“Thus my disappointment with my own enjoyment of I’m Gay (I’m Happy). I feel as if I’m being pandered to, or placated. Lil B is coming down to my level, and I’m all too wiling to pull up a chair for him. In other words, if this sorta-weird package of wide-eyed boombap turns out to be Lil B’s coming-out party, what was the point of the ambient album? Like the cop-out of its parenthetic subtitle, which implies Lil B as a harmless joker instead of a committed envelope-pusher, I’m Gay (I’m Happy) is altogether too willing to throw jerks like me a bone.”

In his review of I’m Gay (I’m Happy) for Prefix, my former PopMatters colleague, the vastly underrated hip-hop scribe Wilson McBee, ably outlines the duality that lies at the heart of Lil B’s latest. I’m Gay is a weird record by Lil B standards, which means that it’s a fairly conventional, even accessible, record by mainstream hip-hop standards. And as happy as I am that I’m Gay, an album that essentially began life as a publicity stunt, turned out to be a consistently enjoyable album of real substance, like Wilson, I can’t help but feel like this marks the beginning of B’s retreat from his own #based philosophy, the fundamental principle of which is a wholly sincere “just be yourself”. Here’s hoping that if one of hip-hop’s most endearing oddballs chooses to engage with the mainstream, he can manage to emerge with his personality intact.

Recent comments

Blog comments powered by Disqus