A SCENE IN RETROSPECT: Danny Brown – “XXX”

‘XXX, and by extension Danny Brown, was momentous, reviewing very well and captivating my generation of college kids that were (or wished they were) draped in hedonism and sex much like Danny’s life was at this time.‘

-David Rodriguez

Release date: August 15, 2011 | Fool’s Gold | Facebook | Instagram

Even from outside of the whole hip hop sphere, Danny Brown has become somewhat of a household name – to the point where even I, who’s maybe heard 15 rap albums in my life, knows enough about Brown to appreciate his artistry. XXX is one of his most beloved projects, equal parts hilarious and harrowing. Let’s see what our resident hip hop heads have to say about this one.

Hearing XXX for the first time opened my eyes to the brilliance of Danny Brown. At first, I was drawn to his sense of humor. “Pac Blood” still has one of my favorite refrains in hip hop: ‘Rhymes that will make the pope want to get his dick sucked/had a virgin Mary doin’ lines in the pickup/make Sarah Palin deep throat ‘til she hiccup’ is the exact kind of brazen and ridiculous shit I wanted to hear when I was in my mid 20s. Bro talked shit about religion and one of the dumbest republicans in history (like, gotta be in the top 5). As I was still holding on to my teenage angst against organized religion and politics (still am, but it was rawer then), this shit hit my brain with all of the energy I could have hoped for from a punk album.

While Brown maintains a consistent sense of humor to this day, what I didn’t see coming was how the more serious lyrics on XXX would resonate over the years. In fact, XXX was Brown’s ‘I’m turning 30’ album. He is 4 years older than me, but for most of my life, I’ve identified with folks a little older than me more than kids my age. On the other hand, younger Danny Brown was easily 4-5 years less mature than his age. Booze, drugs, and partying defined a few years of my 20s, and those more serious lyrics were as self-aware of the potential destruction as I was.

I never had it as bad as Brown, either my life or substance abuse issues, though I will admit to using booze and drugs as a means to deal with undiagnosed depression and ADHD. So, when he was blending his audacious sense of humor with an awareness of his own mental health and substance abuse, I started to absorb it over the years. I would play the funnier tracks for my friends to introduce them to Brown, but I kept coming back to XXX, even after I had listened to the amusing tracks dozens of times. If he was only funny, I would have given up after a few listens. He had broken my novelty barrier; I was a full-fledged fan.

These moments are sold through Brown’s expressiveness. Not only does he have lyrics that are like a blend of MF DOOM, Method Man, and Andrew Dice Clay, his delivery is even more varied; his more serious, emotional tracks delivered in a lower register, letting his rhyme instincts shine on their own with excellent storytelling and his higher, nasally register while he is saying the most audacious shit with gnarly emphasis like when he says, ‘temple’ on “Monopoly”. It is like an angry, pencil breaking period on life itself.

Meanwhile, the beats bang. There are serious moments here, but overall, this mixtape is fun as hell. “Blunt After Blunt” is as bare bones and bass heavy as beats get, ready to fuck up the concrete from how hard the trunk rattles while “DNA’ sees Brown chameleon into a 2000s soulful boom bap. Then tracks like “Bassline” predict Brown’s forward-thinking musicality, with one of the weirder hip hop beats I can think of.

Of course, after a mixtape as diverse and wild as XXX, I have continued to follow Danny Brown. He remains one of my favorite guest MCs. Whenever he pops on a track, it is immediately recognizable and one of the standout verses on whichever track he contributes to. His experimentation has never ceased, either. Quaranta, Scaring The Hoes (with JPEGMAFIA), and Stardust have all landed on my personal AOTY lists, and each new album has felt like I was growing with Brown, shedding party habits, being more open and honest about my life, experimenting with dance music and hyperpop, there are some valuable parallels to Brown’s output and my life. So, XXX remains one of my favorite mixtapes and hip-hop projects; few albums have stuck with me this long.

It took me a minute to first get into Danny Brown; he just wasn’t one of the first people on my radar despite having a number of friends who were big fans of his. When I eventually expanded my interests and started listening to more and more rappers, he rose up whatever rudimentary list of favorites I had quickly, and XXX was one of the big reasons why. It’s everything I love about rap and music in general: a confrontational, and introspective reflection that can just as thoroughly entertain you with hits as its moments of misery.

Danny’s bangers have always had a one-of-one quality to them; there’s really no one that can do his lane as well as him, and XXX has some of his best right from the start. The morbidity of Danny listing as many celebrities that OD’d as he can come up with on “Die Like a Rockstar” is matched perfectly by its enjoyability. I’ll always love the choice to follow up the very tongue-in-cheek “Radio Song” with “Lie4” – a song that could very easily have gone off on the radio. “Lie4” is pretty comfortably my favorite track on XXX. I love the beat, and it’s one of the best displays of Danny’s aforementioned unique hitmaking style in his career.

Both tracks featuring other members of Bruiser Brigade are excellent. I’m probably a bit partial to “Bruiser Brigade”, Danny is so fucking funny on it; the constant mentions of the shittiest beers possible over the booming bass always gets me. XXX doesn’t have my favorite production on a Danny project, it’s part of why Atrocity Exhibition is my project of choice, but it’s got a lot of good beats. “Monopoly” has a great beat by Quelle (Chris), it’s got a killer ’80s techy vibe going on, and some of Danny’s better rapping on the tape to boot. I love the blend of trippy on the instrumental side of “I Will” and Danny’s just completely over the top incredible horniness to complement it – it’s a unique blend, and he delivers it perfectly.

It’s not just the energetic moments though, the more reserved tracks really let Danny’s lyricism shine. He paints such a desolate picture on “Scrap or Die”, you really feel the desperation come through in every word. Pair it with “Fields” and you really get a view of the barren wasteland that Danny views his home of Detroit as being. Some of the shorter tracks are lyrical gems as well, mainly the drug-addled “Nosebleeds” and its tale of a strung-out cocaine addict. The lower and darker moments work much better for me than they do on Old. I find them to be much more open and personal than something like “Float On”, which is funny because five years later a Danny Brown–Charli XCX collaboration would have worked tremendously, but not in 2013.

XXX is also a fascinating project, as many of the ideas here got reused later for some of Danny’s later albums. Both Atrocity Exhibition and Old would continue detailing Danny’s self-destructive addictive nature, with Old also continuing the split conceptual format. It’d also bring back “Blunt After Blunt” for the more electric “Smokin’ and Drinkin’”. “XXX” would also basically get remade into “Downward Spiral” a few years later. Always a big fan of some of my favorites bringing back ideas and keeping themes over their careers, it’s fun to see what parts of their own work an artist personally likes going back to.

For me, Atrocity Exhibition will almost certainly always be my favorite Danny project, but XXX is a pretty comfortable second, and for a lot of the same reasons. I love the confrontational and challenging nature of both projects; they can both be very tough to listen to at times, but the craftsmanship is so strong you can’t make yourself stop. I’ll likely continue to be partial towards the XXX–Old-Atrocity run of his career and view it as his highpoint, but I’m glad he’s moved past it. The recent career shift towards being the patron saint of digicore on Stardust was not exactly my favorite career move, but if it’s what he wants to do to live a happier and healthier life, then so be it.

CHECK. My fervent appreciation for Danny Brown’s XXX that makes me come back to it regularly is twofold.

The original release was in August of 2011 as a mixtape under Fool’s Gold Records. It dropped at a pivotal time, when the internet mixtape was starting to really flourish below the mainstream. DatPiff.com, LiveMixtapes.com, these are sites that real heads were intimately familiar with, downloading the latest trunk-thumpers from bigger names like Waka Flocka Flame, Juicy J, and Lil B in addition to smaller ones who had yet to blow up like Smoke DZA, Flatbush ZOMBIES, and way more. Honestly, my memory’s a little hazy on much of the smaller details, but some stuff is unforgettable. XXX is absolutely one of them.

Personally, this tape came at a time when I was recovering from a big hip-hop drought after becoming very disillusioned with the mainstream rap of the late 2000s and not finding much in there for me. I found it lacked substance, a bit of an ignorant take on my part, not to mention blanketed most of rap in a generalization that it didn’t earn and never has. The likes of Odd Future, aforementioned BasedGod, Das Racist and much of the Mishka/Greedhead label teams, and of course Danny Brown really got me back into rap.

XXX, and by extension Danny Brown, was momentous, reviewing very well and captivating my generation of college kids that were (or wished they were) draped in hedonism and sex much like Danny’s life was at this time. I can’t imagine it’s a good place for Danny to think back on beyond the fact that it’s no longer his life and he’s all the better for it, or maybe that it was a necessary step in order to get to where he is now. I’m sure he’s spoken on this many times in detail, but I lack the exacts, this is purely speculation which isn’t my favorite thing to do.

It’s funny that XXX was one of the many things that got me more into rap again after feeling disconnected from it because the life Danny lives and portrays – but not endorses, that’s a very important distinction – on this tape (and later as an officially released album) is not one I’m even cursorily familiar with on a personal level. I’ve never done a drug, my body count is in the single digits, and while I’ve been poor and struggled much of my life, I’ve never been impoverished enough to resort to the dangerous and/or illegal hustles we hear about so often in rap. XXX included.

So then why? Well, while I was far from a prude at that time, XXX was still shocking. Danny says so much wild shit on XXX that you’d be forgiven for immediately thinking it to be edgy and that’s it. The dread sets in when you realize that he’s dead fucking serious with everything he’s saying on here. Even the first song, the title track, has a few of the most harrowing bars I’ve ever heard in my whole life:

‘The way a n***a goin’, might go out like Sam Cooke
Or locked up, callin’ home for money on my books
‘Cause if this shit don’t work, n**a, I failed at life
Turning to these drugs, now these drugs turned my life
And it’s the downward spiral, got me suicidal
But too scared to do it, so these pills’ll be the rifle
Surpassing all my idols, took the wrong turn
But can’t go back now, so let that blunt burn’

In the same song, Danny dazzles by saying he’s ‘colder than the grits they fed slaves’ and making a Masta Ace reference (here’s hoping I can convince Dom to let us do a Sittin’ on Chrome ASIR at some point). “Die Like a Rockstar” drives the specter of death home even further as he spends several lines comparing his life to other celebrities that made good on the song’s title like Chris Farley, Heath Ledger, Jimi Hendrix, all the hits. It’s during this and tons of other moments on XXX that you feel like you’re listening to a dead man rapping.

When written out like this, it’s hardly something that sounds fun or entertaining, and there’s certainly something to be said about how our media sensationalizes and monetizes people’s trauma, especially those of color and otherwise marginalized. To me, I think it was sobering. Even when Danny is being genuinely funny (‘Rhymes that’ll make the Pope wanna get his dick sucked/Have Virgin Mary doing lines in the pickup’; ‘Sent ya bitch a dick pic and now she need glasses’; ‘Fuck a pregnant bitch, she saved money on her (g)abortion’), there’s this undercurrent of corruption that his mind seems to tap into to make rhymes like that. “Pac Blood” is a great example where there’s a lot of vivid descriptions of the life we know upended by Danny and how he’s able to build any world he wants with his mind and words, written in Tupac blood it’s so real.

I’ve spent all my time so far talking about the lyrics and tone of XXX because they are without a doubt the star of the show, but I can’t overlook the production on here. It’s a 2010s who’s who list of producers on this motherfucker like brandUn DeShay, Paul White, and Skywlkr all laying down weirdo shit like the overloaded vibey beat on “Blunt After Blunt”, the sparse and flirty beat for eater anthem “I Will”, or the horn-heavy slow-mo cardiac crash of “30”. There’s samples, experimental shit, conventional rhythms, it literally doesn’t matter, Danny’s skating on that shit with ease, something he’s only outdone himself on over the years.

XXX is just one of the most violently in-your-face, visceral projects I’ve ever heard. I can’t truthfully say I’ve heard many others as or more nasty and affecting as it in the 15 years since except other Danny Brown albums (Old and Atrocity Exhibition up the ante a few times as he further spirals and reflects before starting his healing journey). It’s not only totally emblematic of the era it was released in artistically and culturally, but it was and is a project I won’t forget because of the grip it had on me since first listen 15 years ago. It’s still in many ways my favorite Danny Brown project even if he’s objectively (as much as possible) surpassed a few times since.

The final track on XXX is another unsettling bookend to Danny’s journey, but it also contains almost prophetic lines that age better the longer he presses on and grabs life by throat instead of the other way around:

‘Came a long way from extension cords in the window
Borrow neighbor’s power just to plug up the Nintendo
Where the oven’s never closed and the stove’s never off
Every winter so cold, n****s sleepin’ wearing scarf
But I always tell myself that it’s gon’ get better
You know who you is? You the greatest rapper ever’

After a long and fruitful career with zero misses, exponential experimentation, putting other artists on, and negative fucks given the whole time, it’s impossible to disagree.