Live Review: Lil B

Nobody actually knows the extent of Lil B's catalogue except Lil B himself. The 24-year-old has, like, 3000 recorded tracks scattered across nebulae of mix-tapes, YouTube clips, bootlegs and whatever, meaning the dozen or so tracks familiar to the body politic are no more than splinters in the proverbial woodpile of the man's net creative output. What The Bakery's 100-odd punters were supposed to anticipate from Lil B or Based God or Brandon McCarty was as much a part of pre-performance hype as the performance itself. Aslan, Clunk and Sleepyhead warmed up the stage beforehand with a cocktail of internet rap (A$AP, Kendrick and Kitty Pryde?), and it rained, which frankly at any Perth gig is grounds for a sentence-long gripe out of sheer meteorological spite (rain is something that happens in Melbourne and London, not Perth).

So when Brandon McCartney swaggered on stage, wrapped in what looked like (i.e. actually was) just a fucking hotel towel, boxers, Vans (like the track – get it) and beat-up cargo pants, what the Bakery's audience was in store for remained an unknown variable. McCartney started with a mash-up of Ellen Degeneres, a track that follows a proven Lil B recipe where he sings about being a famous female celebrity (see also: I'm Paris Hilton), except he integrated shout-outs to Perth, Western Australia. And by 'integrated', this reviewer specifically means rhymed the word 'Perth' with 'Degeneres' through sheer force of raw, poetic bloody-mindedness. The way Uri Geller allegedly contorts spoons with his mind, Brandon McCartney contorts syllables. Other rappers negotiate their wordplay through the time-tested dexterity of consonance, assonance and rhyming couplets; Lil B beats lyrics with the palm of his hand until they take some loose semblance of the shape he wants them to.

But this evades the purpose of Lil B's live performances: his vaunted positivity and his strangely hypnotic albeit completely incomprehensible creed of self-worth and respect. He told the audience he loved them, he gave shout-outs to respect for women, to cowboys and farmers (a stab at what he thought was the Western Australian demographic? We will never know), and he probably meant it, although the broader question about whether Based God's respect for women correlated with the broader consensus on what is respect for women remains, well, a mystery, as he wrote Can't Nobody Fuck The Based God Bitch, which in itself contains a double negative, but, like, whatever. Lil B is, somehow, inexplicably, probably the most non-ironic musician in contemporary music; Brandon McCartney is like a Bermuda Triangle of non-irony. When he told the audience that Based God loved them and that they have to reach deep to be Based, he was conveying (if only through sheer voltage of hubris and self-confidence) the most sincere call to action any Bakery audience has received in a very long time. It makes people resonate. If McCartney loves that people love him (and this he does love), he loves people more, and somehow, he translates the sentiment like a superconductor – Lil B had almost every woman in the Bakery onstage at a gesture. And that, despite his hilarious and shambolic performance, is the gravity of Lil B, a core of culturally anomalous dark matter at the centre of over a million Twitter followers, and upwards of ten million collected YouTube hits. Lil B polished off his set with Wonton Soup (duh) and a hitherto unreleased track from a new EP. There is no way anybody in The Bakery did not enjoy it.