Review Summary: As much of a leap in style as this is, the perennial question remains: is this a typical auditory shitpost from Lil B, or something more?
Christmas might have come early for Lil B’s literal legion of fans (as in there’s maybe a thousand of them still around) as, without warning, fanfare or explanation, Afrikantis was dropped 3 days before the holiday. Or maybe Afrikantis would be too difficult of a pill for even the most diehard of the basedgod’s remaining fanatics to swallow, as the master of the musical shitpost has, inexplicably, dropped a collection of garageband, jazz-esque tracks vaguely reminiscent of Miles’ On The Corner years, or maybe Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters but all composed in… garageband. And yes, it’s very silly, the canned sound, the comically incongruous percussion, the zero-budget vibe of the whole thing, it all screams out that hey, it may be a different style, but it’s just Lil B doing what Lil B does. Whether anyone’s going to find any value in that probably depends on how you’ve viewed Lil B’s music from the inception of his basedgod persona.
Alright, so I found myself beginning to be beguiled for the first time in over a decade by the sheer chutzpah of Lil B who, while not quite fitting the label “outsider artist”, has spent so many years pushing literally every hip-hop genre convention to the point of brain damage, almost for the sheer, silly joy of just doing so that his work has (and I say this without the “hilarious” hyperbolic praise his fans lavish on him) taken on qualities of the avant-garde. But with so much of the enjoyability of Lil B’s music deriving from its playful, ironic qualities, it’s hard to take any of this at face value, not that art should ever be taken at face value. But there are a few times that Afrikantis does quite legitimately slap, most especially on Del the Funky Homosapien, which could easily be a backing track for its namesake. You’d have to be a philistine or completely blind to irony not to recognize that Lil B’s a legitimate talent at this stage in the game and there are times when the ambiguity of whether he’s doing a poor job hiding that talent or whether he’s doing a great job subtly letting us in on the joke almost becomes an art form in itself.
I’m most likely never going to listen to Afrikantis again. Like much of Lil B’s music, the legitimate talent that’s buried beneath the surface just isn’t worth the time required to invest in it and all the playfulness, irony, “based-ness” of the whole thing isn’t going to change that. But frankly, I’m glad it’s out there and that it does what it does and that I got to spend some time reflecting on the conceptual humor of a surprise jazz-funk album-in-a-can from none other than the mastermind behind Wonton Soup. So merry belated Christmas, basedgod. Don’t ever stop doing your thing.
