Looking at Danny Brown’s first two albums, The Hybrid and XXX, it’s pretty clear he debuted in 2011 as another young, bigheaded rapper hopping on the smoking weed, getting drunk, popping pills, playing women bandwagon. He looks sort of like a homeless dude with Skrillex’s hairstylist and Andre 3000’s wardrobe, and even his high pitched flow throws back to a teenager’s first time experimenting with pot.
Sound completely obnoxious and horrible? He’s not. He’s actually kind of awesome. I definitely don’t do hard drugs; and I really am a young woman with self-respect and a brain. But I’m not embarrassed to admit I am on team Danny Brown. I’m even less embarrassed to admit that on his newest album Old, Brown is slowly but surely looking towards the road to redemption, Eminem with Recovery style, but far earlier in his career and still with far more looking ahead.
Probably the most prominent track of the album is “Clean Up,” where he shows remorse for the life he’s gotten himself into. He confesses to turning into a dead-beat dad, where he’s in “Hotel rooms crushing pills and menus/Daughter sending me messages saying ‘Daddy I miss you’/But in this condition I don’t think she need to see me.” Much of the album reflects on his past. The goofy, mesmerizing, “Wonderbread” is actually a nod at the time he got jumped going to the store to buy bread for his mother when he was a kid in Detroit. The powerful closing track, “Float On,” reinforces these hard times. Tracks like these give you compassion for the artist. Brown proves he’s not just a drug and alcohol fueled robot, but a person with a story who goes through the same struggles of finding himself that we’ve all been through time and time again.
But hey, for all you Danny Brown purists, there’s a lot of his traditional style on Old. There are plenty of party-hard anthems, like “Smokin’ & Drinkin’” and “Kush Coma,” if you’re looking to rage to a few Danny Brown originals. The Schoolboy Q compilation “Dope Fiend Rental” has the lovely, repetitive hook “Open wide, ho!” to recall one of his all-time favorite themes, oral sex. He even portrays a figure of strong femininity for all of us ladies to look up to in “Headstand”: “Hands on the floor and her feet on the wall/And she pop that pussy like she ain’t afraid to fall.” Fearless. Truly fearless.
Rating: B+
