniture"). You've not seen any rap battle like it.
Grist has already found unlikely fans on Jezebel.com and looks set to garner many more, by pioneering ethically sound battling. "I wonder how necessary homophobia, misogyny and racism are if you want to win a battle," he explains. "If you can do it without using them, why do you choose to do so?"
