Slang dictionary
based
[beysd]
September 6, 2018
What does based mean?
Based is a slang term that originally meant to be addicted to crack cocaine (or acting like you were), but was reclaimed by rapper Lil B for being yourself and not caring what others think of you—to carry yourself with swagger.
Based has been appropriated by the alt-right online as a general term of praise, as if “un-woke.”
Based comes from the slang basehead, a term from the 1980s to describe people addicted to freebasing cocaine, a method which makes the drug smokable. The term basehead became synonymous with the crack epidemic that swept the United States at the time. Over time, calling someone based was a way of saying that they were a crack addict, or acting like one, especially in West Coast street slang.
In the way slang things go, people acting eccentric or abnormal were labelled based. At least that’s what seems to have happened with quirky West Coast rapper Brandon “Lil B” McCartney. In reaction to people calling him based, Lil B decided to redefine the term. In 2007, his group, The Pack, released their debut album, Based Boys. In a 2010 interview in Complex magazine, Lil B described his new definition of based: “Based means being yourself. Not being scared of what people think about you. Not being afraid to do what you wanna do.”
It’s not clear when Lil B started calling himself Based God, but by 2011 that nickname was firmly associated with him. Eventually, a cosmology of Based God (or BasedGod) emerged, referring to becoming a sort of higher power that Lil B could access, allowing him special abilities, such as the power to curse basketball player Kevin Durant.
The re-invented based, as a signal of power and swagger, was picked up by the alt-right/white nationalist community online in the 2010s. In 2014, during a controversy over female video-game reviewers known as Gamergate, conservative commentator Christina Hoff Sommers was referred to as Based Mom for pushing back against criticisms that video games and their culture are sexist. Since then, referring to alt-right or right-wing conservative figures as based has become a sign of approval in online social-media forums like the pro-Trump subreddit, r/The_Donald.
In 2016, Slate writer Ben Mathis-Lilley perhaps best summed up this strange turn of events with based, worth quoting at length:
“So what we have here, then, is a word that was created amid an addiction epidemic in urban communities being adopted by bigoted fans of a presidential candidate who was demonstrated unprecedented contempt for, and ignorance of, said communities.”
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