My name is Brandon but everybody calls me B-Line, because in middle school I made a beeline for the lunch line every single day, and my boys started calling me B-Line, and it stuck. I'm 16 and a junior. I live in Pennsylvania with my grandmom, who's raising me and my little brother Dylan, and I write rhymes.

I write mostly on the bus, in a black-and-white composition book I keep in my backpack. It's my third one. The first one's full and the second one got rained on. On the bus there's forty minutes every morning and forty every afternoon with nothing to do but look out the window and think, so I think in rhymes.

This is the first time I ever put them where anybody could see. My cousin showed me how to make the page at the library. Be nice.

1. Every word is mine. I don't bite nobody's rhymes. If it's on this page, it came out of my head.

2. No cursing. Not one. My grandmom reads this page. She found out about the Internet in March and now she checks it every night. Besides, if you need to curse to say it, you didn't find the right word yet.

3. No putting anybody down. No dissing, no talking about nobody's mother. I'd rather write about what I see than tear somebody up. Anybody can be mean. That's the easy part.

4. Write what's real. I don't got a car or a chain or a mansion, so I don't rhyme about one. I rhyme about my block, my family, my school and whatever's on my mind.

THE ROOTS. From Philadelphia, and a real band, with real drums and a real bass, not just a record playing. Their new album Things Fall Apart came out in February and I've had it in my Discman pretty much every day since. Black Thought is the best MC alive, I don't care what anybody says. He never wastes a word. That's what I'm trying to learn.

LAURYN HILL. She won five Grammys this year for The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Five! She can rap and she can sing, and she talks about real things, love and growing up and doing right, and it's still hard. Grandmom likes her too, which never happens. When she won I made Grandmom stay up to watch.

MY GRANDMOM. She doesn't rap. But she can tell a story so you can see it, and she never says one word more than she has to. Everything I know about rhyming I learned from music. Everything I know about saying something, I learned from her.

QUENTIN'S OUTKAST PAGE - Southern Hip Hop 101. Quentin says OutKast is the best group in hip hop and he can prove it, with all three albums ranked. I say The Roots. Go read his side, then come back here and read mine, and you decide.