Danny Brown is a Detroit rapper with a strangled yap of a voice that you could politely call "distinctive." Depending on the moment, he either resembles a Doberman whose paw has been stepped on or a cross between Jello Biafra and South Park's Terrence & Philip. For a rapper, choosing an abrasive honk like this as your instrument is an audacious move; it all but demands that you come well-equipped with compelling reasons for your listeners to hang on.
But Danny Brown is an unusually audacious rapper. He proudly rocks skinny jeans that, to hear him tell it, cost him a G-Unit label deal all by themselves, and he has lately settled on the kind of wildly asymmetrical haircut that can invite savage beatings in certain areas. He belongs, in other words, to a proud lineage of mangy underground-rap weirdos. There are many rappers vying to claim this spot, but none of them is as talented or as three-dimensional as Brown, and his latest mixtape, XXX, finds him transforming his quirks and jagged edges into a compelling and immersive universe.
That universe is haunted by drugs, both sold and consumed. XXX's grubby production, laced with trashy electro, evokes a heart-pounding clamminess that will feel instantly familiar to anyone who's weathered a spiky high on cheap stimulants. Brown's voice is uniquely suited to conveying wild-eyed, loose-cannon insanity, and the rising note of panic in it makes every mention of snorting crushed Adderall hurt. To hear him tell it, he is a Hoover for illegal substances; on "Die Like a Rock Star", he catalogs the various undignified ends he expects to meet, invoking Keith Moon, Jimi Hendrix, and others and leering, "Experimented so much it's a miracle I'm livin'."
His penchant for depravity might remind listeners, at least initially, of Odd Future. But Brown's depravity, unlike OF's, comes burdened with real-life stakes; at age 30 (the mixtape's title indicates Brown's age besides suggesting sex and drugs), Brown has lived through some genuinely awful-sounding shit. On "Scrap or Die", he flips the chorus of Jeezy's "Trap or Die" so that it becomes about stripping houses for scrap metal to sell to factories. He takes a perverse joy in grabbing your neck and shoving your face in some vividly unpleasant places: "I done served fiends on they menstrual/ Ain't even had pads, stuff they panties with tissue!" he yelps on "Monopoly". His shock rhymes on XXX are like horrorcore stripped of cartoon fantasy, and they carry the moral weight of experience. On "Pac Blood", he calls his lyrics "shit so personal my mom can't listen to," and you believe him.
If XXX was nothing but debauchery and desperation, it would quickly devolve into an endless slog. Thankfully, Brown is also hilariously funny, an endlessly inventive rapper driven to cook up outrageous variations on standard rap boasts. At one point, he claims to be getting as much pussy as Teen Wolf-era Michael J. Fox; at another, he brags he can "get pussy like loofahs." On "Adderall Admiral", he tells a rapper he is "softer than Flanders' son." In a recent interview with writer Andrew Nosnitsky of Cocaine Blunts, he revealed himself as an omnivorous rap nerd, the kind of guy who went through heavy No Limit and Def Jux phases, and his palpable joy in his craft is infectious. "Words that rhyme together just appear all in my head," he raps on the title track, sounding astonished and grateful. His gleeful love of words not only elevates some pretty heavy subject matter; it also helps distinguish XXX as one of the most compelling indie rap releases in an already strong year.
