This time the rhyme goes online

Aspiring rappers Mike Siehien and Erik Maldonado have never met. Siehien, 27, lives in Santa Monica in a one-bedroom apartment; Maldonado, 25, is a freelance Web designer in the Bronx.

Yet on a recent weeknight, Siehien spit out a furious rhyme that mocked Maldonado’s rap skills, questioned his manhood and let him know where he stands in the vast hip-hop pecking order:

“You can’t hold a candle to this vandal who manhandles you,” Siehien raged. “Like a con off work release, your life has no worth to me -- certainly third-degree burns leave your verses in surgery....”

After a long day processing mortgage loans, Siehien uploaded the song to a free Web server, then posted a link to the song on Maldonado’s website, www.hiphoppoetry.com, where the two MCs have been swapping vicious audio put-downs for more than a year.

It was the latest salvo in a classic MC battle, the kind that has long been a staple in the dog-eat-dog world of hip-hop. To a generation raised on computers, it seems only natural that the tradition has migrated from street corners to cyberspace, home to all manner of uncivil discourse.

Its practitioners call themselves “Net-cees,” a takeoff on MC, hip-hop’s “master of ceremonies.” What started a few years ago as goofing around in rap and sports chat rooms, they say, has evolved into a unique offshoot of the rapper’s art.

Some online rappers use cheap music-editing software to battle one another with actual songs; others, who call themselves text-cees, simply type their rhymes. Many troll for combatants on “battle boards” sponsored by sites such as www.rapflava.com and www.hiphoppoetry.com, which host strictly refereed tournaments and, in some cases, boast thousands of registered users.

Kids from the Bronx battle soldiers stationed in Iraq. Hip-hop heads in London square off against 14-year-olds borrowing their mothers’ computers.

And on the Internet, rappers don’t know if they’re battling a thugged-out gangster or a mortgage broker home from work.

Some of the put-downs can verge on the erudite: Maldonado has called Siehien a “trickled down rapper like Ronald Reagan money.”

But more often online battle lyrics -- like those of their real-life counterparts -- brim with violent imagery, machismo, put-downs and threats. They are occasionally homophobic and misogynistic, and they are almost always spectacularly profane -- like syncopated Don Rickles riffs grafted onto a Quentin Tarantino flick.

Last winter a text-cee named Kimball mixed it up with an opponent named Magoo:

My rhymes are complicated like group-porn flicks, with rhymes so fat they need aerobics

So I’ll spit with militant aggressiveness, sever your limbs and put you on my dissed-membered list

In mainstream rap, words like these have contributed to headline-making feuds and, sometimes, violence. But the online MCs can happily taunt their rivals, safe in the knowledge that the insults are pure ritual.

“The truth is, how many real thugs get online?” said Maldonado, who raps under the name Advocate of Wordz. “Real gangsters are out in the street shooting people and fighting.”

Some hip-hop purists see the Net-cee battles as a debased -- if not downright ridiculous -- take on the live rap freestyle battle, a cornerstone of hip-hop culture rooted in the cutting contests of the jazz era, as well as older African American word games.

At the real competitions -- famously portrayed in the Eminem movie “8 Mile” -- rappers improvise verses, taunting their opponents in front of audiences that choose winners and losers with ego-withering candor.

“Every heartless geek with a keyboard has come along and tried to cheapen my craft,” a rapper groused recently on the hip-hop site www.rapverse.com. “People that would never get on stage and move a crowd, people that never go to block parties where the DJ’s at, with the mike and tables and truly represent.”

The Net-cees concede that spontaneity is sacrificed online: They typically have three days to compose and post their battle rhymes. But the best of them believe it is a legitimate form of workshopping that allows them to practice the craft without leaving their bedrooms.

“You can’t replace a real, offline battle,” Maldonado said in a phone interview. “But people are starting to recognize that a lot of hip-hop is happening online right now.”

The earliest rap music was created on turntables, in part because inner-city kids couldn’t afford musical instruments. Many text-cees are frustrated rappers without access to recording studios, or suburbanites who lack nearby places to battle other rappers in person.

Henry Long is a Navy seaman with musical aspirations who spent a few months of 2004 battling rappers from the computer lounge of a Texas military base where he was temporarily stationed. In his situation, he said, rapping on the Internet was the most practical way to keep his skills sharp.

Long, 23, used to battle his friends in person at his Virginia high school. He said that rhyming online forced him to become a more inventive writer because the words must stand on their own, divorced from the charismatic presence of the rapper.

“When I went to the Web, that’s when I really stepped up my game, ‘cause it made me be more of a marksman with words,” he said.

Maldonado started his website in 2002 with no intention of hosting rap battles. After losing his job at a health insurance company in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorists’ attacks, he simply wanted to start a site dedicated to the music he loved.

At first the site provided emerging MCs with a place to post their rhymes and gave fellow writers a chance to critique them. But that wasn’t enough for rappers like Long, who missed the pugilistic thrill of an honest battle.

“I wanted to be the toughest s.o.b. on the site,” Long said in a recent phone interview. “I see it like this: If you think you the baddest bear in the forest, that’s cool, but if nobody else thinks that, what’s the use of holding that title?”

As the rappers started going at it more often, Maldonado and his friends developed house rules: Site administrators set the length of the rhymes, the battlers had 72 hours to post, and the rapper who earned the best of five votes from the online audience was typically declared the winner.

The crowds who judge the battles can be tough. The voters are usually fellow rappers, and they tend to pick apart weak verses as if they were grad students in the world’s most ruthless writing seminar.

“You wanted an honest and objective critique and vote,” one observer recently wrote to a text-cee who lost to a battler named Nubian Prince. “But NP pretty much ripped your limbs off and beat you to death with the severed appendages as your life’s blood seeped across your keyboard.”

Unlike most online rappers, Siehien and Maldonado say they have a legitimate beef to settle.

In 2002, Maldonado visited another site that Siehien frequented called www.allcityhiphop.com, which has since ceased to operate. Maldonado accused the Web operators there of stealing his ideas. A virtual turf war erupted, with fans of the two sites typing out nasty battle rhymes at one another.

Ever since then, Siehien, who goes by the online name C-N Tower, has been on Maldonado’s site, heckling him in verse.

Their battle is the equivalent of a barroom brawl on a portion of the website where there are no rules. But after more than a year, it is difficult to say who has the upper hand. Although Siehien is generally funnier and meaner, Maldonado, who calls himself the website’s “prezident,” has a fluid, confident style, with higher-quality musical backup.

Siehien wanted to make a strong impression with his latest post, so he asked a music-producer friend to make him a unique, professional-sounding backdrop over which he could rap. With a staggering timbale-driven beat and a mocking flourish of Latin horns, it was a good match for his comic style.

On this evening, Siehien, a stocky, gregarious UCLA graduate, had shed his coat and tie for a skullcap and blue hoodie. When he wasn’t spitting fire into the microphone, he seemed gracious and well-spoken, dropping casual references to Beat literature and Middle Eastern history.

He said the online battling may one day lead to a professional rap career. But that doesn’t explain why he keeps posting tirades against Erik Maldonado, the kid he’s never met.

“I can’t let someone think falsely that he’s got a leg up on me,” he said. “For me, it’s worth walking 1,000 miles to prove it.”

Between vocal takes, Siehien played back his handiwork, laughing at the Looney Toons sound bites he’d sprinkled between verses, and at his own raunchy, largely unprintable words.

Because online rappers’ opponents are invisible and largely unknown, it takes some creativity to come up with truly personal put-downs. On this track, Siehien goofed on Maldonado for rapping with a lisp and breaking up with his girlfriend, a fact he gleaned from elsewhere on the website.

“But I don’t wish him ill health,” Siehien said. “It’s like he said in a thread the other day: If he saw me in the path of a speeding truck, he’d push me out of the way. I feel the same way.”

Reached by phone a few days after Siehien’s song posted, Maldonado was magnanimous and cool.

“He put his time into this one,” he said. “I’ve always said the kid is a good writer.”

Maldonado vowed to post a rebuttal. But how long can a beef between two rappers virtually unknown to each other go on?

“As long as he wants it to,” Siehien said, switching from gracious to gangsta. “If he wants to get pimp-slapped around a little more, my hand’s cocked back.”