Danny Brown's XXX was a concept album about desperation; "If this shit don't work, nigga, I failed at life!" he wailed on the opening song. Old is a concept album about existential confusion. Danny Brown has not failed at life—he's independently successful, with a fervent fan base both inside and out of rap. Now he's got to sort out how to best continue living. It might not be as dramatic a subject as flaming out, but it's more relatable to most of us, and it's maybe no accident that it resulted in the best and most resonant album of Brown's career.
In preparing critics and fans, Brown went to great lengths to warn us not to expect another XXX—"If people are just looking for dick-sucking jokes, there isn't too many of them," he said back in January. "I listened to Old every day and thought, ‘I need to make this more entertaining," he told Pitchfork later. When I ran into him at SXSW and introduced myself, he gave me a quizzical smile: "I'm challenging ya'll with the next one," he joked, looking slightly uneasy. The irony of Old, of course, is that Danny Brown's version of a sober, measured, mature album still features plenty of lines about snorting crushed pills, throwing up in hotel sinks, and smoking so much kush you feel yourself falling off of the earth. Some things haven't changed.
The album is divided into a "Side A" and a "Side B," an act of aesthetic devotion that signals Danny Brown's unusual investment in the arcana of music fandom. Last year, he famously told a bewildered A$AP Rocky that one of his heroes was Arthur Lee before lecturing him on the merits of Forever Changes. The structure here suggests two LP sides, neatly divided, but one of the best things about Old is how mixed up it is—Brown's past, his present, his deranged side, his reflective side, his party songs and his nightmares. "Problems in my past haunt my future and the present," he moans on "Clean Up". The album is 19 songs, ranging across so much emotional terrain that it almost needs to be tackled in stretches.
Side A contains the heaviest, most harrowing material, but the demons he exorcises there don't stay put. Bad memories pop up everywhere on Old, including the louder, more festival-ready second half. The album's structure pokes at the notion of forward motion: At the end of the first track, an unrelentingly ugly crack-sale reminiscence taking place in an abandoned house in Detroit, A-Trak scratches in a hook from "New Era", a song off of Brown's 2010 release The Hybrid. An incident Brown alluded to on XXX's "Fields"—"mommy gave me food stamps, told me buy some Wonderbread/ On the the way, these niggas jumped me, left with knots in my head"—gets expanded to song-length on "Wonderbread" and then referenced again at the end of the album. The cumulative message is layered: 1) Stop asking for the old Danny Brown, because I've been working double-time trying to escape him, and 2) Stop asking for the old Danny Brown, because he's obviously still here.
There are multiple "old Danny Browns," as well: There's the kid from "Torture", whose mind "ticked off, desensitized to a lot of things" after watching "unk beatin on my auntie" and a fiend "damn near burn his top lip off." There's the crack-dealer, who Brown is similarly eager to dispense with: "This the last time I'mma tell it/ Wanna hear it? Here it go," he says on "Side B," before launching into the details of his old trade. And there's the drug abuser, whom he catalogs unsparingly on "Clean Up", ignoring text messages from his daughter while he gets high in a hotel room.
This is a complicated narrative to keep running but Brown is equal to the task. In his berserk originality, writerly flair, emotional impact, and old-fashioned craft, Danny Brown belongs in any conversation about the best rappers working, and he's at the top of his game here. His rapping is abrasive and visceral, but it's also musical, a quality he doesn't get much credit for because of his vocal tone. Listen to the way he rolls the word sounds "fucked up" and "knuckles" on "Dubstep" off of a perfect little woodpecker-stutter of percussion. Or his subdued performance on "Lonely" featuring a fluid, airy beat by Paul White built from two Morice Benin samples.
The production is richly textured, unlikely, and surprising, solidifying Brown's left-field taste. He bends your ear back rapping over conventionally gritty hip-hop tracks from Oh No and Paul White and tackles a range of things that most rappers would run from, including the Rustie-produced electro-squelch "Way Up Here", a cluttered, frantic beat that feels expressly designed to trip rappers up. Ab-Soul and Brown muscle the octopus-armed thing to the ground. He barks over airhorn-shrill party anthems like "Dip"and "Handstand" and broods conversationally on the Charli XCX-featuring "Float On". Brown has always made a compelling case for being weird, but he's never sounded this realized or confident in his weirdness before.
"Float On", which closes the album, is an "Elevators"-like lope, complete with woodblock knock, that finds Brown clearing away the static and bearing down on the only thing he's certain about: "Nothing else matter except my next rhyme," he murmurs. Remembering a time when he had "music in my heart, but my thoughts wouldn't listen," he prays to get old so that he can "see my influence on this genre of music." It's the humblest and most powerful wish I've heard on a record all year.
