Lil B is the strangest rapper alive. He has none of the trappings of mainstream success—no Video Music Awards, no Fallon appearances, no record deal—but he is a celebrity on the Internet, where he has more than a hundred MySpace accounts, four hundred thousand Twitter followers, and sixty million YouTube views. Justin Bieber gleefully transmits Lil B’s memes; Diddy, acting as his hype man at a South by Southwest performance, did Lil B’s signature “cooking dance.” Pitchfork found his most recent album, “I’m Gay,” “especially compelling.” Last year, he released a mixtape with six hundred seventy six tracks, including “Am I Even a Rapper Anymore?,” “Cash in My Tiny Pants,” “I Sex Myself,” and “Sherbert Flerbert.” He is twenty-two years old and claims to have released “over two thousand songs,” which is plausible, depending on what the definition of “song” is.
One of his songs is called “I’m Miley Cyrus,” and it goes like this: “I’m Miley Cyrus / I’m Miley Cyrus / Cyrus / Cyrus / I’m Miley Cyrus.” Another song, called “Mel Gibson,” goes like this: “I look like Mel Gibson / I’m Mel Gibson… Oh my god, I’m Mel Gibson.” He has a song called “Ellen DeGeneres,” which goes like this: “Ellen DeGeneres / Ellen DeGeneres / Ellen DeGeneres / Ellen DeGeneres.” There is one called “Justin Bieber,” one called “Paris Hilton,” one called “Bill Clinton,” and one called “Dr. Phil,” which barely mentions Dr. Phil. In a 2011 video interview, the Vice reporter Ryan Duffy asked, with regard to this phylum of Lil B’s music, “What the f*ck is that about?” “It’s some celebrities that I just think are just funny,” Lil B responded. By the end of the interview, Lil B had come up with a new song. It went like this: “I’m Ryan Duffy / I’m Ryan Duffy.”
Last month, N.Y.U.’s student-run program board announced an unscripted lecture by Lil B, to take place on April 11th. Tickets sold out within ten minutes. “It’s gonna be a real progressive talk,” Lil B presaged, “and when everybody leaves, their lives will be changed.” The mood at the auditorium on Wednesday night was Obama-in-2008 exultant. One student wore a chef’s hat, an allusion to Lil B’s “cooking music,” which is itself a satire of rap’s lionization of cocaine dealers. Anxious for Lil B to appear, the crowd chanted one of his stage names, Based God. Lil B is hardly the first rapper to claim status as a deity, but he did coin “based” (or “#based”), an adjective he defines vaguely, and which uses to describe his music, his lifestyle, and himself.
A white kid with a wispy goatee, wearing a purple N.Y.U. hoodie, sat in the seat in front of mine, typing on his phone. Over his shoulder, I saw him tweet a message to Lil B: “@LILBTHEBASEDGOD you can f*ck my bitch, she even said so herself. 4th row #nyu #lecture.” The tweeter turned out to be Tyler Kochanski, a sophom*ore from Bloomfield, New Jersey. In real life, he was sitting in the fifth row, unaccompanied. I asked him why he wrote messages to the Based God. “Just to do it,” he said. “When you’re feeling reckless, you just repeat the things he says, whether it’s true or not.” (Girlfriend-swapping is indeed one of Lil B’s recurring themes, albeit one that he seems to indulge only within the aspirational world of his music.) “There’s no one else like him,” Kochanski said. “He doesn’t care what anyone thinks.”
“If I could interject,” said Mitchell Wang, a freshman in a Polo pullover, “I think you can’t view him as a traditional artist. He’s sort of the vanguard of hip-hop, in that he’s parodying what’s out there.”
A red curtain parted and Lil B appeared, smiling and pumping his fist triumphantly. He wore a tennis-ball-green T-shirt, a quilted scarf, a jewelled bindi, and a gold grill. He spoke for eighty minutes, starting many sentences and finishing few of them. He punctuated his speech with expletives, like “I’m tellin’ you” and “Hey bruh,” as in, “Let’s stop fracking—who here knows what hydraulic fracking is? HEY BRUH.” He gave shout-outs to Mitt Romney, ant colonies, architects, and his future children, and encouraged everyone to wear seatbelts. Then he handed out copies of his self-help book, “Takin’ Over by Imposing the Positive!,” which he referred to as “my first book.” (Sample sentence: “We use our manners out there and when we bump into somebody we say ‘scuzze me’ and that’s what’s Takin’ Over.”) When we were leaving the lecture, a passing student asked who Lil B was. “He’s the Andy Warhol of rap,” a fan explained, though he might have chosen Andy Kaufman instead. Another girl, carrying a skateboard, spoke into a cell phone: “The people there were so transcendent. All different races, all different cultures, just—based.”
When hip-hop was invented, in the late seventies, the m.c.’s job was to keep a crowd entertained between records. As hip-hop evolved, m.c.s earned top billing over d.j.s, and rappers became poets of urban struggle. But the dominance of the lyrical rapper waned during the reign of Jay-Z, who could spit as fluidly as any of his contemporaries but brazenly dumbed down his rhymes in order to sell records. In a song called “Ignorant sh*t,” Jay-Z riffs reflexively on this Faustian bargain: “I make ‘Big Pimpin’’ or ‘Give It To Me,’ one of those, y’all hail me as the greatest writer of the twenty-first century. I make some thought-provoking sh*t, y’all question whether he fallin’ off.” That this is a largely unheralded track from one of Jay-Z’s least acclaimed albums only proves his point: we don’t want wry pastiches of ignorant sh*t; we just want ignorant sh*t.
