Review Summary: Meet Danny Brown. Party animal/depressive writer. Drug addict, explicit descriptor. Nonconformist. Barely alive by 30.
Kurt Cobain. Jim Morrison. Janis Joplin. Brian Jones. Amy Winehouse. Rudy Lewis. Alan Wilson. Gary Thain. What do all these celebrities have in common? Well, they were all musicians, as well as members of the infamous 27 Club. They were all under the effect of substances in the moment of their passing and they all experienced radical, extreme and wild lifestyles. It's already no surprise when a music artist dies at the age of 27: it is the mythical number of life years that conceived about 50 deaths of musicians. The question here is... what if a aspiring musician did triple the drugs all these icons did, was two times more radical in his style of living and actually self-aware that death would, someday, somehow, catch him and end his life and addictive, self-destructing ways?
Meet Danny Brown. A 30-year old rapper from Detroit, the only american town where you can find over thirty abandoned skyscrapers. Imagine yourself in the shoes of a man with a disturbed childhood, surrounded by death, crime, injustice, poverty, violence, drug traffic and drug addicts. Friends dying and overdosing in front of you. Being submitted to others' mistreatments; in the street on your way to the supermarket to buy bread for your mother, at school for being the new kid in Detroit. A level of poverty leading to the point where you must steal your neighbour's electricity in order to plug on your old, dusty and third-handed Nintendo, as well as to the point where you must steal other people's goods, scrap metals and copper wires to sell them in junkyards to get yourself enough money to buy your own food on a daily basis instead of stealing others'.
But the central point of XXX's descriptive and vivid concept is drug addiction. Danny shares the vice with various family members, various friends, various people living amongst the streets of Detroit. A vice from which the insane character draws momentaneous happiness and from which his adaptation to the air of the city depends on. An addiction that leads a overly clever and intelligent man to commit the most atrocious follies, and his life to ruins, respectively.
Death, luxury, nihilism, racism, hedonism, addiction, sex, futility, misogyny, bipolarity, fears, traumas, memories, sadness, frustration, depression, all of this placed on the table to the exponent of vividness, accompanied by two opposite sides of the same person, the Heads and Tails of Danny Brown: a brilliiantly sarcastic sense of humour and a melancholic and introspective sense of open confessionalism. It is in all fairness impossible to not get curious right from this album's descriptive opening track, "XXX". "I never leave the house, ain't slept in three days. Popping pills, writing, drinking and smoking haze", confesses the aformented rapper, describing what his life is reduced to. "Cause if this *** don't work, nigga I failed at life, turning to these drugs now these drugs turned my life", yells Danny, as realistic as it is deep and sad. It's the unavoidableness of laughing at the hilariously sarcastic "Radio Song", the repulse a normal listener feels by listening or reading deeply into the lyrics of the misogynist fantasy that is a Danny-Brown-style sex night, described to detail in "I Will", the elaborate wordplay and sarcastic sense of humour Danny displays in tracks like "Detroit 187" and "Outer Space"... and it is complicated not to ponder when striked with XXX's most interventional and introspective song "Party All The Time", not to create a ficticional scenario with the characters envolved in the lyrics of "Scrap Or Die" and "Nosebleeds", not to create mind imagery of the deserted city of Detroit that Brown describes in the lyrics of "Fields"... or not to shed a tear by listening to Danny's confessional and heartfelt shouts, yells, screams and cries on the tormentuous musical aformentation that is XXX's closing track, "30".
"XXX" is underground hip hop's answer to the stereotype usually given to hip hop music, as well as Danny Brown's answer to those who criticize the genre. To those who criticize the genre for its' futility (lyrics dealing with money, cars, girls, sex and money)? Danny Brown retaliates by ironically detailing every single lyric he writes about these factors and by creating an entire concept based on these themes, always with a sense of introspection and of self-awareness. To those who criticize hip hop for its' commercial sales and radio airplay? Danny Brown answers by creating his own, aptly titled "radio song", transforming what many see as an issue and a complaint into a magnificent, explicit and hilarious parody surrounded by tons of sarcasm and a self-indulgence from Danny for writing his first "radio hit" (as impossible as it is for it to get any kind of radio play for its' explicit lyrics. Ironic, huh?). And to those who criticize hip hop for lacking in the emotion department and for the typical atribuition of being the musical representation of futility and egocentrism? Danny Brown responds with a statement, cementing and actually putting all that egocentrism to practice on the first part of the record, but wordplaying and detailing every single line he writes to the point it becomes repulsive, mind-bending and grotesque. Danny Brown responds with his heart by assaulting the listener with raw deliveries, explicit content, uncontrollable rage, unmeasurable emotion, unmatchable ambition and with gigantic doses of confessionalism.
But that is just who Danny Brown is. An artist in the midst of the hip hop genre. A nonconformist. People complain? He gives people more to complain about. People rather interpreting songs and lyrics with few information so it becomes more abstract? He decides to itemize every single scenario represented throughout the musical wilderness that is "XXX", expliciting, detailing and specifying everything happening in his own mental world of madness. People want less? He gives them more, always more, a lot more, progressively and increasingly more to the point of his own exhaustion. People say underground hip hop/concept hip hop is dead? Danny Brown reincarnates it back to life with an explicit, uncensored, agressive and maniacal mixtape that pushes the boundries never before trespassed in the genre by a record of so many extremes.
"XXX" is metaphorically a grotesque painting: It is superb. It is sickening to look at. Horrifying. Repulsive. The viewer immediately feels disgust just by looking at it for two mere seconds. But the viewer just can't stop staring fixedly at the painting. The viewer becomes attached, dare I say, "addicted" to the painting. Because in the midst of such horrid colors and repulsive textures, there is something underneath that draws the viewer's attention and sucks him/her right in. Something authentic, profound and inspiring. The emotional depth of one hell of a rollercoaster ride.
