Courtesy of Lil B’s Facebook

Courtesy of Lil B’s Facebook

Two radical and eccentric hip hop acts Odd Future (OFWGKTA) and Lil B (the “BasedGod”) have split the indie music community.

They have each released albums during the second quarter of the 2011 year, respectively entitled “Goblin” and “I’m Gay (I’m Happy),” which have provoked many questions among media organizations such as The New York Times, NPR, and countless indie blogs. Are these rebellious youths adding something to the game of hip hop? Are they proving something about what hip hop has become, or how it is perceived? Are they deep musical mind-freaks, marketing geniuses, or just a comical, bizarre clown act attracting the easiest mind-washed music listeners known to man?

There are two things both of these acts desire most: spotlight and drama. There is no doubt that their music has been driven by the feedback they receive – the juicier the better. It seemed like before his most recent album, Lil B would just pick celebrities, sayings, or new styles that were blowing up on media interfaces and headline them in his songs. Both groups feed off of it like vultures, and it seems to be the basis for their success. But what does their fan base (who are mainly white, middle class teenagers) find as the main attraction: the movement or the music?

Focusing on that concept that perhaps hip hop has become a generated cultural endeavor rather than a source for musical ingenuity with meaningful lyrics, Odd Future and Lil B have been exemplified as perpetrators of this crime. They have taken this flip-of-the-switch, I-don’t-give-a-s*** movement to arguably the furthest extent hip hop has seen today. Music lovers are going to see these guys live for the stage antics and the crowd’s savage atmosphere.

One example of this flippant behavior was when Odd Future performed on BBC’s Music Showcase in early May, being asked to play their song “Sandwitches” off “Goblin” as a radio edit. Knowing the vulgarity of their music already, the gang took the performance as an extremely informal comic act, filling in with slurred phrases like “mess around with me, and I’ll scratch your cat.” The majority of the comments on the Youtube video are based around how funny the performance was and how the group is perceived as a gang of goofy friends who don’t have a care in the world. Not many comments revolved around the music itself, or the fact that the tripped, off-tempo beat and the disheveled lyrical gush made this viewer want to puke.

When it comes to Lil B, or Based God’s attempt at an image, he described the meaning of what it is to be “based” in an interview with “Complex Magazine.” “Based means being yourself,” he said in the interview. “Not being scared of what people think about you. Not being afraid to do what you wanna do. Being positive. When I was younger, based was a negative term that meant like dopehead, or basehead. People used to make fun of me. They was like, ‘You’re based.’ They’d use it as a negative. And what I did was turn that negative into a positive. I started embracing it like, ‘Yeah, I’m based.’ I made it mine. I embedded it in my head. Based is positive.”

In regards to marketing a style or way of life, both groups have achieved massive success, but has this brain-wash tactic been the ultimate driving force of their notoriety? They have created a niche in the hip hop community in which the music is being dragged along because of the rising appreciation of the movement. People inevitably listen to an album keeping in mind who the artists are, what their background is, the band’s image, etc. Considering this, it’s hard to accept the seemingly contrarian dichotomy of what they say and what they do – the tie between what you hear and the beliefs you take from this music has been completely unwound.

Musically, most of their songs are poorly produced, whether they are trying to be rappers or spoken word artists, over skewed rhythms. The beats are sketchy, the lyrics lack depth, and the flow is like that of a drunk wannabe spitter in an unofficial rap-off at a college frat party (and the stream of consciousness approach is not catching on towards being a lyrical genius). Many listeners are falling in love with the nihilistic lifestyle, and they can only be considered followers of it by loosely bobbing their head out of tempo or just throwing themselves into a sweaty human heap of fury, because the music has become strictly the medium for his cultural platform. Thus, the music itself suffers.

For the sake of the future of hip hop, albums cannot continue to be released like this. If there is one thing these two acts have accomplished, however, it is the realization that the hip hop community takes its image too seriously. They were able to climb the popularity ladder because of how lenient and overly-optimistic hip hop listeners and critics have become.

However, this should demonstrate to the hip hop community that although these two acts have created such a static buzz among genre-diving music listeners that if music like this continues to be released, the line between an album featuring true musical talent and some evidence of dedication and meaning and an album that was hastily thrown together for the claim to fame would become paper thin. We would live in a music-infested society in which anyone could throw beats together, and we listeners would try to dive deep into it, but in actuality we would just be heading face-first into a shallow puddle. If that was to happen, best of luck to any musicians hoping to stand out and find their own swag.

Dylan Brewer can be reached at dbrewer@student.umass.edu.

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