Lil B is the Andy Warhol of rap.

Creative freedom is regarded as something that all creators want and see as valuable. The question is freedom from what? Generally the forces that seek to control and limit our creativity are thought to be external. But what about ourselves? What role do we play in creating or accepting boxes, limitations, norms, rules, guidelines which fence in our creativity? I recently listened to an episode of the Accidental Creative podcast in which he talked about the concept of separating our personal feelings of self-worth from the way people react to our creations. The major theme of that lesson was that you are not your work and therefore shouldn’t behave that way emotionally. For me personally this was a powerful idea.

Lil B – I’m God

So much of my feeling of self-worth is tied up in the things that I create. These could be pieces of music, ideas, companies, or groups of people. If I feel that I played a significant role in creating something then a great deal of my self-worth is tied up in the success of or the perception of that thing. As much as I try not to feel this way, if someone gives a negative review to a piece of my music for example, I feel personally attacked and it can have a real effect on my mood for the rest of the day or longer. This is not good both for the fact that you are exposing yourself to negative emotions from external forces that you can’t control but perhaps more importantly because the fear of being judged becomes internalized and you begin to set up internal boundaries for yourself. You try to begin to seek out ideas which are safer and more likely to earn more praise and less criticism. When we find ourselves backed into this corner, it’s a major loss for our potential as an artist. I feel that one of the strongest creative actions we can take is to dive fearlessly off a cliff into new territory without trying to fit into a box or seek an existing audience’s approval.

Lil B – Look Like Jesus

Someone who I have a tremendous amount of respect for in this regard is Lil B the Berkley based rapper who’s also a member of The Pack. To the un-initiated one might listen to a song like ‘Look Like Jesus’ and hear Lil B rapping that ‘Hoes suck my dick because I dress like Jesus Christ’ and dismiss him as just another rapper. What makes him interesting is his willingness to go to ludicrous extremes, turn the hyper-masculine braggadocio of hip-hop on it’s head by rapping about how he ‘looks like a princess’ and he’s a ‘pretty bitch’ and fearlessly saying absolutely anything that pops into his stream of consciousness. Those who follow rap know that as in any art-form rappers are constantly dancing along a line of accepted rapper behavior and making short forays into as yet un-touched subject matter, attitudes and visual and musical styles. The history of stylistic change in hip-hop is incremental with few artists making bold leaps into new territory. What I see in Lil B is an artist relentlessly transgressing boundaries and pushing his art and persona as absolutely far as he can go.

With songs like “I’m God” and “I’m a Faggot” he seems to be constantly searching for ways to provoke his audience which is completely de-sensitized by tales of violence, sex, crime and drug-use in rap. What I respect about this is that here we have an artist in a genre of people proclaiming how fearless they are while relentlessly conforming. Lil B seems to truly not give a shit what people think. Not only does he not give a shit but he’s actually turned it into an ideology which he’s given the name “Based”. You’ll see the term pop up in the titles of his freestyles, on his twitter (which is terrific if you don’t mind your timeline being totally bombarded) and in his frequent name for himself “The Based God”.

In an interview with Complex magazine he explains:

Complex: What’s your definition of “based,” because you say that with everything. What does that mean? Lil B: Based means being yourself. 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.

Complex: It’s also like a stream-of-consciousness thing when you’re rapping, right? Lil B: Exactly. In Based Freestyles, we don’t think. You just let your unconscious mind speak. You let the truth speak. I’m not pre-thinking what I’m gonna speak. I’m going to speak from what my mind says, and that’s the truth. That’s the truth right there. For those of us who are not Lil B what do we take from all this? For me it’s the power of fearlessness and a concerted pushing of artistic and personal borders. It’s an opportunity to look inward and try to identify where you’re limiting yourself with fears or desire for approval and kick that over. How do you see this working for you? How do you feel you’ve been limiting yourself?

Lil B – Freedom