Artists of the Year: Lil B

Lil B’s release of the long-awaited Black Ken maintains his cultural relevancy in Hip Hop.

When ‘Vans’ became a sleeper hit in 2006, nobody guessed Lil B would be considered an icon a decade later. Even more so, as his solo career developed, as based classics like ‘Wonton Soup’ or ‘Like A Martian’ or ‘Dangerous Minds 2010’ drew heavily polarized responses, many Hip Hop fans angrily discounted him as trash or took him with a sense of humor, but NOBODY saw him for his genius and respected Lil B art/music.

But here we are today.

In 2017, Lil B’s influence permeates many areas of the rap game. Innumerable young artist follow a version of the social media models he set during his 150-Myspaces years, innumerable artists conscious or subconsciously rap in Based freestyles, he popularized adlibs as a critical component of a song’s composition. He came up in a time in Hip Hop’s history where rapping was taken with a special and very restricted seriousness, and Lil B bucked hard against that. He made rapping fun again for a whole generation of artists.

Black Ken is Lil B’s most mature, concise project. What was most surprising was the lack of visual content to accompany the album. This broke a mode he followed for the majority of his solo career, where he would drop a slew of videos with the mixtape cover attached to the video so you knew what was coming. This deliberate move was a way to take the focus off his videos (which unarguably have a distinct style, another thing young artist cemented into their subconscious minds) so you can focus on the music.

Black Ken is a culmination of all styles that have influenced Lil B. Insistent Bay Area-infused tracks ‘Young Niggaz’ and ‘Gettin Hot’ are anthems with nods to local legends like Messy Marv, Mac Dre, Keak Da Sneak, etc. The oddball banger ‘Global’ with iLoveMakonnen is insanely fast and weirdly off-putting upon first listen but he puts bars behind the beats that makes one laugh but respect the track. ‘I’m like a rock star, but I got bars/ Strap in the front like a cop car.’ He even nods his cap to rappers like Charles Hamilton and Lupe Fiasco on boom-bappy tracks ‘Hip Hop,’ ‘Wassup JoJo,’ and ‘Bad MF.’ This is funny because it’s almost a slight to these artists, both of which were considered “Real Hip Hop” at the time they were coming up, but now are culturally irrelevant and have not contributed consistently good music in years. Other tracks like ‘Ain’t Me’ I cant even assign a genre to: they’re designed to have a high level of weirdness.

Throughout the 27-track project he maintains his sense of humor and his sense of outsiderness. Leaving nothing inside his imagination, he floats between traditional Hip Hop, hyphy, a lil samba, experimental, and infuses it all with deep funk characteristic of a West Coast sound. If you don’t know by now that The BasedGod knows what he’s doing, if you still don’t fuck with his vision, then maybe you’re the one that’s asleep.