Lil B

Lil B, born Brandon McCartney, is a rapper from Berkeley, California. He is documented as the person who reclaimed the slang word “based”, turning a pejorative rooted in the crack epidemic into a term of approval that later spread from music into online political vocabulary. He also made a widely covered presidential endorsement during the 2016 election cycle.

The Pack

McCartney’s first group, The Pack, formed while he was in high school. Their song “Vans” reached the Billboard charts and was placed fifth on Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 Best Songs of 2006, above tracks by Bob Dylan, Pearl Jam and The Killers and below Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy”, The Raconteurs’ “Steady As She Goes”, Chamillionaire’s “Ridin’” and T.I.’s “What You Know”. The group’s debut album, Based Boys, was released on 30 October 2007.

Internet-Native Distribution

After The Pack dissolved, McCartney remained unsigned and released music directly online at unusual volume. Around 2008 he began recording what he called “Based Freestyles” — a loose, stream-of-consciousness spoken style — and filled more than a hundred Myspace pages with them before abandoning the accounts entirely. NPR reported in January 2011 that he had put roughly 3,000 songs online free in the preceding three years. In 2012 he put his own count at 1,500 to 2,000 tracks with about 30 official releases since 2009; the figures are his and NPR’s respectively and are not reconciled by any source consulted here. The Myspace freestyles were later gathered as a 676-song mixtape, Free Music: The Complete Myspace Collection, and 404 of the tracks were issued to streaming services in 2019 as four 101-track volumes.

NPR also described his engagement pattern on YouTube: soliciting fan video responses and replying in the comments to single out particular contributors. His Twitter following stood at 431,800 in May 2012.

Origin and Reclamation of “Based”

“Based” derives from “basehead”, a 1980s pejorative for a person addicted to freebasing cocaine; Slate traces documented usage to a 1986 PBS segment. In West Coast slang, calling someone “based” came to mean they were a crack user or acting like one, and by extension that they were behaving strangely. It was applied to McCartney, and he inverted it.

In a Complex interview published on 10 June 2010, he gave the account that later dictionaries cite: “When I was younger, based was a negative term that meant like dopehead, or basehead. People used to make fun of me.” His replacement definition was “Based means being yourself. Not being scared of what people think about you. Not being afraid to do what you wanna do. Being positive.” He gave NPR a near-identical formulation the following year. The nickname “The BasedGod” was firmly attached to him by 2011, and the catchphrase “Thank You Based God” became an image-macro meme on Tumblr and message boards.

Migration into Political Vocabulary

The reclaimed word did not stay in music. Dictionary.com’s slang entry and Slate both date the shift to the mid-2010s and give the same two markers.

In 2014, during the Gamergate controversy, the writer Christina Hoff Sommers — whom Dictionary.com describes as a conservative commentator — was labelled “Based Mom” online for her criticism of the argument that video game culture is sexist. By 2016, “based” had become a standard term of approval in the pro-Trump subreddit r/The_Donald and in adjacent forums, applied to public figures whose statements the poster endorsed. Dictionary.com attributes the adoption to what it calls the “alt-right/white nationalist community online”; Slate’s framing is similar. Those are the sources’ characterizations, not this project’s.

Slate’s Ben Mathis-Lilley summarised the trajectory as “a word that was created amid an addiction epidemic in urban communities being adopted by bigoted fans of a presidential candidate who was demonstrated unprecedented contempt for, and ignorance of, said communities.” Lil B himself is not documented as having any involvement in, or endorsement of, that later usage.

2015 Presidential Endorsement

Lil B had earlier released a track referencing Bill Clinton that included a line shouting out Hillary Clinton’s expected candidacy. In a series of tweets beginning 10 July 2015 he withdrew that support and endorsed Bernie Sanders, writing “As much as I want to a woman leading the USA, right now it’s all about Bernie.”

Interviewed by CNN in August 2015, he gave two reasons. The first was the candidates’ records: he said he had been told about Sanders having marched against segregation in the 1960s, and contrasted this with Clinton’s work for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign as a “Goldwater girl” — “She didn’t have any part in trying to march against segregation.” The second was that Sanders had followed him on Twitter. On his account, which accounts a politician follows indicates who they think they should be listening to; he tweeted, “How do these political people running for government not follow one black person over Twitter? But Bernie follows me.”

In the same interview he discussed Black Lives Matter, saying candidates who are not connected to Black communities will not win their votes, and that the movement should give Sanders a hearing over the Netroots Nation confrontation because of his record. He described policing, the court system, landlords and banks as contributors to conditions in poor neighbourhoods, and pointed to his track “I Can’t Breathe”, written in reference to the death of Eric Garner. He was 25 at the time and had by then lectured at MIT, UCLA and NYU.

Relevance to Political Discourse

Lil B’s place in this knowledge base rests on one traceable line: a word he redefined in a 2010 music interview became, within four years, a marker of approval in online political argument, and within six a fixture of a major presidential campaign’s online base. The 2015 endorsement is a second, smaller connection — a documented case of a musician’s social-media following being courted and mobilised in a primary. The music career itself is context for those two things rather than the reason the page exists. The broader phenomenon is covered by the timeline entry on the rise of “based” as political internet slang.

What Is Not Established Here

The audit removed several claims that no fetched source supported.

The page previously stated that Lil B “personally followed over a million users” on Twitter and carried a followerCount of “1.3+ million on Twitter”. Neither figure appears in any source retrieved for this pass; the only sourced count is 431,800 followers in May 2012, which is too stale to state as a current fact, so the field was removed. The related claim that this constituted a distinct model of engagement that “influenced how public figures interact with audiences online” was removed as an unattributed assessment.

The claim that the term “gained traction on platforms such as 4chan, Reddit, and Twitter” was reduced to Reddit, which is the only platform Slate and Dictionary.com name. Neither source dates the word’s arrival on 4chan.

The list of artists said to cite his influence — Kendrick Lamar, Tyler, the Creator, Playboi Carti — was removed; no source meeting this project’s standard was retrieved for any of them, and the claim is in any case a music-industry one.

Removed for want of a source: that he began rapping at 15; that The Pack’s attention came via the hyphy movement; that Lil B is a pioneer of “cloud rap” as a named subgenre (a 2012 interview associates his sound with the producers Clams Casino and Keyboard Kid 206, which is not the same claim); that he spoke publicly about the private prison system specifically, as against policing, courts and poverty, which CNN does document; and the framing of his politics as spanning “2015–2016”, when the documented endorsement and interview both fall in July and August 2015.

The birth year of 1989 is retained as consistent with CNN reporting him to be 25 in August 2015, but no source retrieved here fixes an exact birth date, and the year is not independently confirmed.