I’m definitely a Lil B fan. I didn’t get dude at first, but I eventually came around. I’ve done Lil B mixes for my friends’ radio shows. I call things #based, #rare and #secrete in real life. The cooking dance is as central to my “dude dancing at a rap show” repertoire as turn-up arms. But while Pretty Boy Millionaires and Red Flame were in heavy rotation, listening to a lot of Lil B’s music has never felt like a crucial part of my fandom. Hence, I probably won't listen listen to 05 Fuck Em, his newest 101-song mixtape, front to back.This is partially because in order to keep writing about music and playing it for people for money, I have to listen to a lot of it. My “to listen” list is wild deep at any given time and 101 Lil B songs don’t get priority. If we're being honest, it doesn’t matter whether I—or anyone—listens to 05 Fuck Em. As I've said before, mixtapes don’t have to make a huge impact to be successful and this is even more true for Lil B. He built his career by being a prolific and entertaining weirdo, the first artist to fully realize the potential of the internet for free music distribution. His legacy is a deluge of music, videos, tweets, and tumblrs for people to sort through and find their own reason to like him. The world expects Too Much Music from Lil B the way it expects petty beef from Azaelia Banks and references to exotic game from Action Bronson. It’s good branding.There’s a lot of rappers I really like who put out more music than I find time to listen to. Gucci Mane put out ten tapes in 2013, even though he spent part of the year locked up. I think got to five of them. But I couldn’t write a paragraph laying out my credentials as a Gucci fan like I did earlier for Lil B. Lil B fandom is somewhat mutually exclusive from his music; you can understand what #rare means from his twitter feed alone and you don’t have to hear exactly why he’s like Ellen Degeneres to appreciate the song “Ellen Degeneres.”That’s an incredible accomplishment for Lil B. That level of influence, where an artist’s cultural impact reaches further than their music, is usually reserved for arena-filling superstars. For example, I still haven’t heard Beyoncé. I was in Europe with my family when it dropped and I’ve been in a work-and-Judaism isolation chamber since I got back. Unlike 05 Fuck Em, I will definitely consume everything in the Beyoncé-sphere before too long. But whether or not I ever do, “surfbort” and “I woke up like this” are already in my cultural vocabulary.Still, Lil B is less a singular talent than he is a visionary. He was giving away music on dozens of MySpace accounts when artists still had to fight the RIAA for the right to distribute “promo only” mixtapes. Meanwhile, as artists fight to get fans to notice their music in an infinite sea of options, the battle for influence inevitably moves to other mediums; Lil B has a uniquely involved fanbase because he thought to appropriate hashtags for his personal slang before anyone else did. His outsized reach is just another example of him being ahead of his time.So what’s next? Keke The Adopted Tabby Cat has been a fixture in the #based universe for a minute. Riff Raff just adopted a dog. You do the math.Skinny Friedman owns two cats and therefore does not find the expression "smokin' on catpiss" particularly funny or endearing. He's on Twitter - @skinny412
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