Lil B

The 21-year-old rapper, producer, video star, Twitter fiend, and meme generator known as Lil B is good for about one Internet sensation per month—see (or look up) the cooking dance, the #swag and #based hysteria on Twitter, the Ellen DeGeneres song, or, most recently, his mid-Coachella declaration that his next album will be called I’m Gay. (He’s not.) His Internet hype (and the fact that said hype is sometimes over tracks that consist mostly of the words “ELLEN DEGENERES” repeated ad infinitum in a semi-monotone) certainly gets him attention—in the past year, Lil B has graced the covers of Vice, The Fader, and XXL, and been targeted by endless detractors questioning his sexual orientation, hating on his flow, and calling him a cultural plague. Hip-hop outlets struggle to figure out where he fits into their narrative, and other critics agonize over whether to take him seriously. 

Updated 04/20/2011