Lil B at NYU

Props to The Fader, which has carefully transcribed Lil B's 86-minute lecture at NYU on April 11 in order to present a full Based Scripture (you can also listen below). What an act of love and extreme patience it was to note on paper B's patented go-somewhere-else sentences, which rarely conclude neatly.

But between B's endless non-sequiturs, the announcement of a forthcoming rock album with one of the "biggest artists in the world," and the obvious amusement of the students who came to lavish ironic laughter and cooking utensils on the Young Based God ("I would have worn a suit so y'all could take me seriously," he says at one point), there were lovely and simple life lessons that deserve more than the juvenile ridicule he was met with on Wednesday night in New York. (Read the Village Voice's full account.) Of all the advice he doled out, these are our favorites:

5. "Get gold teeth! Don't be thinking so hard, like, 'Oh, man, I can't get gold teeth.'"

Banish those negative thoughts of being rejected by society and grill it up, y'all. Your future rap career will thank you.

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Oakland's V-Nasty

​V-Nasty entered 2012 with the stench of BAYTL all over her. A collaboration with her favorite rapper, Gucci Mane, the mixtape was received by critics as hip-hop's sloppiest shit-sandwich in a while. The Bay's V-Nasty and Atlanta's Gucci may have enjoyed a few larks in the studio while making the record, but it came off like the sound of a star-struck fan getting to meet their idol, instead of a couple of peers collaborating. (That neither V-Nasty nor Gucci are actually very good at rapping did not help matters.)

But now, with her long-promised solo mixtape, Doin' Numbers (free download), V-Nasty hasn't just redeemed herself -- she's demonstrated the promise and pull that all of her early online hype and hatred warranted. Put simply, the 14-track project is the sound of the V-Nasty that came to infamy through that YouTube video of her strutting around Oakland cursing people out and generally embarking on anti-social behavior. The personality depicted in that clip was abrasive, uncompromising, and odious -- which, when flipped into rap form, makes for an utterly endearing character.

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Pep Love, putting all his heart into this.

And today in Reminders of the Considerable Powers of the Hieroglyphics Crew, we bring you this video for "Hip-Hop, My Friend," from Oakland MC Pep Love. It's the first single off Rigmarole, his second solo album and the first in 11 years (since Ascension), and both the song and the video are worth pausing to enjoy.

Building on a sweetly melancholic sample from Bobby "Blue" Bland's "I Wouldn't Treat a Dog the Way You Treated Me," Pep Love renews his dedication to hip-hop and bemoans what he sees as the negative influence of the media, major labels, and suit-wearing cigar smokers on its original values. Of course there's a bit of myth-making going on here, too; any song that begins with the line "I'm a real true artist/ Put all of my heart in this" bears the risk of sounding both corny and arrogant, sorta like those hypemongers and anonymous trolls wagging online fingers about "real hip-hop." But here we'd say Pep Love stays on the good side, coming off more like a concerned wise man than a cranky elder. And anyway, his flow is so impeccable -- effortlessly smooth and rhythmic in that way we've come to expect from Hiero members -- that he leaves no room for shots even if you disagree with his point of view.

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Beeda Weeda.

"I'm kinda like taking the Too $hort persona and putting my own stamp on it," says Oakland-based rapper Beeda Weeda about his upcoming project. Titled Bass Rock Babies, the album is co-signed by $hort Dog, who contributes guest raps and has allowed Beeda to recreate classic videos of his to promote the project. In the run up to that album's March release date, Beeda dropped the freebie Bass Rock Babies: The Leak mixtape last week. So in the interests of paying deference to the Bay Area's hip-hop pioneer, we asked Beeda to run through his five favorite Too $hort tracks.

5. "Girl (Cocaine)" (1985)
With this song it's just that beat! It's something special about it; I redid this song for my own project, with the same exact beat. When I first heard this ... I was probably like two or three years old, but my cousins used to have tapes and I used to steal tapes and get ass-whoopings for stealing their tapes! Then later I'd take them to elementary school and my grandfather found out and I got an ass-whooping for it!

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During its 10-year run, the Distortion 2 Static hip-hop TV show graduated from profiling local upcoming artists to chatting it up with rap superstars. Started by Prince Aries, Ariel Nuñez and DJ Haylow, the show signed off on its broadcast run back in September; a farewell shindig will be going down at Mighty tonight. (Read this week's print feature about the show.) Before the big end, we snagged Prince Aries and DJ Haylow to reminisce about their favorite guests from Distortion 2 Static's vast interview vault.

Prince Paul

​5. Prince Paul
Prince Aries: "I actually get my name from Prince Paul -- that's why I called myself Prince Aries. I think we sat down for almost two hours; I was still new to interviewing and wasn't good at cutting it short, but I asked him [about] everything, from what equipment he used to Stetsasonic and De La Soul and Gravediggaz. He was a good sport about it and it felt like we were just kicking it. It was at the Hotel Triton in San Francisco.

"One thing that stood out from the interview was that I was asking him about the gear he was using to make beats. To me, coming up listening to Prince Paul, he's very innovative, so I thought he'd be kind of a techie and up on the new gear. But he wasn't! I think he said he had an MPC and a sequencing machine. But anything beyond that he didn't care or know anything about!"

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Trashy as she wanna be.

Sure, it's technically on a new mixtape from the Madden Brothers -- you know, of Good Charlotte fame -- and it features a guest verse from curiously named Chicago rapper Hollywood Holt. But there's no doubt that Oakland-bred whippersnapper Kreayshawn runs the show on "Firetruck" -- she raps through most of it, and the backing track has that big, slow, sleazy feel you might recognize from "Gucci Gucci" or "Rich Whores."

It's not quite the aural-and-visual assault that "Gucci Gucci" was (sigh, could anything be?), but it's more than enough to keep the Kreayshawn fans sated and the haters more or less at bay. Of course, those so inclined will find plenty to object to here: We're frankly a little irked that the first real line is, "So hot I'm a fire/ Got these hoes like a fireman," after which Kreayshawn rhymes "again" with "again," and then wades into some incoherent babble about ice and cigarettes that doesn't really rhyme at all.

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Ken Taylor

DaVinci, in unmistakably San Francisco fog.

DaVinci represents the Fillmore passionately. The rapper claims roots in the area going back to his grandmother's time, and has traced the changes in the blocks he grew up on through songs like "What You Finna Do." So before he lights up the stage at 330 Ritch with Freddie Gibbs this Wednesday evening (Nov. 16) -- supporting his great new EP, Feast or Famine -- we got him to reminisce about five fond memories of growing up in the Fillmore.

BMX Bandit
"I was one of those kids who would hang out all over the place. I had a little Mongoose bike that I rode around on. A good friend got it for me for Christmas. I'd ride that everywhere -- to the beach, to hang out in front of the BBQ pits... And I was the king of wheelies! I could do them for days! I could also jump my bike in the air and spin my back tire around to knock a garbage can over. But then someone stole my bike and I had to get like a $50 bike from Toys R Us to replace it."

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A-Plus

As part of the mighty Souls of Mischief crew, A-Plus ushered in a new style of Bay Area rap with the group's breezy and effortless "'93 'Til Infinity" anthem. Also a mainstay in the Hieroglyphics movement, the rapper and producer has been involved with releases from Del, Pep Love, and Casual, and earlier this year released his own Pepper Spray EP project, which is hooked around giving songs by the Red Hot Chili Peppers a hip-hop make-over.

Here then, A-Plus looks back at five of the most notable musical projects he's been involved in since his early-'90s introduction. It's a set of anecdotes that includes the perils of living with Prince Paul in a house full of spiders, the musical gatekeeper role of George Clinton's pet dog, and the revelation that "'93 'Til Infinity" was originally a Pep Love song.

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What the shirt says.

San Quinn is a certified Bay Area rap veteran. Since dropping his debut, Don't Cross Me, back in 1993, he's gone on to amass a 15-album discography, with his latest project, Can't Take The Ghetto Out A Ni**a, released in July. With that album's new single, "Big Bank," still buzzing, we caught up with San Quinn and asked him to give us the inside story on five of his own long-playing projects from years past.

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Hey Gina, Roah Gigz requests your attention.

Oh, that Roachy Balboa. Of all the tracks on S.F. rapper Roach Gigz's new Bitch I'm a Player EP that make us grin, we're extremely glad he chose "Gina" to illustrate a new video. We just love it when rap songs with lyrics that describe a scene then get videos that portray that scene with exacting precision!

And especially this song, which has Gigz innocently (gulp) riding around the city with a friend, only to have his attention yanked away by a member of the female persuasion named Gina, who just happened to be walking down a San Francisco street. Gigz gets her number of course, takes off, gets pulled over by the cops, and continues on with his beat-thumping San Francisco day. We won't spoil the end for you, but the suggestion is that Gigz and Gina meet again; both the song and video end with, shall we say, a lengthy exploration of one whiny-voiced local rapper's oral fixation.

Watch Roach Gigz's new video, "Gina," after the jump.

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