Danny Brown Bounces Back

For the moment, Danny Brown presents it as a physical problem, not an existential one. “These pants don’t bend,” the lanky rapper says, folding himself into right angles on the bright-purple paper backdrop he’s posing against. The shock of color breaks up the otherwise muted interior of this house, about 15 miles southwest of downtown Austin, which belongs to the photographer Pooneh Ghana. He and Ghana have shot together before, and Danny—currently splayed on the floor, balancing Ghana’s tiny dog on his mucus-green trenchcoat—is clearly comfortable with her; today, he shows up with a bag of clothes and no publicist or manager. Ghana’s assistant, a polite man in a crewneck sweatshirt advertising the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival, unfurls a spiderlike lighting apparatus. Danny makes minute adjustments to the position of his jaw, his line of sight, the angle of his upturned toes.

In a couple of days, Danny will release Quaranta, his sixth studio album and his first solo work in more than four years. As its title—“forty” in Italian—suggests, it’s the spiritual successor to XXX, the 2011 album that marked his commercial breakthrough. Alternately pronounced “triple-X” and “thirty,” that record was animated by an open, gnawing desperation. “If this shit don’t work,” Danny raps on its martial opening track—this shit being his plan to make a career out of music—“I failed at life.” By every measure, it did work. Despite XXX articulating in roughly equal measures a profound death drive, a ravenous desire to eat pussy, and a propensity for stripping copper wire from the walls of abandoned homes, it was broadly acclaimed by fans deep in the underground-rap weeds and trend-conscious omnivores. Its follow-up, 2013’s Old, became an indie rap blockbuster, its shrewd construction—one block of raucous rave songs followed by another that documented a harrowing comedown—both critiquing and accommodating his newfound stardom.

The new LP is a gut check about the progress he has and hasn’t made. At times, Danny is self-deprecating about the parallels between XXX and Quaranta. But even in doing so, he captures the restlessness and sorrow at the heart of the new work. “XXX was me crying about how I wanted to be a rapper, time running out, this and that,” he will later tell me over wings at a sleepy sports bar. “Now, ten years later, I am a rapper—and crying about being a rapper.” Danny is sober now, but was very much not during Quaranta’s creation; the album captures unnerving emotional lows, as on its opening track, where he abandons his near-peerless, elastic technique to rap, slowly and plainly, about emptiness. The “show must go on,” he drones at one point, the life he dreamed of on XXX finally here—but revealed to be an albatross. “Bought a ticket, take the ride.”

Austin has provided Danny with something like normalcy. As Ghana fiddles with lenses and he mulls changing into something he calls “the slime suit,” Danny and I commiserate about new rap releases and the low-five-figure vet bills our respective chihuahua mixes have recently incurred. For all the torment that Quaranta lays bare—and for the chaos in which it was created—at the moment things are peaceful. Over the next several hours, the four of us will coax a lazy flock of ducks to crowd around Danny at the edge of a pond, amble through a carwash that’s all but abandoned, and sign waivers to enter an indoor trampoline park that are longer than any contract I’ve been shown by a major label artist mummified in red tape. There are no prying fans and certainly no cameras in his face—in fact, across all of our time together, the star barely checks his phone. Even during release week, it’s as if the outside world is an abstract notion.

The first time Danny Brown’s pants became an issue was about a decade and a half ago. Since he was a child on Detroit’s east side, he’d been fixated on becoming a rapper; the legend goes that the Dr. Seuss books his teenage parents read him led him to speak in rhyme as soon as he could talk. Shortly after XXX blew up, he told Complex that when he began selling weed, he figured that at the very least it was something he could write songs about.

He was half right. In 2006, Danny was sentenced to an eight-month stint for violating his probation. There are mythic stories about rappers corralling their creative energy while behind bars: Pac flying straight from prison in upstate New York to the Death Row studios near Los Angeles, Gucci Mane reemerging with “First Day Out” or Boosie singing the blues in the back of a chauffeured SUV, or the late Drakeo the Ruler—one of Danny’s favorite contemporary MCs—showing up to record the night of his release with a trash bag full of loose-leaf paper. But when Danny was released, he says, he was soon crestfallen. “I cried in the studio,” he tells me of the sessions where he hoped to begin his own All Eyez On Me. “Shit wasn’t as dope as I thought it was when I wrote it in jail.” He tried to salvage songs in the moment, spot-editing two or four bars at a time. “I couldn’t do it,” he says.

Finding a voice of his own had already been a sporadic process. In the mid-2000s, Danny had begun making trips to New York, meeting with A&Rs and recording demos in studios operated by major labels. He was a glutton for eccentric hip-hop from around the world—he recalls scheduling one visit to the city around the release of Showtime, the 2004 album by the early grime crossover star Dizzee Rascal, which he doubted he’d be able to find in Detroit—but felt barred from bringing that energy into these high-pressure sessions. “I still had to go to the studio and make records that would appease them,” he says, still disdainful. “It wasn’t even shit that I was into—it was just the shit that I thought I had to do to get a record deal.” Then he adds a curious note: “And I wasn’t good at that yet.”

At one point during my time in Texas, Danny and I have a discussion about a popular rapper I’ll leave nameless, who in recent years, he and I agree, has belatedly come to earn the reputation as a genre-bending auteur that he was handed several albums earlier. He “finally grew into what he was supposed to be,” Danny says. He goes on: “We’re hearing these kids so young, when they’re still in the artist development stage, their demo phases—[a time] when I was in my basement rapping. Only now do they get fully fleshed out. Now it’s something.”

It scans as a credible reading of the industry because Danny is clear-eyed about both the myopia he faced from label employees and the way that narrowmindedness ultimately forced him to become the type of artist whose album release might inspire someone like him to take a 15-hour Greyhound ride just to buy a CD. “New York motherfuckers”—his term for industry types—“would call back around to Detroit to see what people thought of me there,” he remembers. “And people would be like, ‘I never heard of Danny Brown.’ Because I’d never made a name for myself.” So when meetings with labels including Roc-A-Fella came to seem like obvious dead ends, he went back home and began tinkering with a style that felt truer to his interests. “That’s when the Dilla stuff started popping off,” he says, referring to the glitchy, experimental songs inspired by the late Detroit producer’s unconventional rhythms and chopping techniques, “and that’s what I was into at the time.” He played clubs, lounges, and open mics until his evil-Animaniac voice became inescapable in the city’s rap circles. “It felt like I was a little celebrity,” he remembers.

The culmination of that period was the release of 2010’s The Hybrid—nominally Danny’s debut album, but really—as he laments is no longer the natural course of things today—the product of a years-long process of experimentation and editing. It’s a remarkable record. Simply take “Greatest Rapper Ever,” a madcap song with an unforgettable opening couplet (“My homie a magician with the Tec/Make the chain disappear and reappear on his neck”) that darts in a half-dozen different directions to include taunts about someone dressing like Young Dro, memories of serving crack to a pregnant woman who wails about unseen parasites crawling over her skin, taking uppers while spinning Dilla’s Donuts, and “writing 16s like internet child predators.” At one point he clarifies, defiantly, that he did not sign to Roc-A-Fella. But it’s the type of song so brimming with idiosyncracy and charisma as to suggest a potential crossover star with no need to conform or compromise.

Which brings us back to Danny Brown’s pants. Around the time of The Hybrid’s release, he forged a close working relationship with Tony Yayo, the arch-Queens shit talker and glue guy in G-Unit. This very nearly led to Danny’s signing with the imprint 50 Cent had been given under Aftermath and Interscope. But 50 had a specific idea of how Danny should present himself. “It was pretty much a done deal, if I just would’ve played by the rules,” he says. “But the first New York stint made me not want to play by the rules.” The rules, per 50, were that he change his name to Dirty Brown; that he rap exclusively about “broke shit,” the model being Danny’s stark song “Fruit Cocktail”; and that he trade the skinny jeans he’d taken to wearing for the appearance of a “dirty hood struggle rapper with nappy braids.”

Danny, of course, demurred. “Fruit Cocktail” was crucial to the mixtape that included it, Detroit State of Mind 4, as songs like it would be to The Hybrid, XXX, and every album that followed. They rounded out his experience and identity. To reduce his output to songs in that vein would not only turn him two-dimensional, but dull the effect of each individual track. Still, the nth false start in his career must have been frustrating, I say. “Hell no!” he cackles. “I was cracking! In Detroit and on the internet, with the blog world and shit. I was already cracking.” He laughs again and looks out the window of our moving car at the endless freeway.

After the success of XXX and Old, Danny bought a large house in Farmington, 20 miles north of downtown Detroit. It could have been a marker of stability, but became instead a source of (and venue for) constant, corrosive doubt. “I didn’t appreciate it,” he says today. He describes that stint in Farmington as a protracted stress dream: “‘This shit could all go away soon,’ you know what I’m saying? That anxiety—impending doom. I wasn’t basking in the moment, feeling happy, feeling blessed.” He says that age has given him some of the perspective needed to see major life changes in their proper contexts, to know more intuitively which pieces are static and which are fluid. Then he concedes that the shift in thinking is not entirely a matter of wisdom: “Drugs make you paranoid.”

Seven years ago, shortly after he purchased that home and while he was preparing for the release of the claustrophobic but genre-hopping Atrocity Exhibition, I profiled Danny for another magazine. This was in the open-air restaurant on the roof of a Hollywood hotel. It would be tempting to overread that interview—to look, in light of his openness about substance abuse, for signs of agitation or paranoia—but the truth is he was expansive about his process and about the other artists he loved, at one point dissecting the opening verse from Cam’ron’s 2000 album S.D.E.. He did say, though, when I asked him about how Detroit had or hadn’t changed, that he felt too isolated to have a good read on it. “For the last five years,” he said, “I couldn't tell you what's really going on.”

Atrocity Exhibition is a bold, engrossing record, but charted much lower than Old. (It also marked a move from Fool’s Gold, the label that had issued XXX and Old, to the dance-oriented Warp, through which Danny continues to release music.) He got to work on a new record, this time under the supervision of Q-Tip, a big deal because, well, it was fucking Q-Tip, but also because A Tribe Called Quest is Danny’s father’s favorite group, and because his own relationship with them dated back more than a decade: When he was too broke to afford studio time, Ali Shaheed Muhammad secured him a Macbook on which he recorded innumerable demos.

But impatience crept in. The process of writing, recording, and re-recording songs for what would become 2019’s uknowhatimsayin¿ “was way too long,” he says. “I was frustrated at the end.” Q-Tip is a well-known perfectionist; rumors about the extent (and quality) of his vaulted material with rap’s iconic figures are, at this point, legendary. Danny was not in a place where he could be understanding about that slow-burn approach. “At the time I was going through so much, I was like, ‘We need to get this out,’” he admits. “Now, looking back on it, I wish I did have time to let the process play out, to give him the patience that he needed, to make the album that he wanted. But we pretty much just took the album. [away from Tip.] Those were the only songs that he felt comfortable with. He still wanted to keep going, man. I was like, ‘No, man, I’m done.’”

Included in the things he was going through at that time: a breakup that made the Farmington house too depressing to inhabit. “I didn’t want to live in that big-ass house by myself,” he says. So he moved to the top of the Westin hotel in downtown Detroit—“A big-ass penthouse, some Frasier-type shit”—on a floor that was otherwise occupied by Pistons, Red Wings, and Lions. “I could see the view of Canada,” he says, and he could order room service and housekeeping 24 hours a day. It collapsed the hour-plus commute to his studio into a walk around the corner. It also accelerated his drinking and substance use. When Covid came, Danny was suddenly as isolated as he’d been when he was all alone in Farmington. Guests weren’t allowed up to his floor; all there was to do was get drunk at the studio or stew in his home. “I was fucked up,” he says. “I was depressed. I was lonely. I started making Quaranta because I had nothing else to do.”

From the time XXX became a minor phenomenon, the things that would normally make someone like Danny Brown divisive—his eccentric manner of dressing, the voice he gleefully pushes to nasal extremes—were undergirded by truly unassailable chops. He’s a rapper’s rapper, a point of near consensus among MCs across generations, stylistic schools, and regions. The praise extends to the very clothing sensibility that gave 50 Cent pause (the Los Angeles underground legend Blu tells me, “I would say Danny can dress as well as he can rap. I remember, back in the day, him pulling all the honeys in L.A. anytime he wore that pink Gucci sweater”) and to his knack for longform storytelling. “There’s nobody as unique as Danny when it comes to formulating an album from beginning to end,” says Bruiser Wolf, a member of Danny’s Bruiser Brigade crew who has himself emerged as a major stylist, sort of an unflappable neo-Suga Free.

But what really astonishes peers is what Danny’s able to do within the confines of a single song. “Amongst the first two Danny songs I heard were ‘New Era’ and ‘Cartier,’” the celebrated New York rapper billy woods recently emailed me, “and although those songs are pretty different from anything on Quaranta, two things haven't changed; Danny's ability to pull you into his world(s), and his voice. I don't mean just the way his voice sounds, although it is that, but the narrative voice, the way he describes things, his perspective… it's all very singular. I think of the first time I heard Boots Riley, the whole presentation was unique. Other rappers had mined some of that same territory but they didn't have his voice.”

Earlier this year, Danny turned in one of 2023’s most showstopping guest verses with his turn on woods’s “Year Zero.” Sprawling across more than two minutes of runtime, Danny offers clipped, confrontationally spare punchlines (he’s “back, like skinny white girls”; you’re “broke, like the ice cream machine”). These are meted out at such a languid pace that the dead air starts to grow sinister; he sounds in total rhythmic control until the very end, when he allows—begs—the pace to quicken, to consume him. The track cuts off prematurely, immediately after he’s uttered the last syllable in the line “I ain't worried 'bout the hate, I just wonder where the love gone.”

It’s an unforgettable verse—except, technically, to Danny. “I was blacked out drunk when I did that,” he says of the recording session that yielded “Year Zero.” “I’m being completely honest with you, I didn’t even know I was on there until it was coming out. I saw my name on the tracklist and didn’t even know what it was. I listened to it like everybody else the first time.”

The move from downtown Detroit to Austin didn’t really put a dent in Danny’s addictions—it concentrated them on one substance. “When I first got down here, even though I quit doing blow and all that shit, it spiked my alcoholism even more,” he says. He and his girlfriend at the time moved into the city’s downtown, which led him to frequently get what he calls “drunk by mistake.” He explains: “I would just leave the house to go to the store and be like, ‘Well, I’ll stop in this bar for a drink.’ Next thing I know I’ve been there for six hours. Now I’m doing blow in the bathroom.”

The dissolution of yet another relationship and a move to his new city’s fringes preceded a month-long stint in rehab this spring. “I didn’t have nothing to base it on; I’d only been to jail,” he says of the trepidation he felt before heading to Pennsylvania to enter the program. “So going to rehab, to me, was like going to jail. I’m just gonna lock myself up?” But the 30 days centered him in an evidently profound way. Danny talks enthusiastically about the effect the spiritual advisor in particular had on him—it triggers for him memories of being in the Filipino church he attended as a child in Detroit—and he encourages musicians to apply for MusiCares grants which, among other initiatives, defray the cost of rehab for touring musicians, substance abuse being something of an occupational hazard.

He’s already had a test case for sober touring in the form of the dates to support Scaring the Hoes, his exuberant joint album with JPEGMAFIA from earlier this year. “Before, I was just thinking about the afterparty,” Danny says of touring in the past, when he was still drinking. “I would be out there, hoping to get the performance done. But now the performances are the most fun part of the day. Like I said,” he begins, referring back to something he’d said earlier about the process of writing and recording post-Pennsylvania, “I’ve fallen back in love with it.”

The trampoline gym is called Altitude, obviously, and it looks like an airplane hangar or a neglected CIA black site. The foam on the walls and support beams, the padding around the trampolines, and the trampoline surfaces themselves are done up in various configurations of purple, orange, and black. A class of seven- or eight-year-old boys practice running up a wall in a faraway corner; a disembodied voice calls the Harper party to the table for pizza. A child runs screaming out of a “Hurricane Simulator.” The only seating I can find near where Danny and Pooneh are jumping and shooting is a bank of those coin-operated massage chairs you find in the middle of the mall. A dozen TVs are all tuned to Jeopardy and ask, “This saint of Jesus' time celebrated on June 24 lived up to the ritual from his name.” (Who is John the Baptist?) “One Week” by the Barenaked Ladies plays, tinnily.

After a half-hour of Danny alternately shooting his limbs in every direction while eight feet in the air and laying on his back in a pool of tarp like primordial ooze, he and I get in a car to drive across town to his house north of the city. On the way, amidst jokes about rappers biting him and riffs on Cannibal Ox, he offers notes for Austin city planners: “I think they should slow down 10 miles [per hour] everywhere,” he says. “You don’t have to be going 65 here. There are schools and kids here.”

There’s a cross over the door of the brick-faced home he shares with his new girlfriend, though nothing like the one above the comically expansive religious school nearby. Inside, NBA Countdown plays for two tiny dogs, including the beleaguered chihuahua mix. A room off the entryway is decorated with, among other things, a life-sized Pitbull cutout; this is where Danny podcasts, works on beats, and reads. One of four monitors offers suggested YouTube videos, including a new episode of Cam’ron and Mase’s It Is What It Is and a clip calling children’s toothpaste a scam.

The production setup, which includes a small stack of hardware, is particularly interesting. “I run a lot of my drums through the four-track,” Danny explains, before noting that he first learned to make beats on the SP-303, and that before he went to jail, he was doing so every day. But when he was released, the beats fell by the wayside—until recently. He clicks through different folders, showing genre exercises that evoke Dilla, Madlib, and more formalist producers from the generation prior. They’re all good; none are exceptional. Then he cues up one that he notes, with some pride, sounds a little like something El-P would do. He’s right: it bounces and groans, always seeming to strain under its own weight, like sludge formed into something vicious.

We talk more about the effect jail had on his life as an artist, eventually returning to the time when he emerged with notebooks full of raps, only to be disappointed by how they sounded in the studio. I ask him if that experience inspired him to throw out what he’d been working on and go in an entirely new direction. He looks flummoxed: of course not. Those songs, he says, were worked on incrementally, improving bit by bit until they became 2008’s Detroit State of Mind 2—the record he says he’s most proud of, precisely because of that painstaking process.

We revisit XXX’s animating ambition—not as a superhuman origin story, but as a complex he finds a little bit embarrassing. “When I came in at 30, I came in bitter,” he says. “Bitter and self-centered. But people didn’t owe me anything.” From there we rappel back down, deeper into his memory: to seeing Kid ‘n Play on TV, to being taken, by his father, to 1984’s Fresh Fest at Detroit’s Cobo Arena. He danced to Whodini’s bass lines; he imitated DMC and Run. We talk about the days before streaming: “My mom would give me 20 bucks every weekend. I’d go to the mall and buy one tape, and if it sucked, I had to just thug it out. Find some joy in it somewhere.” He had to be patient and attentive, he had to study and study and tweak and re-tweak.

A few weeks after our conversations in Texas, Danny plays a small show in Los Angeles, in the Masonic Lodge at the Hollywood Forever cemetery, a venue that is more or less what it sounds like: a small theater-sized space surrounded by a maze of hallways and anterooms bathed in red light. He’s scheduled to go on at 9:00 p.m., which usually suggests a start time close to 10:00. By 8:50, his set is in full swing; at 9:33, he leaves the stage for good, having warned the audience that the encore chants won’t work. It’s crisp, professional, and precise.

By 9:40, he’s on a balcony overlooking the stage, appreciative of the love but ready to draw some hotel blackout curtains. This is after a sprint of domestic dates and some time lingering in London; the flights are catching up to him, and the outside noise—the sales and streaming reports, the fans straining to pass him records that will be flipped immediately on Discogs—is all one din. “I don’t even know what time it is,” he says, rubbing his forehead with the palm of his hands. He smiles at someone who shouts his name, he shakes a few hands. Then he disappears.

Originally Appeared on GQ