Fucking hoes heads (based freestyle)

This is so good. If people will wait in line to sit in front of an artist and get stared at, I don’t see any reason why having Lil B in an all white room at MoMa with a mic doing a based freestyle can’t be considered performance art.

From a comment on BLUNTRAPPS:
M Stunna – I wouldn’t really compare him to any of those guys – Kool Keith maybe a little, but his experiments were more on the traditional hip-hop dimension. Gucci is weird, but it’s controlled and intentional (using unusual rhymes, etc).

It’s a little odd to be discussing the cat’s technique where he’s likely to read it but I’ll do it anyhow. I realize this is entirely long, I just got to thinking and didn’t stop.

Usually when a guy spits off the top of his head, the intention is to demonstrate skill and wit and ability. While B does have traditional rapping ability, the based freestyles are trying to do something entirely different, which is to directly open his (subconscious?) thoughts to the tape. It seems sort of like rapping because it’s framed as such, and because his verbal consciousness is shaped by rap and being a rapper, but what he’s really doing is

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealist_automatism

and instead of starting with the medium of poetry or painting or instrumental music (free jazz!), he’s in rap. That’s interesting enough to begin with, and he’s also very good at it. He doesn’t censor himself or let self-consciousness interfere with what he’s doing, he puts force behind every word and doesn’t retreat.

Combine that with unusual instrumentals (the ambient stuff or those noisy rave tracks) and you wind up spending a lot of time very close to the thoughts of another person. All you can really pay attention to are the words he’s saying, and you can hear the thoughts forming and the words coming to him and the tiny fracture half-pauses as a sentence forms. It can be really disconcerting, almost psychedelic, to have your mind that full of someone else’s thinking.

Given some of the things B has said (about his work, and about life in general) I’d say that the Based Freestyle series, to me, is about trying to find a really pure sort of communication between people, a real unmediated connection. He’s trying to share his thoughts directly as possible with a listener, which totally fits in with the sort of positive-thinking worldview he talks about, love and community and such.

As for his more traditional rap tracks, I think he benefits from the sort of practice the freestyles give him. More unusual beats, no self-censorship, and a really powerful delivery. He’s not succeeding by having the most clever rhymes or the most agile flow, he’s got raw conviction, and you can’t fake that or replace it.

So… yeah. Sorry about that ramble.

Thank you to Blan & anyone else who tried to explain Lil B to me lol.

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