Danny Brown's clean slate
Age has always been embedded into the narrative of Danny Brown's music. He was a late bloomer in the industry who once titled an album Old. These days, he's relishing his adulthood, welcoming the accumulated wisdom it brings and hoping to impart that wisdom on younger artists who might listen. His new album, Quaranta, commemorating the rapper turning 40 years old, opens imitating a critique from his public: "N**** you 40, still doing this s***?" Not only is he still doing it, he's as refined at his craft as ever — with sharp perspective after surviving formidable obstacles.
Quaranta chronicles Brown's journey starting from scratch after substance abuse wrecked his life. He worried it might be his last album. "I was really just thinking about my mortality a lot," he says on a call with NPR. "I was in a dark place." The album is pensive and desolate. He's reckoning with all that he's lost, and, after finally going sober, figuring out how to stay joyful while remaining present. "I had a lot of fun, don't get me wrong," he admits. "But when is the party going to be over? You can't be 40-years-old and still in the club. The party don't have to stop, but the party is gonna stop you."
A former drug dealer, Brown's work on the mixtape circuit in the late 2000s led to a G-Unitstarted his transition into an internet-rap mainstay. In 2011, as a 30-year-old feeling like his window was closing, he signed with the A-Trak label Fool's Gold and released his breakthrough project , a freewheeling mixtape that revealed an eccentric personality. He traded traditional braids for a swooping, unwieldy haircut that made him look like an anime character, and curled his lips to reveal a snaggle-toothed smile. He introduced one of the most elastic voices in all of hip-hop, effortlessly shifting between a high-pitched shriek, a menacing growl and a deadpan flow at a bar's notice. There are of Brown's laugh, a charming, cartoonish cackle that punctuated playful, mischievous rhymes. But his uniqueness was more than aesthetics: He oscillated between rapping about Detroit poverty, cunnilingus and, perhaps most often, recreational drug use and its effects.
