That hip-hop is a young man’s game is no secret; and yet soon we’ll have to face a pantheon of all-star rappers as they continue rhyming careers into their 50s, which begs the question: what does a 50-plus-year-old Jay-Z rap about? does he still ply the hustler as a character deep into the stretches of his luxurious middle-age? Lord help us. As hip-hop as a genre ages–itself now in its mid-30s–we’re seeing a changing landscape of content, that might be opening up new breathing spaces for introspection; not to say that young rappers don’t think as deeply, but it is an interesting prospect to think on what rappers in their 30s or even 40s are saying compared to their newer, younger peers. Danny Brown’s first album proper, XXX, pertains to just that kind of generational discrepancy. While he did release a generous amount of music in his 20s, he also spent most of that time evading arrest or in jail before he decided to (more or less) quit his life of hustling and focus on the career he’d always wanted. So fast forward to that age when one is looking fondly back up on the peaks of their 20s and perhaps skeptically and warily down the perceived hill of their 30s; XXX considers the whole purview: the first half tending towards obstreperous party-bangers and the second half like the day after a drug-and-alcohol-filled night when you have to face the realities of your responsibilities, health, future, etc.

Oh, but how reductionist it would be to narrow Danny Brown down to an album of two perspectives mirroring that transition between youth and adulthood; this would hardly convey the spasmodic character that truly wins fans over:

This guy is unquestionably a freak of the highest order. Gap-toothed, frazzled hair, borderline hick-accented, a known penchant for molly and adderall (see: “Adderall Admiral”)–Danny Brown is no less than an odyssey of idiosyncrasy.

Hailing from Detroit, Danny dabbled in ‘the hood life:’ “I used to play with pistols in crackhouses / Skipping school just to fuck bitches on dirty couches / abandoned houses.” In his more introspective moments he thinks back on the relative wasteland that is his home city, a landscape comprised of “house, field, field / field, field, house / abandoned house, field, field,” where he would gut said abandoned houses and sell the scrap metal just to get by (“Scrap or Die”). On “DNA” he contemplates a genetic disposition towards addiction that runs in his family; “Nosebleeds” and “Party All The Time” chronicle the downward spiral of amphetamine addiction in college graduates and dropouts, bleeding in the back of class, leading lifestyles with a trajectory toward prostitution. And these are the almost conversationally-toned songs that back-end the first half of songs that feature grimy production, Brown’s urgent and yappy delivery that can so easily transmute into aggressive and gruff; the disparity of the album’s subject matter mirroring the range in his delivery, timbre.

This is an album where on the second track Danny Brown casually proclaims he wants to “Die Like A Rockstar” over bubbling, soupy synths in between verses over droning production punctuated by cavernous drip-drops, name-dropping Ledger, River Phoenix, Chris Farley, Cobain, Keith Moon, Basquiat. Where on the aggressive smoker’s anthem “Blunt After Blunt” he dourly dismisses the idea that he smokes too much (“and they try to tell me, I get too high / that’s a lie, if so, bitch, I woulda been died”) only to later backtrack in one of his introspective moments and admit he depends on marijuana to curb mental instability (“I ain’t smoke an eighth a day, I might end up a mental patient”).

While to discuss Danny Brown’s ability to tread the precarious balance of party music and introspection that underpin XXX gives us an idea of his artistic intent of being a 30-year-old rapper in 2011, it doesn’t come close to conveying his lyrical dexterity; that he can easily bounce between two distinct pitches of rapping, deftly traverse any kind of beat, whether it be old-school boom-bap or contemporary grimy electronic, these feats really only scratch the surface of an artist who can easily make jokes about being so dope as to make the pope want a blowjob and on the other end of the road wonder if he hasn’t overdone it in his youth, if he hasn’t irremediably frayed his own mind.

Besides all the contemplation of the incommensurable natures of age and the culture of hip-hop, Danny Brown has made a name for himself over the last few years as being one of the few rappers who sounds comfortable and even excels at rhyming over UK grime, and really, just about any electronic production he likes, plying his singular voice over a huge range of production (see this guide for an idea of the massive number of singles and features DB released in 2012 and 2013), all the while still spitting rhymes that “sound so real, thought I wrote it in Pac blood.”

FURTHER LISTENING // VIEWING

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