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With the crowd looking on, the first two MCs introduce themselves at the Mic Club show Wednesday

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B-boy Yuta break-dances for a crowd prior to the Mic Club freestyle battle event Wednesday night.

Editor's note: Audio clips in this story contain some expletive lyrics.

Usually quiet after dark, the heart of campus Wednesday night thumped to phat beats as some of UCLA’s finest b-boys and MCs popped, flowed and spit their illest rhymes.

As part of Hip-Hop Awareness Week, a coalition of campus groups held Mic Club, perhaps the only event on campus to be billed as “an evening of beat-boxing, freestyling and b-boying.”

The event was organized by the Cultural Affairs Commission and the Student Committee for the Arts, in conjunction with the Majoring in Hip-Hop club. The club, for lovers of hip-hop music and culture, was founded in 2004 by second-year world arts and cultures student James Datu.

“We started out as a breaking club, but we wanted to cover all the elements of hip-hop to build a community for the entire culture of hip-hop,” said Datu, also known as “J-Boogie.”

“Majoring in Hip-Hop is all about learning about yourself,” he said.

The night started off with D.R.E.S. tha Beatnik, who has been hosting Mic Club in Atlanta for five years, manning the turntables on the stage in Ackerman Grand Ballroom as the b-boys (break-dancers) warmed up and the modest crowd of about 120 streamed in.

First up: break-dancing battle.

“This is a competition to celebrate the lifestyle of b-boys,” said Datu, who hosted the break dancing portion.

The 15 who started the competition were whittled down to eight in round two, and only four were able to break their way into round three.

In one of the marquee head-to-head matchups, the judges found B-boy Steven’s sharp and quick routine to be no match for B-boy Psycho’s showmanship. After sliding across the floor on his knees, Psycho twisted his body into a one-handed handstand and spanked himself.

With a sweaty series of spinning windmills and acrobatic torso twists, Psycho won the “body rock” break-dancing competition.

Next up: freestyle battle.

As the lights were turned down, D.R.E.S. took the stage with his six-member band to provide some live beats as a series of amateur rappers tried their hand at flowing.

D.R.E.S. proved to be versatile as master of ceremonies, interacting comfortably with the crowd and injecting pointed barbs at the rappers who floundered on stage.

In successive head-to-head rap battles, D.R.E.S. decided the winner by an electronic sound meter that determined which of the two received more applause.

When one rapper, P.D. Pablo, was met with near silence from the crowd after his performance, the host stopped the show briefly to announce that Pablo had received a 57, which is the worst score anyone had gotten in the five years they had been performing Mic Club.

“With a 57, you don’t deserve to be anywhere near a microphone,” D.R.E.S. said to a crowd of laughter.

The freestyler known as “Dumbfounded” steadily rapped his way to victory in the freestyle competition.

One of the crowd favorites, a large woman known as “Murdah Big Drawz,” battled a comparatively skinny MC in each of the first two rounds. The two traded jabs about one another’s weights, arousing rounds of “ohhhs” from the crowd.

“I do this shit for fun. I never met a girl who weighed two tons,” rhymed Yellah Fellah.

“I’m gonna eat you in my fuckin’ mouth. You not even a cheeseburger, you a McNugget,” rapped Big Drawz, who said in a subsequent interview she has been freestyle battling for six years.

For many of Wednesday’s performers, hip-hop is more than a musical taste. Big Drawz, whose real name is Carmella Scott, said she travels to area juvenile halls to teach kids about hip-hop and “use hip-hop for anger management.”