A lot of mainstream quality stuff, because that’s what I do. And I’m working on stuff that’s gonna be easier for the masses to get. I look at it like, the people that really love me will find me, you just gotta stay up-to-date with me. Here’s what he told Complex magazine,Ĭomplex: Why do you take that approach? Most of your songs aren’t available for download. He doesn’t just use YouTube or Twitter, he has built his music ground-up for the formats. I think it’s important that Lil B’s medium of choice is the YouTube video. This is the excellence of Lil B the Based God. Instead it’s a made-up move from reality. He has invented his own world centered largely around the idea of being “based,” which means something like “inventing and living in one’s own world.” He has his own dance, “cooking”, – more Bobby Flay than Raekwon – which looks like it’s a made-up move from a parody movie. Since then, Lil B has published a book and recorded prolifically, but instead of the catchy pop-rap of his youth, he now records largely stream-of-consciousness word associations over haunting beats. If you’re not from The Bay, you might still have heard their catchy “Got my vans on/but they look like sneakers ” if you’re from The Bay, you definitely heard it. Lil B the Based God, as he’s affectionately known, was a member of The Pack, a Bay Area rap group made up of young teens. Even still, the bigger Lil B blows up, the better for our understandings of each other and ourselves. My little brother is six months ahead of the Times, which knocks me down to only a couple weeks of insider self-satisfied bullshit. My brother told me about the Berkeley-based rapper Lil B within the last month, and now he’s in The New York Times and The Village Voice.
Sample album track "I Hate Myself," below, then buy I'm Gay on iTunes.This week, I got to find out exactly how far ahead of the mainstream I can possibly be at my luckiest. But maybe that was his plan all along-shock the world the title, only to have them come and witness his straightforward serious rap shit. In fact, he doesn't even talk of his gayness (or straightness) once on the album. Very few mentions of swag or pretty bitches or tiny jeans. Sample-driven boom bap production (okay one of the samples is a Goo Goo Dolls sample, but still), personal, sociopolitcally charged, traditional and mostly lucid rhymes. But if you divorce I'm Gay from the controversy of its title (which may never happen because controversy is more popular than music these days) you can process it as just another Lil B album, a mature effort of the Angels Exodus and Illusions of Grandeur lineage. In fact for a while it seemed entirely possible that it might've suffered the fate of the much lamented lost album Black Ken. The record's title has served as such a talking point that it was easy to forget that there was an actual album behind it. Just as a few of his devotees (namely me) were turning restless, last night his controversial I'm Gay dropped on iTunes, unexpectedly like bird shit. This time last year we were getting rare and legendary musical gifts from B on a nearly daily basis. It's now been six weeks since Lil B dropped the Bitch Mob, which is like a thousand years in Based World.