Speaking to an audience in Glasgow during a Red Bull Music Academy lecture in 2015, Danny Brown attempted to describe Atrocity Exhibition, his then forthcoming album. “I’m just trying to push myself as far and make rap as progressive as possible,” Brown explained. “So maybe like, I’m on some Trent Reznor shit with this one, you know what I’m saying?” Atrocity Exhibition made good on this, employing lumbering post-punk rhythms, industrial textures, and obscure musique concrète samples in service of Brown’s dystopic vision. Of course, Brown didn’t work alone; the English beatmaker Paul White produced the bulk of the album. The pair have a long history of pushing boundaries together. White has contributed to every Brown album since 2011’s XXX, and with Atrocity Exhibition, it felt like they had finally managed to tear down whatever barriers remained between hip-hop and their wide-ranging influences.
A victory lap of sorts, the Accelerator 12'' feels even more uncompromising. Take the title track, wherein White pummels the listener with disorderly polyrhythms and driving intensity. Included here in the barrage of sounds are a tangle of bongos that clop like hooves at a horse track; a buzzing, prog-rock guitar run; a rolling, rubberband bassline; and a psychedelic, reverb-soaked guitar solo. If that sounds like an emcee’s worst nightmare, you wouldn’t know it from Brown’s nimble rapping. He manages to effortlessly surf the track’s competing drum lines. “Rappers rap about it/But never really live it/I never glorify it/I tell it how it is,” he yelps in his signature squeaky register, neatly summing up his documentarian appeal. Of course, Brown can’t help but see the sonic chaos around him as a metaphor for a mind on drugs, half-singing, “Walking light the ground is so shaky/Losing sight, ’cause things is so hazy.” The song’s video features a man chasing his escaped, anthropomorphic brain through the streets of London, which feels about right.
The B-side, “Lion’s Den,” takes a slightly different tack—while it’s plenty unorthodox, it slows things down to an even keel. The song is built around a loop of a yé-yé singer set atop a plaintive pan flute melody; instead of a hi-hat, the steady boom-bap beat lands on a tambourine hit. Brown knows a thing or two about juxtaposition and here he delivers on the promise he makes in “Accelerator,” weaving a tale of street life and addiction that’s anything but glamorous. Brown details days spent hustling “just to get up out the gutter,” admits to “serving out our momma’s house” and finally concedes, “the pain never ends.” Still, the song’s ultimate message is one of defiance in the face of hopelessness: “We gotta break the cycle, a future for our kids/You see it half empty, I see it half full.”
White’s audaciousness on Accelerator is commendable, though the single suffers a bit for its maximalism. As bold as Atrocity Exhibition was, it also felt refined, with the record’s sharpest edges counterbalanced by moments of restraint. Accelerator throws that moderation out the window, resulting in two songs that feel unnecessarily cluttered; in particular, the vocal loop that runs throughout “Lion’s Den” distracts from Brown’s rapping, holding back what’s very nearly a great song. That said, both of these tracks do seem to be abrasive by design—like White is intentionally pitching curveballs at Brown, just to see if he can hit them. To that end, Accelerator also feels like a dare to any other emcees who think they could tackle these beats. It seems unlikely that very many will try.
