Lil B The Based God @ Highline Ballroom

Equally inspired by Prince and 2Pac, Lil B is an eccentric, ambitious rapper who came up with the Bay Area’s the Pack, a group that had a hit with the sneaker-loving track “Vans.” After the group released its 2007 album, Based Boys, Lil B began to explore other opportunities by first partnering with fellow Pack member Young L for SS Mixtape, Vol. 1. New solo songs would regularly get posted to his /MySpace site and then, in late 2008, he began to toy with the excessiveness of the Internet, storming the Web in a full-on blitzkrieg. As the prolific and unfiltered Lil Wayne was to the mixtape game, so was Lil B to the Net, creating no less than 122 /MySpace pages, each linked to create one giant body of work. Originally, aliases such as the BasedLord and BasedGod appeared alongside streaming audio of Lil B freestyling over familiar beats. As the number of pages grew, the music and the rapper’s delivery became more experimental. The sounds of detached spoken word over techno beats seemed out of step with the soul-baring posts Lil B was putting on his blog around the same time, some reading like motivational essays while others were emotional pleas for racial unity. In early 2009 some of the stranger tracks began to catch on, with the gabba techno-sounding “Shoot the Bitch Bra” becoming a fan favorite, as did the dubstep-influenced “My Baby.” In March the polished “We Can Go Down” brought things back to reality, with the video being serviced to more traditional outlets like the BET cable network. A month later, Lil B launched his artist networking site /Bang Ka Dang with a new song and video on the home page. His odd choice was the somber and unsure “Am I Even Really a Rapper Anymore?” ~David Jeffries, Rovi