SRS TRAX: Danny Brown - "30"

Yeah, I know it came out two months ago, shut up.



RAJ: Danny Brown has been getting lumped in with Odd Future a lot as just another shock rapper, mostly by people who haven't listened to a lot of Danny Brown. It's not that Brown isn't very actively trying to shock people (on "Pac Blood": "Rhymes that'll make the Pope wanna get his dick sucked/Had Virgin Mary doing lines in the pickup"¹), but there's a purpose to his shocks that goes beyond, say, Tyler the Creator's motivation of scaring old people². Much of Brown's album XXX is a harrowing personal story about past poverty and present addiction - some anarchic, boundary-breaking glee makes for a nice counterpoint to the dour stuff. It's the reason why Trainspotting is a better movie than Requiem for a Dream - there's a human vitality (a lust for life?) that's always present instead of solely a parade of torment and degradation.

And it's kind of ground-breaking that the back half of XXX approaches a sort of rap Trainspotting, because in a genre so obsessed with the drug trade, nothing like a junkie-eye view of street life really exists. The closest thing to that might be Lil Wayne in the depths of his syrup days³, and he was never exactly lucid about it (or anything, for that matter) - usually, you just have the obligatory album track where the drug dealer half-heartedly reflects on the consequences of his actions. So it hits hard when Brown raps about stealing scrap metal from abandoned houses from drug money ("Scrap or Die").

And then we get to "30", the album closer and one of the most bizarrely brilliant rap songs of the year. The song starts out as a mess, with bleating horns and plucked bass stuttering in the general vicinity of the actual beat. But Brown seems intent on holding the song together through the force of his conviction alone - he's screaming by the time the backing track starts to fall in line. That happens just as off-color jokes start giving way to a painful personal history and the horror of drugs haunting even his current success. In the last few lines of the song/album, we find out that Brown is 30 years old, and that the album title is as layered as the album proper - a vulgar come-on masking a sober reality in Roman numerals, a rapper reflecting on the experience of age in a genre where rappers avoiding admitting being older than 22. It carries weight - it's the kind of thing that'll probably stick with you after Wolf Gang's latest rape joke has passed by.

(9)

¹ Nothing wrong with this when it's as inspired as this track is - "Pac Blood" gets the same score.

² Actual Tyler tweet: "I Want To Scare The Fuck Out Of Old White People That Live In Middle Fucking America."

³ I guess Eminem's Relapse, too? I was omitting it since it, uh, sucks. Am I forgetting anything?