The Bay Area’s rap landscape has many of the archetypes that you associate with rap: you have gangster rappers like Philthy Rich; you have local living legends like E-40, Too $hort and Andre Nickatina; you’ve got universally respected rappers who passed away as a result of street violence, like Mac Dre and The Jacka; and you have guys whose whole existence seems to be based on having sex with your girlfriend at a house party, like G-Eazy and Sage the Gemini.
But one thing that the Bay Area rap scene has that other regions lack is an entire subset of weird-ass rappers who have somehow beaten the odds to become trendsetters and celebrities on their own terms.
Berkeley native Lil B has challenged the boundaries of acceptability in hip-hop and, as a result, has pushed the whole of hip-hop culture forward. Does that not scream Berkeley? When Lil B released his strategically entitled album, I’m Gay, he faced a homophobic backlash, but he also set a precedent in hip-hop that everyone eventually had to accept. Without Lil B’s pink bandannas and blouses, would rappers like Young Thug even exist?
Sexual ambiguity isn’t the only thing Lil B has pioneered in hip-hop; he’s also the first rapper to blatantly not care about being proficient at rapping in any capacity. This pretty much opened the door for Internet sensations like Lil Yachty. And way before Kevin Gates was making headlines for verses about analingus, Lil B was not only talking about eating ass, but also he was making entire songs about it. How many rappers can say they’ve given a lecture at MIT? Exactly.
Lil B’s not the only rap weirdo to come out of the Bay Area. What other place on earth could have ever spawned someone like Kreayshawn and her group, the White Girl Mob? No, they were not trying to be satirical; they were dead serious. One of Kreayshawn’s affiliates, V-Nasty, ruffled feathers over her liberal usage of the N-word. Did this controversy ruin V-Nasty’s career? Nope, it propelled it, if not created it entirely. She went from being a ratchet white girl from Oakland to making a joint album entitled BAYTL with Atlanta rap star Gucci Mane. You can’t make this shit up.
Even legendary Bay Area rappers are kinda weird if you really think about it. E-40 introduces about 40 new slang words per album (which he releases three at a time), not to mention that he has a voice and a flow that no one else in hip-hop could achieve even if they tried. Mac Dre regularly raps about taking Ecstasy and dancing like an idiot. And don’t even get me started on the weirdness of Keak Da Sneak’s rap style.
The legacy of weirdness can be traced all the way back to the early ’90s. Remember the Oakland-based rap group the Digital Underground? Before they were primarily recognized for launching the career of Tupac Shakur, they were making their own hit songs, like “The Humpty Dance.” In the song, rapper Shock G purposefully uses a nasally voice to rap about how he’s ugly but still knows how to party. When he performs the song, he wears a plastic nose, black thick-rimmed glasses and a Cossack fur hat, and calls himself Humpty Dumpty. If that image alone doesn’t perfectly illustrate the weirdness of the Bay Area’s rap culture, then I don’t know what will.
