Explaining the pockets of popularity and hate that Lil B inspires takes paragraphs.

By technical hip-hop standards some of Lil B’s rapping is close to horrible, sloppy and off beat or thematically incoherent. It’s a very punk rock approach, bypassing technical proficiency entirely in favor of getting an idea or emotion to tape in the fastest way possible. The method has its roots in the Based Freestyle, a formless and stream of conscious style of spoken word rapping that B invented around 2008.

“Based,” at large, is Lil B’s vaguely defined and slightly cultish ideology. He explains: “Being based means [being] positive, doing what you want to do, not caring and just being yourself.” You know, everything.

Lil B filled more than a hundred Myspace pages with these freestyles, then abandoned them completely. Still, their influence remains. “That was all unconscious groundwork for why I’m here today,” he says with a degree of awe. “Thank God for the Based Freestyles.”

Unsurprisingly, his work has been met with an intensely mixed response. Critics seem intrigued by Lil B but ultimately turned off or confused by him. An ambivalent review in The New York Times called his a show “fantastic and bizarre, but at least humane” and dismissed his output as “a thematically thin cesspool.” When MTV’s The Vice Guide To Everything ran a segment on Lil B the host shrugged him off in the kindest way possible: “I’m pretty sure Based music is just an excuse to be professionally weird, but it’s a super endearing brand of weird.” Civilian critics tend to be less, well, civil. When rumor of a planned collaboration between Lil B and the well-regarded “conscious” rapper Lupe Fiasco broke, a concerned fan confronted him at a Q&A session: “I just want to know why you decided to collaborate with Lil B, who I feel is a rapper that is ruining the future of hip-hop.”