I’m not sure that Lil B actually, as the title of his song “I Got AIDS” suggests, is actually HIV-positive — a lot of his recent work’s been about making declarations designed to get people to show their worst selves in their reactions, as he did when he announced that the title of his last album would be “I’m Gay,” which he later changed to “I’m Gay (I’m Happy).” But even if he’s not, there’s something sort of weird about ?uestlove’s snarking at him for it, declaring “2007-12 the ‘Post Modern Ye-ified Narcissist-Histrionic disorder’.” It’s pretty bizarre that rappers regularly get praised and defended for taking on alternate personas in order to give them cover to say wildly anti-social things, but that if one does it in order to tweak his peers about homophobia and safe sex, it’s histrionic. The song itself is fine, nothing special, sort of melancholic:
And it’s nowhere near as clever as Salt-n-Pepa’s realtalk about the limitations of the pill in “Let’s Talk About Sex”:
But that’s okay. Songs serve different purposes. Lil B may be self-aggrandizing, but he’s serving a pretty valuable social purpose along the way.
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