Artist: Danny Brown
Album: XXX
Release Date: 15/08/2011
The reason everybody loves Danny Brown (and yes, everybody does love Danny Brown) is his unpredictability. That applies to his raucous live shows, the diversity of the instrumentals he uses and the artists he chooses to work with, as well as his lyrical content. He can make you piss your pants with laughter one minute, throw drinks down your neck the next, and suddenly strip everything away and put images in your head that will transport you to a place or time, however dark and cold that may be. He’s the hipster who used to sell crack, the ladies’ man with missing teeth, the Joy Division fan who is deep into Chief Keef. Although there was an edge to the “old” Danny Brown that longtime fans will remember from ‘The Hybrid’ (the name of that mixtape alone hints at exactly that), ‘XXX’ was where the experimentation and boundary-pushing went to the next level and the artist that we all know now staggered from his chrysalis.
This is what a rap album with ADHD would sound like. With barely a couple of tracks over three-and-a-half minutes and most under three, and with such varied and unusual production sounds, it’s a frenetic journey from the party-focused first half through to the darkly powerful and vivid latter half. Early highlights include… well, all the early tracks. ‘XXX’ introduces Danny’s identity and background, stresses the importance of passion and hard grind in forging his career and is a kind of mission statement for the album, while ‘Die Like A Rockstar’ sets about glamorising the fuck out of snorting prescriptions and banging lots of chicks. On ‘Blood’, Danny showcases his patchwork of influences and contradictions, calling himself “Langston Hughes with a blew fuse and a screw loose”. ‘Radio Song’ uses an ironically abrasive beat to raise two middle fingers to commercial pressures on the industry and ‘Lie4‘ outlines just why Danny is enjoying himself so much he doesn’t care about those commercial pressures. Then you’ve got ‘I Will’, which is just three minutes and sixteen seconds of Danny rapping about eating pussy. It’s all part of the journey.
I could describe every track on the album, but that would be a pretty tedious write-up and if you want to know what every single track is about, you should probably go and listen to it. The point is, although the songs vary wildly in content and style, they never dip in quality, and this continues through to the second half of the album, where tracks like ‘Nosebleeds’ and ‘Party All The Time’ squint into the shadowed corners of the drug-fuelled party lifestyle and paint vivid portraits of its victims. Another duo of tracks particularly worth mentioning is the pairing of ‘Fields’ and ‘Scrap Or Die’, which both revisit the grit and poverty of Detroit with the honesty and originality that, by this point in the album, you expect from Danny Brown. ‘Fields’ takes the city’s abandoned buildings and derelict scraps of land as its central image, and links them with the human abandonments that happen in and amongst them. ‘Scrap Or Die’ follows it, and has to be the first rap song about the least glamorous crime possible, stealing copper wire from disused buildings. The reference to Jeezy’s ‘Trap Or Die’ only deepens the contrast between Danny and the rest of the rap world, as a Detroit dude rapping about nicking aluminium siding is about as far away from the big-budget, Benzes-and-bricks story as it’s possible to be. It’s obvious which narrative rings truer though, and cleverly, just as this track is literally about making profit by taking parts of your surroundings, Danny shows how he has created his art by taking images, in all their run-down glory, directly from his experiences and from the city that made him.
The album finishes with ‘30’, which uses a cacophonous instrumental that squashes together real instruments with digital keys, out-of-sync brass with off-kilter drums in a horrendous mish-mash that, somehow, manages to stay powerful and perfectly judged as a finale to this album. Danny’s delivery on this track is the best part of the whole thing, as the passion, pride, resentment and pain all seem to spill out of him at once while he looks back on his journey, revisits the obstacles he has overcome and even envisions his own death. It’s a haunting track that will make an impression on anyone who really listens to it.
So, there it is. ‘XXX’ has laughs, tears, social commentary, grit, glamour, intelligence and even a bit of cunnilingus thrown in for good measure. What more could you ask for in a rap album? If you haven’t bought it already, then go and buy it. Then go and buy ‘Old’, out today. Danny Brown deserves your money.
10/10
