Li'l B's lolworthy lecture at NYC

  On 4/12/2012 at 5:24 PM, Joyrex said:

Who in the hell is Lil'B and why should I care?

If you didn't already care, you wouldn't be asking.

  On 4/13/2012 at 2:57 AM, SPD² said:

  On 4/12/2012 at 5:24 PM, Joyrex said:

Who in the hell is Lil'B and why should I care?

 

If you didn't already care, you wouldn't be asking.

lol

fun show, new museum is a bad venue though for him. there was a no-mans-land between retarded lil b fans and chinstroking museum patrons.

lil b should at least be interesting as a concept, whether or not you like him. he's released hundreds and hundreds of songs, everything from drunk stream of consciousness over ambient music to surreal pop-culture trapaholic chants. he's like the embodiment of unfiltered rapper ego, stupid rhymes or not. and he's fun to hear at parties and clubs. easy to understand why people don't like him, honestly, and I think you can "get" him and not like him at the same time.

lil b is actually andrew wk

hahaha oh my GOD i posted the video i just posted to youtube, and my mom responded with

i fucking love my mom

LIL B, rapper for white people that are too uncomfortable with 50 cents.

  On 4/13/2012 at 3:58 AM, YO303 said:

LIL B, rapper

  On 4/13/2012 at 2:51 AM, Smettingham Rutherford IV said:

  On 4/13/2012 at 12:54 AM, Dan C said:

  On 4/13/2012 at 12:51 AM, zaphod said:

and his music fucking sucks. objectively.

 

Is this based on the criteria?

 

LOL i think this falls well within the purview.

 

  On 4/13/2012 at 1:58 AM, Xyrofen said:

I'm really glad I'm not the only one that doesn't understand what Lil'B is at all.

 

"Bitches suck my d because I look like J.K. Rowling (SWAG SWAG SWAG)."

 

...What?

 

You understand...you just hate it.

 

Shit like this is the reason I sometimes think Duchamp ruined everything for the rest of us.

 

its all self smug 5th level super detached meta-humor and it fucking drives me nuts.

Wait, so it's supposed to be funny?

it's a number of things, dude, funny or not. actually, at the show tonight, lil b said "if you're laughing at my rap, that's good, it's how you know you're having a good time".

pop culture-referenced rap is taken to the logical extreme with lil b, via absurdist pop culture non-sequiturs. as a result of this trend in lil b's output, my friend once described lil b as "spam rap", which i think is entirely true. at the same time though, i think lil b exemplifies trends and ideas in pop rap in an entirely unintended "meta" sort of way, in both club chants and introspective rhymes alike.

intellectualize it all you want, the music is still terrible and his fans often come across as irritating trolls. luckily it seems to be an internet only phenomenon, as i've never met anyone who liked this shit in reality.

i mean, he just played at the new museum in manhattan—it's not like i'm the instigator in "intellectualizing" it.

but yes, i wholeheartedly agree in my acknowledging how many people just find his music to be terrible—it's an acquired taste borne out of what i find to be an otherwise unlistenable genre, and to draw a parallel to james ferraro's most recent record, the concept is almost more digestible than the product itself.

and after seeing the show tonight, i can confirm that the vast majority of his fans are irritating trolls.

i know i'm not convincing you, zaphod, and i'm honestly not trying to. i think this song, though, is a pretty legitimate example of an inherent he has. the examples are admittedly few and far between, but i don't THINK he's popular just because he's funny and he's random.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeLQOfb6IBU

okay, and as far as lil b at his worst/funniest, i'm seriously speechless when watching this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VP_X0nZsuWg

acquired taste.

like caviar.

edit: i have to admit i love his borrowing the "woodie"s of cash money records, and i fucking hated cash money when they were popular when i was in junior high.

edit 2:

Does anybody else find him a bit Rain Man?

His weirdo high-pitched voice, stance, and rocking back and forth on his legs always make me think he has some sort of mental disability.

The only people I know who listen to Lil B are trashy trashy people.

  On 4/13/2012 at 5:12 AM, sergeantk said:

The only people I know who listen to Lil B are trashy trashy people.

i think you might need to meet more people who are able to take a step away from his visceral popularity, and consider how much of a legitimate oddity he is in the rap industry. just as a general music fan, i could hate lil b's music and still find his presence really interesting in regards to modern rap.

edit: that being said, ignoring the new museum/nyu/pitchfork hype, it's easy to simply consider lil b as stupid rap, which is totally valid too. (possibly excluding Rain in England), lil b seems to be either unaware or indifferent to any sort of deeper context in his music and oeuvre, so any critical analysis is done entirely by outside parties. maybe he's just the outside musician, like a rap-centric wesley willis afterall.

I bet he would be perfectly happy making joke songs for a small handful of friends but he wound up making joke songs and hanging on stage with P Diddy which exemplifies the wonder of random chance.

If you're appreciating this at all, I hope it's more as the artform of whatever he's doing than the actual music because the production sucks.

  On 4/13/2012 at 5:16 AM, KY said:

 

consider how much of a legitimate oddity he [li'l b] is in the rap industry. just as a general music fan, i could hate lil b's music and still find his presence really interesting in regards to modern rap.

 

 

The thing is - he is not part of the rap industry, or he is in the same way the odd future crew are. His schtick is on point - and he markets himself beautifully.

He's not changing the rap game anymore than the Odd Future crew are.

  On 4/13/2012 at 5:33 AM, RadarJammer said:

I bet he would be perfectly happy making joke songs for a small handful of friends but he wound up making joke songs and hanging on stage with P Diddy which exemplifies the wonder of random chance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifOE_kE-r8M

i don't know—i don't think lil b is in it to make "joke songs"—if anything, the armchair analyst in me thinks he must have some sort of megalomania to be perfectly honest. quality doesn't really find itself anywhere in lil b's workflow, for better or worse (and considering the trajectory of this thread, the latter of the two primarily.)

  On 4/13/2012 at 5:40 AM, chenGOD said:

  On 4/13/2012 at 5:16 AM, KY said:

consider how much of a legitimate oddity he [li'l b] is in the rap industry. just as a general music fan, i could hate lil b's music and still find his presence really interesting in regards to modern rap.

The thing is - he is not part of the rap industry, or he is in the same way the odd future crew are. His schtick is on point - and he markets himself beautifully.

He's not changing the rap game anymore than the Odd Future crew are.

i mean, he's not on BET, but come on. He appeared on the cover of XXL, had MTV appearances and steadily blows up on worldstarhiphop.

He hasn't even assimilated into mainstream hip-hop to the degree that Odd Future has, but I think Lil B has more in common with trends in the past ten years of hip-hop than OF has, all Pharrell and Pusha T collabs aside. What Odd Future has is a larger-scale industry co-sign.

But Lil B is the one with 9th Wonder beats, Lil Wayne collab track and (apparently forthcoming) Jay Electronica collaboration.

If anything, Lil B doesn't have the co-sign from fellow rappers that Odd Future does, but I think Lil B's self-appointed braggadocio has more than anything to do with that.

edit: I think Lil B's biggest issue isn't with his industry co-signers, but with the fanbase that congregates around his current workflow, which is some killer, but all filler. He needs a filter, really badly, to weed out the people who absent-mindedly latch onto the "cooking" and "fuck my bitch" trends.

This guy, Noz Scaggs, who runs the Cocaine Blunts blog, made some interesting (and almost entirely agreeable) comments on Lil B's current standing as a successful artist, both commercially and artistically, on twitter a day or two ago while the whole NYU lecture was going down. Worth checking out.

  On 4/13/2012 at 5:33 AM, RadarJammer said:

I bet he would be perfectly happy making joke songs for a small handful of friends but he wound up making joke songs and hanging on stage with P Diddy which exemplifies the wonder of random chance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifOE_kE-r8M

Only words I can hear diddy saying is "fucking" and "shit".

And your God-Damned pants are down off your ass. You are not allowed on the bus!

  On 4/13/2012 at 6:05 AM, KY said:

This guy, Noz Scaggs, who runs the Cocaine Blunts blog,

OMFuckingGod MegaLOL™ IRL!

MetaLOL™ even.

  On 4/13/2012 at 5:16 AM, KY said:

  On 4/13/2012 at 5:12 AM, sergeantk said:

The only people I know who listen to Lil B are trashy trashy people.

 

i think you might need to meet more people who are able to take a step away from his visceral popularity, and consider how much of a legitimate oddity he is in the rap industry. just as a general music fan, i could hate lil b's music and still find his presence really interesting in regards to modern rap.

 

edit: that being said, ignoring the new museum/nyu/pitchfork hype, it's easy to simply consider lil b as stupid rap, which is totally valid too. (possibly excluding Rain in England), lil b seems to be either unaware or indifferent to any sort of deeper context in his music and oeuvre, so any critical analysis is done entirely by outside parties. maybe he's just the outside musician, like a rap-centric wesley willis afterall.

 

"and also, laugh at me, because laughing is beautiful, that means you're happy". true gentleman.

this is where i'm just not sure about things. i can't pretend to know "modern rap" in any legitimate way (i have admittedly hipster white guy taste and listen mostly to doom and mid 90's dilla produced stuff and the occasional mixtape), but is lil b of any relevance to hip hop except as a sort of fringe internet oddity? i mean, i don't know. i don't hate him, really. his music sucks, he's a terrible rapper, the production is mostly awful. his fans, who i've only ever encountered on the internet, are always, always, annoying. more annoying than odd future fans, who i've also never met irl. the only arguments i've ever seen in his favor are either a tautological statement about based god which is basically just trolling, or an argument like yours, which is at least legitimate but no more convincing because you rely on intellectual language to describe why you enjoy a musician. and that would be ok, if i thought what he was doing was integral to music or had artistic merit. i'm just not convinced that lil b has any importance to most listeners of modern hip hop. he displays none of the qualities that i personally require a rapper to possess to be listenable. he's not a spitter. he's got no flow at all, his image is this sort of weird pseudo ironic absurdist parody of the most extreme aspects of hip hop culture but completely abstracted to the point of somehow being earnest. i guess i'm just getting old. or i don't get "it", although i don't really think there's anything to get here.

  On 4/13/2012 at 3:51 AM, KY said:

hahaha oh my GOD i posted the video i just posted to youtube, and my mom responded with

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZHwxIL9oYo

i fucking love my mom

Your mother is great. High five to mom.

Yeah I'm probably just getting old - but looking at lil b's fanbase tells me a lot about what's going on. Yeah i know the fanbase doesn't make the music itself good or bad, but it does let us know something about the context the music is received in.

That guy noz scaggs has a picture of Richard Kirk from Cabaret Voltaire as his twitter image right now.

I'm not one to make assumptions - but something tells me he's not your average hip-hop fan.

And to extrapolate from a single data point - he writes on his cocaineblunts blog about some group from Florida:

"It owes a lot to Lil B, which is to be expected at this point with young fringy experimental underground rappers,"

I dunno - I'm probably just in the same boat as zaphod - old and cantankerous. But do a little thought experiment for me - imagine your average mainstream hip hop listener (you know, listening to Drake and Kanye, Lil'Wayne) sitting down to listen to Lil'B. YOU thin they'll be getting down? Pumping that shit in the clubs?

  On 4/13/2012 at 6:35 AM, zaphod said:

i'm just not convinced that lil b has any importance to most listeners of modern hip hop. he displays none of the qualities that i personally require a rapper to possess to be listenable. he's not a spitter. he's got no flow at all, his image is this sort of weird pseudo ironic absurdist parody of the most extreme aspects of hip hop culture but completely abstracted to the point of somehow being earnest.

Here's where I see eye to eye with you, or at least think I understand exactly where you're coming from. I don't necessarily turn to lil b as a great rapper—I think that's a point I should have made earlier. I enjoy the overall experience that the insane lyrics and sometimes-awesome production produces. (I seriously don't co-sign even half of his tracks because of the increasing annoyance of some of the beats.)

Lyrically though, that's the case with a lot of rock music for me too—I don't really care about the lyrics as much as the delivery and intent, as well as backing instrumentation. That being said, I find Lil B's technique far more interesting than the use of the technique, if you know what I mean. Honestly, I'm torn about Lil B for a lot of the same reasons as you guys, but I still really like him and it's hard to explain without going about it for paragraphs and paragraphs, so here's a remix of one of his songs i did instead

chengod, you should ignore the avatar and individual tweets—noz (i think his real name is andrew? not that it matters) seems to have a really solid knowledge of hip hop from at least 1990 on.

i think if lil b came forward as a performance artist and didn't pretend to be a rapper i might be able to appreciate him a little bit more. i have a bit of a bias toward rock music because i allow terrible lyricism if the music is good. and that's most pop music. in rap, for whatever reason, i need the lyricism to have some kind of competence or i can't listen to it. and lil b sounds like a spoken word artist speaking in run on sentences over slowdive samples. it's just not for me.

shit like this just confuses me:

[youtubehd]zI4RJnvyq_s[/youtubehd]

  On 4/13/2012 at 6:55 AM, KY said:

 

 

chengod, you should ignore the avatar and individual tweets—noz (i think his real name is andrew? not that it matters) seems to have a really solid knowledge of hip hop from at least 1990 on.

Maybe I'm being too obtuse or something - I'm not saying he doesn't have a solid knowledge of what hip hop is about, the roots etc. I'm saying: he's not your average fan. Come on now - go out on the street, ask 100 people who are listening to hip hop if they know who Richard Kirk is - or for that matter if they know who Cabaret Voltaire are.

You could probably do a pretty good venn diagram with "people who listen to hip hop and know who Cabaret Voltaire are" and "people who listen to hip hop and are fans of Lil B".

And again - if we're giving full credit to his knowledge of hip hop, trends and history, quoting him as an authority - what does it mean then when he writes on his cocaineblunts blog about some group from Florida:

"It owes a lot to Lil B, which is to be expected at this point with young fringy experimental underground rappers,"

That vid from XXL is good (yelawolf kills it, mos def) - but compare it to some of his stream of consciousness shit where he's rapping over ambient backdrops totally off-meter and just laying down nonsense....

knowwhatimsayin?