Photo illustration by Molly Butterfoss

Forget OKCupid or Match.com. For Brittany Frankso and her boyfriend Jebriel Teague, it was the obsessively prolific Bay-Area rapper known as Lil B-- and his thriving online community of fans-- that brought them true love. What began as a casual online friendship over shared affection for the rapper on Facebook blossomed into a deep romantic bond. Frankso, 21, recalls a period after a storm last summer when the electricity at her parents' home in New Jersey went out for days. She endured the dark, powerless nights in her car, talking to Teague over the phone. "I was hot and upset and scared and by myself in the pitch black," she says. "That's when we really started connecting."

She soon booked a trip to visit the 19-year-old Teague, and within three months she'd packed up and moved in with him and his brother in their Atlanta home. It's a decision that may seem rash to some (her mother initially disowned her for dating a black man), but Fransko is committed to Teague. "I wouldn't have moved my entire life if I didn't think it could be forever," she tells me. And their shared devotion to Lil B and the lifestyle he endorses-- his music, his positivity, his "Top Chef"-ready cooking dance-- continues to strengthen their connection. Frankso even dreams about the rapper playing officiant at their wedding. "Lil B can say, 'And you may now cook with the bride,'" she says, giggling.

What Lil B lacks in notoriety he makes up for with an

all-encompassing worldview-- becoming a serious

fan often accompanies a mentality makeover.

Lady Gaga has her Little Monsters, Nicki Minaj has her army of Barbz, Justin Bieber has his squealing Beliebers, Chris Brown has his perpetually misguided Team Breezy. And Lil B has his sprawling BasedWorld, a virtual-reality home to some of contemporary music's most fiercely loyal, spirited, interconnected, mobilized, internet-savvy fans. There is no single hub or message board-- instead, the community thrives primarily as a decentralized network of Facebook pages. The most dedicated devotees sometimes become members of a subdivision called the Task Force, a group that expresses itself through video game-like geekery and military vocabulary. Their primary goal is to stamp out the fires of anyone who speaks ill of Lil B online, and they take their duties very seriously-- within a few minutes of posting, any negative comment about the rapper on YouTube, WorldStarHipHop, Facebook, or Twitter is killed with kindness, buried in positivity.

I had been aware of Lil B's army of followers and their online presence for some time, but I didn't fully grasp their reach and intensity until January. The rapper was nominated for the voter-determined Gig of a Lifetime challenge, a contest designed to bring new talent to perform at a Grammys-affiliated event. After he lost in an early round to a Los Angeles pop-punk band with a comparatively negligible online following, I received a flood of emails from his energized fans. "CARRIE THEY DONE FUCKED LIL B," one wrote. A petition quickly went up on WhiteHouse.gov to "Boycott the CBS Grammy Awards show for unethically purging Lil B."

At first glance, Lil B's fans can seem as off-center as the controversial artist himself, who is still unsigned, still releasing hundreds of songs a year, and still doing things like creating a persona for his cat Keke or taping himself crying in a pet store. The rapper's fame remains modest, but what he lacks in notoriety he makes up for with an all-encompassing worldview-- becoming a serious fan often accompanies a mentality makeover. Lil B and his followers abide by an ideology that's both grand and simplistic, a kind of back-to-basics guide for living based on the principled tenets of both old-fashioned parents and hippies.

"How can you possibly have anything bad to say about a guy who devotes himself to helping others be happy?" wonders Brandon Skipper, who goes by the nickname Skip in BasedWorld. He's a 24-year-old who used Lil B's music as a way to lift himself out of a deep rut. After graduating high school in 2007, Skipper turned away offers from Duke and various art programs to join the Navy, with the hopes that he could earn enough money to pay for school. But once he wrapped up his time in the military, where he'd earned high-level security clearance within the Office of Naval Intelligence, he began to flail, using drugs regularly and even considering suicide.

At some point, a friend played him the deeply introspective, new age-toned Lil B song "I'm God", which initiated a gradual shift. "I started to apply what Lil B was saying in his more serious songs to my life," he says. I can practically hear a faithful joy radiating through the phone as he explains his new perspective. Skipper is living at his parents' home in Baxley, Georgia, folding Lil B's philosophies into his daily routine as he tries to return to his artwork. "I don't have a job. I ain't in school right now. I'm single. But every day I get up, go outside, look at the sky, feel the breeze on my skin," he says, "and I'm happy."

Brittany Frankso's "based" tattoo

At the center of Lil B's philosophy lives the word based, a term once used as an insult that's been flipped to mean something profound. Based is an intuitive notion that signifies a constellation of desirable qualities-- positivity, sincerity, groundedness. It is not easy to pinpoint exactly what based means on paper, but if you orbit BasedWorld for even a short period of time, spotting examples of the virtue in the real world becomes second nature. (Some guy walking tall while sporting a hot pink fisherman's cap? Extremely based.) The five letters carry so much weight for Frankso, who's known as Brittany BasedPrincess online, that she has them tattooed in large black letters down her forearm. In talking with Lil B's motley crew of fans, I found that the based ideology can forge more common ground between people than upbringing, location, age, race.

"A lot of people I've known for six months through BasedWorld are closer to me than friends I've had my whole life," says Frankso. "That's why I'm glad my boyfriend is based." (They're not alone, either-- a 22-year-old Lil B fanatic named Nancy Rodriguez met her boyfriend the same way, and he eventually moved from St. Louis to live with her in Chicago.) Once Frankso relocated to Atlanta, she and Teague reached out to Skipper to meet up in person, and the three spent a day together riding scooters, smoking weed, and watching movies. They've since become close friends. While Lil B's community is a ramshackle network of pages and people online, there's a sense of intimacy among its members. The rapper himself keeps watch over all that happens in his kingdom, sometimes forging personal friendships with its inhabitants.

Monica Howard, a fan in Columbus, Georgia, sometimes communicates directly with him about personal problems. The 32-year-old single mother tells me that she reached out to him at the end of last year. "The holidays are a rough time for me," she says, "because my mom passed away in 2004, and Christmas was her favorite time." She posted a note on Facebook about her troubles, and Lil B noticed. "He thanked me for sharing my experience, and said that these are the things that remind him to stay humble," she says.

The interpersonal nature of BasedWorld can translate to a real-world connection with the man himself, too. "He knew exactly who I was," says 17-year-old Joey Greene, describing the time he met Lil B in person at one of the rapper's shows. "He was as happy to meet me as I was to meet him. His face lit up and he was like, 'I fuck with you, man.'" Lil B undoubtedly recognized the 11th grader from a series of videos Greene posted online, where he's pictured in his bedroom, the red wall behind him scrawled with tags like, "#SWAG", "Joey," and "#based." He's doing a version of Lil B's cooking dance, but with the volume and adrenaline dialed all the way up. "When I'm not recording," he says, "I go even more insane with it."

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Greene is a reminder that, in spite of the heavy-handed spiritual component, BasedWorld is, above all, a wildly fun place. It might seem sacrilegious or mean-spirited to laugh at an artist who spends his days tirelessly spreading hippy'd-out visions of peace and love, but each fan I spoke with agreed: Lil B is nothing if not a brilliant comedian, a skilled and knowing provocateur. To take him entirely with a straight face would mean selling Lil B short and underestimating his self-awareness. "He's a master troll, and people don't understand that," Skipper says. "He's so smart and such a good rapper that he tries not to rap well." For many fans, the juxtaposition of goofy and serious-- and the tension between those two elements-- is what drew them to his music to begin with.

"Before I got into Lil B, I was super uptight," says Emmett Tyler, a 20-year-old who lives in Burlington, New Jersey, with his parents. "He helped me realize that you don't have to be so hard on yourself." Tyler, who's dubbed himself the Task Force Hitta, dropped out of a pricy Philadelphia art school and now works in retail while taking classes at a community college. "I don't want to put Lil B on too much of a pedestal, but he's a martyr of some sort-- he's emotionally sacrificing himself." He takes pains to point out that Lil B must have submitted himself to a surge of harsh judgment in order to experiment with his brand and philosophy. "I know I'm weird," Tyler says, "but I look at some of the stuff he's done and wonder if I could ever sacrifice that much."

Task Force artwork

Speaking of sacrifice: Joel Gonzalez, an 18-year-old from West Palm Beach, Florida, says he spends an average of 12 hours per day in his home, monitoring various BasedWorld pages. He's been done with high school for two years now and hasn't quite mapped out what the next step is, but he's got tunnel vision when it comes to his BasedWorld trajectory: He's a Task Force administrator now, and he intends to serve and protect.

But being a Lil B fan is not an all-or-nothing experience exclusive to passionate teens and twentysomethings with a healthy amount of free time to kill. One BasedWorld stalwart who goes by Task Force Chip describes himself as "Lil B's oldest fan over 60." He's the cool uncle (or grandfather) who knows what the kids are into, and truly understands it. Chip was exposed to Lil B's music by some younger co-workers at a consulting job and was initially struck by the profanity. But, like many who first greet the BasedGod with confusion or skepticism, he eventually "started listening to the music and really hearing what he had to say," Chip tells me. "It reminded me of Frank Zappa, whose music was profound, but a lot of people didn't appreciate it because of the words he said."

Chip and his co-workers eventually made a home video set to Lil B's introspective song "White House" and put it on YouTube. Pictured in the video is Chip's pottery studio-- he currently owns a ceramics company that designs and manufactures special dinnerware for high-end restaurants. "I work with some of the most successful chefs in the country," Chip says, "and they're very based people."

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He's encountered little opposition to his online alter-ego. People in his line of work either think it's funny or they get it. Even his wife, to whom he's been married for 30 years, is dipping her toes into BasedWorld-- she's a member of the Task Force now. "I told her, 'You need to be able to look beyond the profanity and see the message. This is something incredibly positive that our grandkids are going to be listening to, and you need to know what's going on so that you can relate to them.'" Similarly, single mom Howard says she's passing down the tenets of BasedWorld to her seven-year-old daughter Regina, who already knows how to do the cooking dance.

Task Force artwork

Despite the best efforts of Lil B's legions, a nu-metal band called Within Reason won the Gig of a Lifetime contest and took the stage at the Grammy Museum earlier this year. Lil B and his fans were left in the dust without explanation as to why he'd been prematurely removed from the contest. Still, the BasedWorld mobilization seemed to overshadow CBS's contest altogether. It didn't really matter why Lil B lost, only that his fans came to life in great numbers to support him.

That is, until the BasedGod spoke. "Thank you to cbs and the grammys.forgive me for reading my emails late, thats why i didnt perform i missed grammys email crazy", he tweeted, long after the contest had passed. I emailed him for more information, and he responded immediately: "cbs personally emailed me about the grammys... I read my emails late." Like anything that Lil B touches, the Gig of a Lifetime Contest was at once immensely complicated and delightfully simple. I tried to use the brief email exchange as a way to spark a discourse about his fans, only to lose the elusive rapper once again, as he slipped back into BasedWorld.