Yeah, celebration bitches, you feel me?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iqGo35v8ys
Alright so I'm Canadian and live sorta near Toronto which means that I have learned more about baseball in the last few months than I have in my entire life thus far. If you didn't know, the Toronto Blue Jays, our Major League Baseball team, has been killing it all season and made the playoffs or whatever (which is apparently just the top 6 teams or something in baseball, crazy) for the first time in something like 20 years. I first became aware of this when I was taking the train from Toronto one time and it got filled with Blue Jays fans drunkenly celebrating. I had assumed, I think reasonably, that the team just lost all the time.
And then "we" were down 2-0 against Texas in the first round - single elimination! Sports doesn't play around! Not like e-sports! But then something truly miraculous happened, something truly based... Lil B, at the behest of city councillor Norm Kelly, blessed the Blue Jays. which lead to, of course, their winning the next 3 games, the most recent one just this night. TYBG! I don't really care about baseball at all lol and I don't think I'd ever go out of my way to watch it but it made a lot of my friends happy, which makes me happy. My facebook is blowing tf up with people celebrating. My friend in Toronto reported that downtown was experiencing a "reverse riot", which is one of my favorite things to witness.
More importantly, though, this victory further verifies the "transcendent meme" that is Lil B's blessings/curses. Although his music releases have become much more sporadic (mostly due to the tragic loss of Based World studios, rip) and thus my feverish obsession of him has shifted somewhat to Young Thug, his legacy endures... endorsing Bernie Sanders, working through his transphobia on twitter, collaborations and feuds with various rappers and athletes for reasons beyond our mortal comprehension... Lil B has hit that sweet spot of recognition where I'm confident he'll keep popping enough just often enough for the mainstream media to preserve him as an "oddity", almost completely disjoint between each incident, but close enough that some contextual callbacks can justify their report. For us true fans, the living myth of Lil B only accumulates. I like to picture someone decades from now reading about Lil B... there's so many entry points of eccentricity, so many quick facts through which you can hook someone's interest, and then, as they read more and more stories, could they ever believe it was all one person?
The final resting place for their understanding of Lil B will be, of course, that the music is fantastic. Here's a great track from one of his best mixtapes, 2012's God's Father. It comes about 20 minutes in, you've just heard five fantastic tracks and you can see there's 29 left, and maybe there's a bit of fear in your heart - can the next 90 minutes really be as good as these first 20? It's a pretty reasonable thing to be a tiny bit skeptical of the quality of a ~2 hour mixtape, no matter how devoted you are to the Based God. But then BOOM, he comes in with that glorious Millie Jackson sample, "I appreciate y'all for still fucking with me, you feel me?" and you know right then that you will never stop fucking with him, that this whole mixtape is gonna be fire, that you never should have doubted, that your faith is twice as strong now, twice as strong as your logic. You get to the end and you realize that this track was as good as the first five and all the following ones will be just as good too. TYBG.
It's like the feeling of knowing that Lil B's curses and blessings have been almost eerily accurate, and not really actually believing that there is a supernatural aura surrounding Lil B's twitter that magically influences sports, of course, because you aren't insane, but wholeheartedly acting like you do believe because it's so fun, and getting so into the meme that you don't really even consider the rational, skeptical part that understands science very often. And then really wanting the trend to continue, just to make the fun even stronger, so much so that you care about professional sports more than ever before. But when it happens you aren't shocked at all, not even surprised, but a reassuring feeling warms you, you think of course, it's an irrational feeling but it's real. "Like I said this shit feels like a victory, man".
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