Steve 'Flash' JuonI admire Lil B. That may not always be obvious from my reviews. I think some of his albums are great and others are excessively bad, and that level of inconsistency is not in itself admirable, but Brandon McCartney’s hustle in the game is second to none. He’s built an incredibly loyal network of supporters who can dismiss the wide discrepancy in quality between works and ride with him from one project to the next. He then floods the market with multiple albums per year (sometimes multiple per month) and they can at times be astoundingly long. He could be called “Lil P” given just how prodigious he is. That’s why I respect Lil B so much. Regardless of the quality of his individual albums, he has built a career out of being completely independent, and a profitable and lucrative one at that.
“Afrikantis” is an excellent representation of all of his best and worst qualities at the same time. Brandon decided to produce an entire instrumental album with a title and cover art that implies it will celebrate the African diaspora. A noble premise — albeit one that would lack the charm of his vocal stylings. Sometimes Lil B sounds like he walked into the vocal booth without anything written down and just said whatever shit came off the top of his head. It can result in “songs” that are bad, hilarious, or accidentally profound, but you’re rarely bored by them. In many cases the lyrics themselves make up for the self-produced tracks, and on Lil B albums that are hours in length his rugged independence in doing it all himself becomes a musical weakness. Now imagine an entire album of that weakness put under a magnifying glass with nothing to block your view.
Songs like “Kim” are so perplexing. There are hints of good ideas within its 308 seconds. The percussive sounds and the rhythms definitely speak to world music and celebrate it, but that alone would have made for a pleasant experience, and he takes a hard left in the middle of the track. He starts layering in increasingly discordant synthesized samples, as though he was trying to do his version of electronic freestyle jazz, only I’ve heard more believable and enjoyable samples coming out of the S-SMP chip on a Super Nintendo. If your sound is like a Fisher Price “My First Keyboard” less powerful than a 30 year old game console, why even go there? If you had a good beat and it would have been fine on its own, why splash it with clashing instruments that only make it sound worse?
“Guinea Pig Arcade” both reads and sounds like a Primus idea gone horribly wrong. It’s what would happen if Les Claypool decided to slap his bass aimlessly instead of laying down a funky groove. Mix that with a banjo picking jamboree. Then, mix that with a series of randomly chosen notes from the high end of a synthesizer. Ramp all of that up to a fever pitch and you’ve simply got a musical mess that I would generously call unlistenable and less charitably call shit.
Strangest of all is the fact that on an album called “Afrikantis” one of the most listenable tracks is called “Eurasia.” I didn’t say good, I said “listenable.” Lil B is still trying to mesh together styles that don’t really fit together. It’s the musical method of smashing jigsaw pieces into place with a large mallet, even if they come from a completely different puzzle. Somehow on this one song the funky bass manages to carry you through the presentation largely unscathed, but with songs like the seven minute plus long “Welcome to Oakland California” you won’t be so lucky. It can’t even find a footing to stand on at the beginning let alone anywhere in the next six minutes and change.
I’m not entirely convinced Brandon didn’t record “Afrikantis” while completely stoned out of his mind, sitting in his home studio surrounded by all his recording equipment, just randomly reaching out to slap one and make a noise come out. Whatever that noise was, he kept it. It’s the audio version of the infinite monkey theorem but I don’t have the patience to wait until he churns out Shakespeare. You shouldn’t either. Everything I said about Lil B still holds true. His hustle is incredible, and when he’s able to focus and discard his bad ideas, he can produce some excellent work lyrically and musically. When he’s NOT focused you get this… and whatever this is, you don’t want it.