Best New Tracks - Pitchfork: Lil B: "No Black Person Is Ugly" |  |
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Posted: 31 Jul 2014 11:55 AM PDT
Every few years, Lil B taps into a pure, unfiltered sunbeam that channels his essence. "No Black Person Is Ugly" is one such moment—an empathic sentiment delivered loosely, a mood big and vague enough to live in. He opens with in a tightly packed flow that tricks you into expecting a linear, coherent performance. But you soon realize it's Lil B straight through, a string of small, disconnected sentences tracing the contours of some big, connected thoughts. "I see it every day—they got shows like 'Jailbreak' but won't help you get straight," he mumbles. The beat is faded, golden, and thin, and together with Lil B's rapping it suggest Nice and Smooth's "Sometimes I Rhyme Slow Sometimes I Rhyme Quick" as reinterpreted by a Bulgarian teenager. "My English not perfect," Lil B admits. And yet, he finds his way, as he often does, to something heart-piercingly direct, and here it's "I've seen the other side, and I know that it's amazing/ Life is amazing." When Lil B is at his best, you feel him looking you directly in the eye.
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