It's possible not even Lil B knows how much music he's released in the past four years. Spend 15 minutes trying to sort out how much he's made in the past four months and you'll feel in your stomach just how deep the Internet goes. More than any other musician, the Bay Area rapper has adapted his creative behavior to resemble the rippling action of your RSS feed-- an unceasing, pellet-dispenser flow of new content.
It's a self-contained musical universe, located at the vanishing point on the "all-or-nothing" spectrum, and its cult of faithful has been steadily building to the point where the mainstream rap industry has been forced to contend with him. The result was a hip-hop comedy of manners: as XXL included him on their Freshmen 2011 list alongside industry non-entities like Mac Miller and Lil Twist and Lupe Fiasco publicly congratulated himself for "getting it," B basically continued whistling his tune, collaborating with Lil Wayne and Jean Grae and Tony Yayo and rapping over How to Dress Well instrumentals. And then he announced at Coachella he was going to name his next album I'm Gay.
With this single statement, Lil B calmly detonated a flower-power land mine in the center of what is arguably rap's most tortured, combustible political arena. Whatever his motivations (it probably had something to do with his philosophy of universal acceptance and self-love, but his manifestos don't survive close analysis), he guaranteed that the album's audience would be exponentially larger than anything he'd done before.
I'm Gay appeared on iTunes last week, and by convenience or design, it's his most coherent, cohesive, and accessible single release to date. His followers may debate whether Rain in England or 6 Kiss or Illusions of Grandeur or Bitch Mob: Respect Da Bitch is better (Lil B has a flair for titles), but for the uninitiated, I'm Gay does a great job of articulating his ethos and appeal in the space of one album. If you're intrigued by Lil B but shrink from the commitment of keeping pace with a human data stream, it might be the only record you'll ever need.
That's not to say that I'm Gay contains all of Lil B's personae. The album finds him securely in his dazed, child-like observer mode, where he peers at the world as if for the first time and wonders aloud. He has many other faces-- occasional boom-bap traditionalist, tweaker of boom-bap traditionalism, uncomfortably personal YouTube diarist-- but this side is easily B's most relatable and endearing. The production, by frequent collaborators Clams Casino, 9th Wonder, and others, reinforces the mood of naive reverie: "Gon Be Okay" samples an orchestral flourish from the soundtrack to Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away, while "Unchain Me" is built on a loop of "Cry Little Sister" from The Lost Boys soundtrack. "I Hate Myself" is a woozy, pitched-down loop of Goo Goo Doll's "Iris" in which the drums hit like down pillows. You're unlikely to find a more guileless or gentle hip-hop record this year.
Lil B's stream-of-consciousness lyrical approach remains uniquely suited to this sort of cosmic contemplation. Composing your thoughts on the fly has obvious downsides, and Lil B's YouTube channel is littered with examples of times he hit "record" and the muse failed to follow. But here, he's consistently focused and has a knack for articulating universal sentiments in seemingly artless wording: I can't think of anyone else who could say things like, "The people die for a piece of paper, it's so stupid" or "If God's real, then why'd my friend have to die?" or "Don't wanna go to school because the teacher's too simple/ I just wanna know where I come from, just tell me," and prompt contemplation instead of laughs.
But then, reproducing lines like these in print doesn't do them justice. Lil B's music draws on spontaneity as its wellspring; you hear him stumble, pause for breath, abandon a line of thought and start over. So when he happens across a searing image like "Mental slavery/ Niggas hangin off trees in the woods," and roams his way to "I'm nicer than Grandma with a cup of iced tea" a few lines later, there's a charge of discovery in the air-- the conviction that you're hearing music and expression being born raw.
"I'm ready to give up/My old thoughts...Everything I seen was a lie/I'm not ready to die/I love myself" he declares on "I Hate Myself," a vague but powerful manifesto that suggests why Lil B has inspired such fervent devotion. He projects fearlessness, which can take many forms: it can mean deciding to name your rap album "I'm Gay" out of thin air. (The subtitled "I'm Happy" was a deflating backward step, it's true, but it was hard to get riled considering how little motivation he had to choose the name I'm Gay in the first place). It can also mean posting the album for free to your quarter-million Twitter followers hours after it was made available for purchase. It can mean sharing every half-baked scrap and warty throwaway you record, trusting your fans to decide what's worth keeping. So while I'm Gay isn't a definitive statement, it is an especially compelling point on a bizarre trajectory, one that feels worth keeping around.
