Reasons Why You Should Vote For Lil B To Perform At The Grammies

[UPDATE: Lil B has been removed from the "Gig of a Lifetime" contest. Noisey's official editorial stance is "Furious."]

If you haven’t heard, Lil B has been nominated to be nominated to participate in CBS’s “Gig of a Lifetime” contest, the winner to which will perform as part of GRAMMY Live, the three-day build-up to the 55th Annual Grammy Awards. Currently, Lil B is one of the leading artists in the Pacific Region. The voting ends at 3pm today, and you can vote up to ten times. You cast a vote literally by clicking here and then clicking the big button that says, “VOTE FOR THIS BAND.” So what are you waiting for?

If he wins the nomination from the Pacific Region, he’ll be competing against six other artists from across the country, none of whom are as #based or as #rare or as straight-up positive as B is. It would be legitimately awesome to get Lil B even associated with the Grammies. And honestly, in all likelihood Lil B fans are way more rabid about him than any of the other artists he’s up against, so with their combined powers there’s no reason he shouldn’t win the opportunity perform on GRAMMY Live in a cakewalk. But just in case you’re on the fence about whether or not you should devote a minute of your time to the cause of all things Based, here are a bunch of reasons why you should head on over to the CBS Facebook and vote the shit out of Lil B for the “Gig Of A Lifetime” contest.

LIL B IS NOT PART OF THE PR BULLSHIT MACHINE

Lil B is self-made. He has no publicist, his manager is just some guy, and he releases the vast majority of his music for free on the Internet. Any success that he’s ever came across has been earned through hard work and the loyalty of his fans.

LIL B KINDA-SORTA CHANGED RAP MUSIC

I’m not ready to go out on a limb and say that Lil B is the most influential artist in the history of hip-hop or whatever, but there are tangible things that Lil B did that have become influential. For one, he invented the “Cooking Dance” which has filtered up all the way to motherfucking Diddy, he actively challeneged our understanding of rap song structure, he’s invented a shit-ton of words that have entered the rap lexicon, helped advance the dialog about homophobia in hip-hop, and introduced a palpable element of play to hip-hop that was heretofore unexplored to such a degree. Meanwhile, simply by virtue of the rate with which B releases music he’s exposed how many of us treat music as single-serving and disposable. How better to serve that culture, Lil B seems to say, than to release torrents of music, little of which is meant to be listened to more than once? Lil B gives us exactly what we want, for better or worse, and he should be rewarded for that.

RAP IS UNDERREPRESENTED AT THE GRAMMIES AND GOOD, WEIRD RAP IS RARELY RECOGNIZED AT ALL

This year, the following rappers were nominated for a Grammy, in any capacity. Drake, Lil Wayne, Jay-Z, Nas, Kanye West, Young Jeezy, Andre 3000, Flo Rida, Ludacris, Wale, Big Sean, Pusha T, Snoop Dog, Wiz Khalifa, The Roots, Rick Ross, and 2 Chainz. That’s also just a list of popular rappers, and Wale (zing!). None of those rappers were nominated for the main Grammy categories (Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year). It’s a reminder that, when you look at America as gestalt, our culture’s view of hip-hop is still extremely limited. Lil B being associated with the Grammies would help shock America into paying more attention to hip-hop.

ELECTING LIL B TO THE GRAMMIES WOULD DEMONSTRATE THE POWER OF TOGETHERNESS

Lil B’s popularity resides mainly within the Ones and Zeroes of the Internet (No, I don’t really know how the Internet works). If we banded together to make an artist that lots of Internet People cared about, it might be the most #based thing we could do.

WE AS THE INTERNET NEED TO MAKE UP FOR SENDING PITBULL TO ALASKA

If you don’t know the story, last year Pitbull announced that he’d visit whichever Wal-Mart got the most Facebook likes. A dude named David Thorpe, in a stroke of absolute, motherfucking genius realized that there was a Wal-Mart in Kodiak, Alaska, and realized it would be really funny to get people to like the Kodiak Wal-Mart and effectively vote to send Pitbull there. The prank was (I assume) meant as a commentary on corporate misunderstandings of social media and the shittiness of Pitbull, but somewhere in between Kodiak actually winning the contest and Thorpe actually having to fucking go there with Pitbull, he realized his online prank had unintentional offline consequences, and he ended up embarrassing a bunch of people and ruining the month of the dude who managed the Wal-Mart in question. We, the citizens of the Internet (and BasedWorld) need to make up for giving Pitbull and those poor Alaskans a hard time by giving the citizens of GrammyWorld a positive Lil B performance. Related:

LIL B IS LEGITIMATELY THE BEST PERSON NOMINATED

I thumbed through the pages of the other artists nominated on the Gig of a Lifetime contest page, and I’m not kidding when I say that I’ve only heard of three of the other nominees out of maybe a thousand. There are literally no other artists whose name recognition is on the same level as Lil B’s entered in this thing, other than weirdly enough Machine Gun Kelly, the Christian rapper Lecrae, and fun., who are also nominated for a Grammy. This leads me to believe that the list of nominees was either assembled by someone who had no idea what they were doing, or CBS and the Grammies actively want Lil B to win this competition and have stacked the deck intensely, intensely in his favor.