Released on August 15, 2011,
on Fool’s Gold Records.
The guys in Odd Future may not be the messiahs of the new rap, but the hype that carried them taught us at least one thing: in 2011, we needed a hip-hop that once again combined the excesses of crowd-pleasing rap with the stylistic daring of the underground’s activists. If the California collective can’t fill that void, others are ready to do it. And judging by the reception given to XXX, Danny Brown may well be the best of them.
Now in his thirties, this Detroit rapper, who crossed paths with J Dilla and Black Milk in the past, has the résumé of a rap heavyweight. On top of the customary former-drug-dealer credentials, he has already been courted by Roc-A-Fella and G-Unit – no small thing. But it didn’t work out, for reasons that are easy enough to guess. One look at this scrawny rapper, sporting an improbable shock of hair and missing his front teeth, is enough to see that he is a long way from 50 Cent’s He-Man physique.
So Danny Brown retreated to different territory. For a while, he dabbled in socially conscious rap with The Hybrid, before releasing the now-famous XXX on Fool’s Gold, a title referring both to the rapper’s age and to the sexually explicit nature of his material. And on this exhilarating, psychedelic release – genuine drug music – the rapper lets himself loose. His voice shifts from a shrill, hysterical register to a deeper one, and he raps in just about every conceivable style over deranged beats cooked up by a whole host of producers, trying his hand at British grime (“Lie4,” “Bruiser Brigade”), electronic minimalism (“Detroit 187”), the sci-fi rap of a decade earlier (“Outer Space”), and the cloud rap of Main Attrakionz (“I Will”).
XXX is disjointed, but that suits its central themes: the upside-down life of a Danny Brown wrecked by beer (“Bruiser Brigade”) and drugs (“XXX,” “DNA,” “Blunt After Blunt”); the decadent lives of rock stars (“Die Like A Rockstar”); and women losing themselves in nightclubs (“Nosebleeds,” the superb “Party All The Time”). The rapper tries everything, always displaying the same knack for pairing adventurous sounds with lyrics that are provocatively funny and deliciously outrageous, as on the excellent “Pac Blood”:
Rhymes that would make the pope want to get his dick sucked.
Yeah!
He also turns to satire on “Radio Song,” which takes aim at cookie-cutter rappers. And on “Scrap Or Die,” he returns to social commentary. It goes absolutely all over the place. But wherever Danny goes, right through to the apotheosis of the brilliantly unhinged “30,” it is utterly exhilarating, fresh, and alive. If, after this, there are still undertakers around to tell us that rap is supposedly dead, then all hope is lost…
P.S. The following video is apparently the only one taken from the album. If you happen not to like it, don’t worry. Not a single track on XXX sounds like any of the others.
