Jacques Attali argued that music anticipates social change earlier than any other cultural form. He wasn’t talking about hip hop, but he might wish he had been. The form was born out of hustle, rapidly morphing to nestle in the contradictions of whatever constellation of economic and technological forces prevails at the time, scraping together artistic and financial survival in creative, illegal and dangerous ways. If you want a barometer for how the next revolution in advanced capitalism will be lived, you should probably look to a rapper. Specifically, you should probably look at Lil B.

The young Berkeley rapper has built a sizable fan base of hip hop fans and hipsters, though not without controversy. Lil B makes music — a lot of music, an incredible amount of music, literally dozens of songs a day — whose artistic merit is, even fans will admit, questionable. He raps in an affectless nasal voice with little regard for the traditional aesthetic qualities of rapping such as rhyme, flow, conceptual coherence. He seems determined to rap about every possible topic (in the words of a recent NPR profile, “cat care and back pain, black liberation and becoming a deity”) over every possible type of music — gabber, opera, juke. I find the music barely listenable, though that hasn’t stopped me from sifting through dozens of his tracks. I want to like Lil B because being a part of his absurd carnival seems like fun.