Deciphering CyHi’s “No Competition”
CyHi wanted street rappers who could write, and felt the genre had tilted too far toward campus-bred wordsmiths. The song stakes its claim on biographical authority and technical supremacy.
Every year and a half, somebody with a rap career and a grudge logs on to announce that the new generation can’t hold a candle. CyHi picked February, aka Black History Month, to do it. Days ago, he typed that today’s lyricists are “a bunch of straight A students who dropped out of college they sophomore year to be rappers. You can tell they don’t have any life experiences they’re just good with words.” People in his replies tore him apart within the hour, mostly because he spent the last decade putting words in Kanye West’s mouth for a living, the same Kanye who built an entire persona around ditching school. CyHi didn’t flinch—he said what he said and told everybody who didn’t like it “oh well.”
Then he dropped a song, and on a song the rules change, because Twitter awards you points for having an opinion while a record makes you prove it.
“No Competition” opens with CyHi pulling a slick move. “I’d like to take this chance to apologize,” Connor McGregor’s infamous speech announces, and before you can register the apology he banks straight into a résumé. Before Jimmy Fallon, he had to meet Jimmy Henchman—that’s James Rosemond, the music industry power broker doing federal time on drug trafficking and murder-for-hire convictions. Before he had any equipment, he had “amigo in Arizona send me a shipment.” The bars are doing exactly what the tweets did. CyHi wants his street passport stamped before he spits a single punchline, and the Henchman name isn’t casual. That’s a real figure from a real era of label-adjacent violence. Most of the rappers CyHi is mad at wouldn’t drop that reference and wouldn’t know why it carries weight.
He moves quick from there. “I keep my enemies close cuz I feel we distant/Or get killed by a friendly ‘cause I don’t see any difference.” Standard paranoia bar, competent, nothing wild. Then a Willie Lynch allusion about Black division (“Still be a Willie Lynching cuz niggas never heal from defeat”), and he bends that last word into a Kobe Achilles pun. Clever, and CyHi has always been clever. Since he snuck his verse onto “So Appalled” back in 2010 while Kanye was sleeping in the studio, his whole reputation rests on the fact that he can cram more syllable tricks into sixteen bars than most MCs fit into a full project.
After the Henchman reference and the Lynch allusion—two bars that actually connect biography to lyricism the way his Twitter rant demanded—CyHi sprays everywhere. His woman is unapproachable and won’t even notice you, dudes act emotional, somebody’s getting thrown in a trunk, there’s a Trump voting reference, and before you can catch your breath he’s bounced to Master P, Prince, and Dream in rapid succession. A female voice, maybe his wife, warns him to watch his positioning and remember what Ye told him. Inside of maybe twenty bars, the verse touches seven or eight subjects and commits to none of them, each line swinging to outdo the last one instead of building anywhere specific.
Ye handles the hook, or the scratches on “there is no competition” multiple times flat and CyHi tags it with “behind every bar is a celebration.” Late-era Kanye hooks have a certain laziness to them, and this one fits—he sounds bored, which maybe suits a song called “No Competition” but also puts CyHi’s voice next to the man who proved more forcefully than anybody alive that you don’t need a street background to gut people with rap music. Before loving MAGA and Hitler, Kanye made “Jesus Walks” and “Runaway” and “Diamonds from Sierra Leone,” none of which came from the drug trade, all of which cut deeper than ninety percent of records made by people with the exact credentials CyHi says are mandatory.
Wedged between the verses, an interlude plays audio of somebody, sounds like Sway or maybe another radio personality (for real, it sounded like Big Sean), praising CyHi’s cipher ability and admitting they wouldn’t battle him. It’s supposed to reinforce his dominance. What it actually does is salute the exact thing CyHi complained about on Twitter: being good with words. The whole tweet storm was about how vocabulary without biography falls short. Here’s CyHi getting praised for vocabulary.
Second verse, same motor. “None of y’all could mumble off my wonderful monologues/Some of the most iconic [rappers] you would stumble across/For my ciphers was on the blog.” He name-checks writing “So Appalled” rapping, “I was involved with that life before I wrote So Appalled,” and now the record has a genuinely interesting tension. CyHi claims he lived the street life BEFORE he got his pen up, which is supposed to separate him from the college rappers he’s criticizing, and fair enough. Except the line burns by in two seconds, and instead of parking on that distinction and letting it breathe, he’s already onto condom jokes (“Magnum on my dick/I can’t afford to take the condom off”), Applebee’s punchlines (“Serve your whole fam in the booth/Welcome to Applebees”), and strawberry daiquiri riffs.
The rhyme schemes, though. “Emphatically the last [one] to get mad at me/Automatically put on/The moving Africans rapidly through Atlanta.” That’s a quadruple-stacked internal scheme, and most working MCs would need three takes just to pronounce it clean. CyHi rattles it off like he’s reading a grocery list. The pen talent has never been in question—five Grammy nominations for songwriting, co-credits on “Sicko Mode” and “Famous” and “Father Stretch My Hands,” records for Kanye and Travis and Pusha T. The man can flat-out rap.
So why does “No Competition” feel like watching somebody warm up instead of perform? CyHi told the world he wanted rap grounded in real life, in scars, in the friction between survival and craft. He said words alone aren’t enough. Then he cut a record that is almost entirely words. The Henchman bar and the Arizona shipment bar and the “So Appalled” credential check are the only moments where his biography shows up with any weight. Everything else with the puns, the Applebee’s line, the condom joke, the woman-at-the-photo-shoot detour, could’ve been penned by any sharp MC with a thesaurus and no felonies.
He wraps the second verse with “contractually she going to always come running back to me” because “There is no competition,” folding a relationship brag into the title like he’s signing a deal nobody offered. The outro rolls in. Sway or whoever again, muttering about going bar-for-bar and conceding “I really really don’t want it.” Then a voice, maybe CyHi’s own: “I’m telling you, easy.”
Easy. That’s the last word on a record built to answer whether CyHi can back up his public stance about what real rap requires. And “easy” is the right description for what the song delivers technically. CyHi made this look easy. What he didn’t make it look is necessary. The bars prove he belongs in any cipher on earth. They don’t prove that his particular life (the 2021 highway shooting, the years ghostwriting behind a locked door, the Stone Mountain upbringing) puts something on wax that a gifted college dropout couldn’t match with enough practice. He had that song in him, but cut a different one.