Does it feel like it’s been a long, hard year? Well, maybe it’s because we were missing something vital for our well-being and sanity: new music from Lil B. By his usual standards, Lil B had a quiet 2015, at least musically. Outside of music, he kept busy, spurring his hometown team, the Golden State Warriors, onto an NBA championship and into possibly the best season professional basketball has ever seen while also finding time to make the case on national television for his presidential candidate of choice, Bernie Sanders. He also partnered with a vegan emoji app! It may have been Lil B’s highest profile year ever, but it also yielded only a handful of tracks and a single seven-track EP (far shorter than Lil B’s usual projects) with Chance the Rapper.
Well, never fear: If you thought we were going to close out 2015 without a proper deluge of music from Lil B—and, reader, I’ll admit I did—we are not. We now have Thugged Out/Pissed Off, a 63-track “3 DISC LIL B RARE COLLECTERS EDITION MIXTAPE” of “ALL EXTREMLY RARE BASED MUSIC.” As the cover suggests, there’s plenty of the old-school, fun magic Lil B fans love, including a song in the “Ellen Degeneres” vein called “Stephen Hawking.”
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But over its 63 tracks, it also covers an enormous breadth of sounds and topics, from Lil B’s Weeknd diss “4 Tha Record” to his recently released interpolation of Future and Drake’s “Jumpman” called, naturally, “BasedGod” to the familiar “thugged out” version of Lil B on songs like “Kill Every Snitch.” And then there are the serious songs that tackle social issues racism and, in a particular focus for this tape, domestic violence, from “Based Jam Remix” to “Domestic Violence Case” to “Listen Pay Attention,” which sounds like a Thundercat collaboration. Sonically, we get everything from explosive, laser-filled turn up beats to classic East Coast tributes (“NY Cab Wont Stop”) to soulful ambient music to jazz and funk.
“Less is more / I’m trying to be content without eating the store,” Lil B raps on “Listen Pay Attention,” and it sounds a bit like a pivot for B: We had less Lil B music this year than in the past, but what we just got is one of the most consistent releases the Based God has ever given us, over 63 tracks. Check it out here or listen below.
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