Lil B - Thugged Out Pissed Off

Pitchfork 63

People who still keep up with rapper and social media mystic Lil B have their own personal rubric for grading his tapes. What tracks I can show to my friends that think Lil B can’t rap? How ridiculous are the style experiments? What funny celebrities does he have "more bitches than," and have "hoes on his dick like"? Is anything on this as good as "Like a Martian"? Is anything on this as good as "I’m God"? At this point, B's set his own parameters such that there’s no way to identify what "going astray" might look like for him. In everything from his capricious tweets to his mixtapes, he’s made a perspective in every direction a perspective in itself.

So how do we rate new DatPiff-based landfills full of Lil B music, which arrive about three years since he has done anything genuinely surprising, or figured out that he didn’t have to? Sometimes it feels like you have to commit to either categorically disdaining the BasedGod brand, or endorsing all of it. When you have a 50-plus track Lil B release, like the recent Thugged Out Pissed Off, there’s a song or 10 to satisfy any of your favorite B song types or subjects. The majority of his tapes since 2012’s God’s Father have been this large-scale: Perhaps there’s no going back when you’ve gotten into the habit of running long and holding yourself to a standard that no one except you remotely understands. How does he decide when a tape is done? With Lil B, you can’t qualify what you’ll never feel like you really processed.

The tape kicks off with the musical equivalent of a slow-motion strut into the boxing ring with the robe hood up: a trap-ified flip of Giorgio Moroder’s funereal Scarface theme. The track sets the mood for the tape pretty well, insofar as we can generalize that of a 63-track-long collection of freestyles: Thugged Out Pissed Off is a little more self-serious, a little more dead-eyed, and a little more disinterested. It lacks the exuberance that made 2014's Hoop Life and last year's Chance the Rapper collaboration charming. You, the listener, will spend a little more of the portion of the collection asking "Why this?"

As with a lot of the music which defines the notorious genre of cloud rap—from Raider Klan affiliates to disciples like Yung Lean—part of the appeal of Lil B (or, at least, the source of his novelty) for his fans is the contradictory perspectives he squirms in and out of. He’s usually playing at some comic book version of a hard-ass, a bathetic mystic, or a confessional "real hip-hop"per. On this tape—as if celebrating of the impending release of Deadpool—he’s in full-on noxious mode. He plays the anti-heroic Stanley Kowalski of hustlers with a "dirty dick like Charlie Sheen," and dallies on the subject of "knocking out bitches." It seems as if he's intending to indict roided-up possible form of masculinity through first-person character study, and as always with B, it’s hard to put together any fixed explanation. "I’m a jealous guy so I beat up my bitches/ I’m so insecure, I don’t even trust me," he drawls on "Play the Hood," showing his cards a bit.

Lamentably, there is little in the way of songs fit for crying in pet stores or fun, non sequitur-filled bangers to balance all this out, or make the body of this thing—the middle two hours, perhaps—less boring. If you love the playful WTF moments, they don’t get too much more compelling than flips of "Coco" and "Jumpman" (the choruses, respectively: "I’m in looove with the Based God" and "Based God, Based God, Based God, Based God"). These are exercises which it’s hard to imagine even the most diehard, TYBG-tatted devotee getting excited about.

The best songs on this tape pair oddball versions of party-rap production—a fair amount of Mannie Fresh’s laser-tag bounce and calls of "whodie" here—or slurred, I’m Gay (I’m Happy)-style boom-bap, with lyrics revolving around racial identity. "I Was Born Poor" couples a Hot Boys-ready, cymbal-driven beat with a velour sitar sample, and finds B dreamily murmuring about his ancestry ("Booker T. Washington, still got that honor/ Born into bondage, still became a scholar"). On the purely musical end, there are a handful of unusual gambits that stick with you: the triumphant singing on "With Me" is placed like a R&B break in the middle of an early '00s rap track and comes out sounding like something close to Tiny Tim.

But even the pleasant details are forgotten too quickly. Even more than, say, 2013’s 101-track 05 Fuck Em—a similarly unwieldy but much more engaging release thanks to a good haul of truly bizarre style experiments—it feels like B is just hitting a deadline and releasing what he has lying around. Sure, that’s probably what he’s always done, but this feels more like a perfunctory archive purge. Thugged Out Pissed Off creates the image of a Lil B who is unsure if he wants to keep up things exactly as he’s been doing them, but doesn’t know exactly what he should do instead.