Seven years ago, Lil B announced a mixtape called Black Ken, just a blip amid the 13 other projects he released that year. Since then, it’s been hard to judge the size of the gap between the Berkeley rapper’s pious legion of disciples and those who would dismiss his based freestyles as the death of rap. But time has clearly validated his path, arcane as it may have once appeared; and while the average 2017 rap fan might be more familiar with the Based God’s Curse than Evil Red Flame deep cuts, Lil B’s impact on the way rap sounds and how it’s distributed is beyond doubt. In the past few years, that influence has been celebrated by his peers, unprompted, from Kendrick to Metro Boomin to Danny Brown. Even a cursory scan of underground (and occasionally mainstream) rap movements of the 2010s reveals traces of B’s DNA at every turn: Odd Future, Raider Klan, Yung Lean, Makonnen, and perhaps most visibly, this year’s bumper crop of SoundCloud rap stars, from South Florida’s glitchy underbelly to GothBoiClique’s face-tat emo. Put simply: Based God was right.
None of this, however, brings the world closer to articulating what exactly sets Lil B’s body of work apart, even from those in his creative debt. His free-verse mindspray has nudged rappers away from more structured lyricism, and his tear-soaked Imogen Heap-core beats have spawned micro-genres of their own, but a purely stylistic reading of Lil B feels insufficient. His benevolent cult-leader persona—a Zenned-out internet addict in tiny pants with a direct line to the wise and mysterious Based God—has certainly laid the groundwork for a generation of social media myth-builders. But an oversimplified focus on B as “historical online figure,” emphasizing his impact in terms of sheer virality, paints him foremost as a digital marketing mastermind—accurate, maybe, but a bit outside the point. How could the guy who wrote the social media era’s “What’s Going On” be understood as a living meme?
Since the Myspace days, which he spent uploading countless based freestyles to his 100-plus pages, some have argued for Lil B as a rapper whose appeal lies in his subversion of rap conventions: his unedited stream of consciousness, his wide-eyed mysticism, his insistence on his visual similarity to J.K. Rowling, his occasional doubt as to whether he’s even a rapper at all. Black Ken—released nearly two years after his last project—offers a striking argument to the contrary. Lil B is great, Black Ken affirms, not because he disrupts hip-hop but because he embodies it so completely—an endlessly curious student of rap, enamored of the form enough to spend a decade thoroughly deconstructing it, asking what it all means, then putting it back together again. And more than any other release in his immense catalog, Black Ken draws direct and persuasive lines between his own music and that of his Bay Area forebearers—from ’80s pimp wisdom all the way to hyphy—presenting B as a rapper born and raised not on the internet, but in Berkeley, California.
I’ve started to think of Black Ken as a metaphysical He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper situation. Over its 27 tracks, Lil B raps over entirely self-produced beats with occasional narration from the omniscient DJ BasedGod. And its first eight tracks represent his most purposeful block of music since his 2009 opus 6 Kiss—raw, squelching loops of murderous funk and 808s that land like uppercuts, stuff that sounds like you could’ve bought it on cassette out of a trunk in ’88. The first we hear of B’s voice on “Still Run It”—measured, resolute, completely unlike his liquid freestyles—he is channeling a Tupac flow, a reminder of the icon’s claim to Oakland as the city that put him on game in his Digital Underground days. “Hip-hop is back!” B crows, and if you didn’t believe him the first time, three tracks later is “Hip Hop,” unquestionably the dopest song this side of the Reagan (or Dregan) administration with a “Hip! Hop! Hip! Hop!” chorus. “Remember I was younger, I always loved music/So now it’s an honor to write and produce it,” he raps; it all could’ve easily read as kitsch if the beat didn’t knock so hard, or if he didn’t so plainly believe it.
Black Ken channels the sound of Lil B’s hometown in the years just before his birth—an era in which Bay Area rap stood uncompromisingly apart from the industry out of both necessity and pride. The result is an outsider artist’s take on old Too $hort or Kool Rock Jay tapes: plain-spoken neighborhood tours that impart real-life lessons in self-reliance over booming, brittle 808s and P-Funk tracks stripped for parts. “Bad MF,” on which B tells a snitch to kick rocks (“Catch the bus, motherfucker!”), has the kind of roughneck piano beat that evokes a virtuoso who plays only with his elbows, with funk licks that make me want to stomp down an alley kicking over trash cans. And when on “Free Life” he wonders how to exist happily in an exhausting world, his reminder that “the best things in life are free” is not a cliché, but a distillation of based philosophy in the style of Too $hort’s “It’s Your Life,” a 1990 lesson in imposing the positive. The album’s mid-way hyphy section is a less successful revival, but it’s worth it for B snarling, “Gentrify me? I beg your pardon!” in his best Keak Da Sneak voice on “Getting Hot.”
Such is the duality of Lil B: One minute he’s a Zen monk, floating high above the trappings of society, and the next he’s a red-eyed, surrealist gangster, one funny look away from tearing the club up. And there are occasionally confounding, mostly delightful sonic outliers throughout Black Ken’s back half: “Ride (Hold Up),” like a Clara Rockmore theremin performance interrupted by sepia-toned zaps of Detroit techno, feels at once bound inextricably to history and hovering extra-terrestrially above it. On “Turn Up (Till You Can’t)”, B applies his T-t-t-totally dude “California Boy” sing-song to Gothenburg-style Balearic pop, and “Zam Bose (In San Jose)” resists explanation entirely. But what ties Black Ken together, and what makes it not just a palatable but completely thrilling listen, like stumbling unwittingly into the best block party ever, is Lil B’s production throughout—a wild but controlled stylistic breakthrough.
Late last year, Lil B made some headlines when he announced on Twitter that Black Ken would be dedicated to a seemingly bizarre selection of honorees—from Jadakiss and the Lox, to Charles Hamilton and Iggy Azalea, to the state of Rhode Island. In retrospect, though, the most knowing shout-out dedicated the tape “to everyone who makes music.” Typed out, it’s perhaps a simple sentiment. But it also gets to the heart of Black Ken, and to the core of what continues to set the most influential rapper of the past decade completely apart from his peers. More than anything, Black Ken feels like a testament, seven years in the making, to music as a lifelong process of discovery—an affirmation of art-making as not a means to an end, but a reason for being. In that sense, the best thing about Black Ken is that it is not an endpoint in itself, but a mile-marker along Lil B’s journey; it just so happens, after a decade as rap’s most devoted scholar, to also be a masterpiece.
