I'm not pre-thinking what I'm gonna speak." So Lil B's rhymes are often sloppy and half-formed, sometimes crass and silly, and sometimes remarkably cogent. "You just let your unconscious mind speak. "In based freestyles, we don't think," he said recently in an interview with Complex magazine.
He calls his raps "based freestyles," slang for an improvised, stream-of-consciousness flow. Known previously for his work with the Berkeley party-rap crew the Pack, who scored a 2006 hit with their sneaker ode "Vans", Lil B's solo approach is unfiltered and introspective. It's an insane output, almost impossible to keep up with, and it mirrors Lil B's scattered, freewheeling lyrical style. Mostly forgoing mixtapes and mp3 downloads, Lil B constantly shoots video of his tracks and freestyles, uploading them to a YouTube site that, as of today, has 172 original clips to view. Twenty-year-old Lil B (real name Brandon McCartney), a rapper from Berkeley, California, has taken this approach to its logical extreme. Maintaining an active Twitter feed, jumping on as many guest verses as humanly possible, and flooding the market with mixtapes is the best bet for exposure.
As Pitchfork's Tom Breihan explained in his piece about rap's recession, it's harder than ever to get noticed as an up-and-coming regional MC, and the smart ones aggressively take to the Internet to promote themselves.