Showing 5 posts tagged Lil B

“Check out the “MIT students” working on the drone project: “The three of us (Brandon McCartney, Natassia Zolot and Radric Davis) can spend the summer focusing on the Panopticopter.” That would be the real names of the rappers Lil B, Kreayshawn and Gucci Mane. (While I have no doubt about Gucci’s engineering prowess, I certainly doubt his ability to stay out of jail for an entire summer; and he seems to prefer working with Kreay’s awful co-conspirator V-Nasty.) “We laughed about it, but then we said this was an idea that’s just one step removed from reality,” says co-founder Mehan Jayasuriya, who put in the rappers’ government names “as a little Easter Egg” for fans. “It’s just believable enough that people might fall for it, or some percentage of people might actually think it’s a good idea, which would be horrifying.”

Shoutout Spencer Ackerman for catching this subtle reference. I was actually kind of worried that no one would notice it.
  • Wired

Last night, I covered Lil B’s first-ever academic lecture at NYU for MTV Hive. My favorite part was when he claimed to be the first rapper to ever adopt a tabby cat (though I kind of doubt that that’s true?) and shouted out the ASPCA. Head over to MTV Hive for my photos and impressions of the (#)rare event.

Also, my tweets from last night ended up in a couple of different places: NPR quoted a bunch of them over at the NPR Music tumblr and my buddy Josh Begley made a Storify out of them.

Finally, do please make a note of that scarf in the photos above.

publicknowledge:

In this awesome video, musicians and celebs praise Megaupload, one of the websites being slammed by the RIAA and MPAA for being a “rogue website”, for its speed and usefulness. Check it out!

This rules, even if the video itself is hilariously awful and gratuitously long (download “the mega song” for free, really?). I do hope that this results in a full-on rappers-endorsing-file-storage-services arms race, though. Dream team: Lil B and Weezy go to bat for Mediafire in the form of an expository free word association. Make it happen, internet!

“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.

“The concept of “rarity” has become obsolete. A previously “rare” CD or movie, once it’s in the iTunes store or on the torrent networks, is, in theory, just as available as the biggest single in the world. (In practice, there are marginal differences, like having to do a few extra searches or wait a bit for a download, but that’s a big difference from, say, driving across town to a Tower Records to find that they don’t have a CD in stock.) A rarity might be less popular; it might be less interesting. But it’s no longer less available the way it once was. If you have a decent Internet connection and a slight cast of amorality in your character, there’s very little out there you might want that you can’t find. Does the end of rarity change in any fundamental way, our understanding of, attraction to, or enjoyment of pop culture and high art?”

If you’re a music fan of a certain age, you’ll likely enjoy Bill Wyman’s Slate piece on the digital age’s feast of cultural riches. As someone who spent a great deal of time (not to mention allowance money) tracking down imports, bootlegs, etc. during my formative years, I’m not sure how to feel about the obsolescence of “rarity”. On the one hand, it’s satisfying to know that in 2011, no track is truly out of reach; on the other hand, it’s a bit sad to think that I’ll never again know the thrill of digging up some long-forgotten demo or B-side. As Wyman admits, rarity, while obsolete, isn’t truly dead—one need look no further than record collectors to know that in some circles, the concept of rarity is alive and well. Still, his overall point is well-taken, though I do wonder what Lil B would have to say about all this (admittedly, in his case, ”#rare” may now have become as empty a signifier as “#swag”).
  • Slate