This review is brought to you by the promise that I’d start writing whenever I felt I had something to say about a record, new or old. Also, real quick, before anyone gets anything I say twisted, fuck all the patriarchal bullshit in the world that crushes my friends and their friends and the people we’re not friends with yet. This is not a defense for you or any pigs. This is just a review of an album.
Earlier this year one of my favorite follows on twitter, professor Brittany Cooper posted this lyric while talking about how civil rights issues for women cannot wait.
“Love a feminist bitch, oh, it get my dick hard / so no apologies for all the misogyny”
This pulled a response I have basically all the time, where I am forced to deal with the reality that the art I like acts in opposition of what values I personally hold. It’s a thing that keeps me from sharing the music I really like with most people. I mean, it’s easier to tell someone “yeah I’ve been listening to this weird experimental music” than it is to say “I’ve been listening to Danny Brown and Nicki Minaj and Lil Ugly Mane.” It’s safer, in every possible way. It’s left me in this place where I feel at ease promoting rappers as much for causes as I do for what they’re actually doing, some real hardline tumblr shit. Well-meaning, but still too much like religious persecution (there’s a word I’m looking for here that I’m missing).
This combined with my inability to actually break down what makes a flow interesting to me is what keeps me from writing a lot of rap reviews, but not consuming the music. Most of my top ten this year is rap, from wildly different styles and spheres. This has done little to help me deal with the nature of the tropes and how they affect people. The fucking asinine way the internet has begun to respond to the mere concept of feminism isn’t helping me talk about what’s happening. It feels like I got in when it was bad, and it’s getting worse, and I’m stuck sitting here as a participant in the struggle and the oppression.
XXX is too.
The album is about extremes, this much has always been clear. The stark cover, the explicit stories, the name, everything suggests harsh existence. What has been made more clear over time is how all-encompassing these extremes are, and how it’s not actually taking a side in any of them. It’s easy to assume Danny has a side he’s taken, given how much time he spends in one tonality and one subject, and how much he gets associated as being that one thing, the Adderall Admiral, the “Blunt After Blunt” guy. In reality however what Danny Brown has done on XXX is create a three-act play, showing three specific extremes: Escapism, Breaking Down, and Reality.
So about the claim of three-act structure. There is a need to prove this, and I can. I can only imagine how frustrating this is to Danny Brown, since I’ve just gone through Metacritic and no one has picked up on what now seems pretty goddamn obvious. It works pretty easily, in chunks of six tracks each.
ACT 1: XXX – Die Like a Rock Star – Pac Blood – Radio Song – Lie4 – I Will
The most obvious link is in the mixture of boisterousness and reality. Tracks like “XXX” and “Die Like A Rock Star” acknowledge the inherent sadness that leads to drug abuse and the understanding of the outcomes ahead. “XXX” specifically talks about being a prime sexual partner and being deliriously hungry with the same bragging tone. The transition is as jarring and immediate as my use of “and” in that sentence. In this track he gives away the whole gag, toeing the line between humanity and inhumanity inside and outside himself. He’s not in a place where he can exist in any defined political identity since his life is too immediate and unpredictable, which gives him the perspective to see both from underneath, to switch wildly between them and attack vigorously on tracks like “Radio Song” and “Lie4”
Lost in the brazenness of his punchlines on a track like “Pac Blood-” clearly the mellower peak of his high- is his willingness to cut as deeply into every angle of a debate and ideology. When he says he’s the Rap Frank Zappa on that EP he did with Black Milk (please make another), this is what he’s talking about. He is playful with horrible ideas because to engage them otherwise would result in being crushed. He attacks usual easy targets like the record industry and his competition, but he’s just as happy to provoke the intellectual elite.
If anyone has the right to deliberately piss off the kinds of people who would call art problematic, it’s a man raised in Detroit, a city destroyed by the abdication of the white class of thinkers that moved production out of the city while acting to make a cartoon out of the desperate states this abdication has left in it’s place. Detroit has to sell art out of it’s museum to make ends meet. It’d be hard to accept any outsider telling you how to live after they turned your city into this nightmare. And yet, just as quickly as he swipes at the educated minds, he strikes immediately at anyone that thinks his music is for misogynists and alpha males. “I Will” is open defiance of masculine norms, prioritizing the woman’s pleasure over his. No one is safe from Danny Brown’s barbs, especially when he loses control.
This would be a good time to go listen to “I Will” in full, then notice just how jarring the next track is in comparison.
ACT 2: Bruiser Brigade – Detroit 187 – Monopoly – Blunt After Blunt – Outer Space – Adderall Admiral
As Danny links up with his friends, they begin to influence him with all the macho posturing that goes along with desperate dudes hanging out. All of the beats become more insidious, and the energy of not being alone anymore with this high along with the peer pressure to up the stakes with booze leads to some of the most insanely hateful claims on the record on “Bruiser Brigade.” Immediately, his pleasure and his crew’s pleasure takes priority over any engagements, while cutting them with all sorts of ugly goddamn words. Danny digs into the women around him and himself. While the most damaging lines are not to be ignored in what their power holds, the intention is misunderstood. It’s an expression of a false personality that is fueled by all these escapist behaviors.
In the middle of the act on “Monopoly,” the kind of talent he actually is breaks through while trying to act like the same alpha male, starting with a sample of patriarchal bullshit. It’s a diss track aimed at both him and his rappers being alive. “I’m a smart n**** that do dumb shit.” “Irritated when I’m not sedated.” Immediately after this outburst, he immediately crashes with “Blunt After Blunt,” slurring his words and trying to keep snapping people but only being capable of simplistic macho shit.
However, “Adderall Admiral” gives away the game a second time. First, the track used in the beat is This Heat’s “Horizontal Hold,” a song ultimately about different kinds of stasis, only similar in their inertness. This could be a clue towards the cyclical nature of violence and exploitation. What’s a lot more explicit is the order given at the very end of the song: “Rewind this and just smoke to it.” Because this is the last moment of escape, a moment of loveless debauchery and passive aggression. The adderall is giving out and he’s really about to crash, and it’s going to be fucking ugly.
ACT 3: DNA – Nosebleeds – Party All the Time – EWNESW – Fields – Scrap or Die
The tonal differences are obvious and over-examined. There’s not a lot to say about it. “DNA” is a frank awakening, completely removed from every fantasy he was bragging about being near, and the first two tracks after the comedown “Nosebleeds” and “Party All The Time” which engages his participation in the culture that creates this, and shows a deep sympathy. And in this sympathy comes the real point of Brown’s work, of living through the duality of escapism and addressing what he’s escaping- a trait Frank Zappa was never particularly skilled at in his work, unable to bypass his detached humor to speak truth to power like Brown does on “EWNESW” and “Fields.”
What’s more important is that in the third act, Danny Brown expresses the reality of extreme positioning- it is a response to intensive trauma. Dehumanization springs from the unloved and damaged. It is a response to the teeth baring down on them, to bite at what they can bite. This is a Truth with a capital T. It applies to any social situation that affords an extreme position to be taken, rooted in unhealed pain and the fear of reliving that pain ever again. From activism to terrorism, this pattern can be expressed. It’s the people saying you’re not doing enough to fight for the cause because they’re doing so much more. The people who insist the world is out to destroy the way things were. All of the people who have ideals but a hard time on the planet. All the enemies who will only be pitiable humans after their power melts and the threat recedes, all needing forgiveness. What hurts Danny like this? Another way out being closed in front of him. “Scrap or Die” details the heartless work of scrapping the abandoned buildings detailed in fields for money at a junkyard. Only, instead of any payoff, he and his crew get caught.
And now the finale track “30” speaks for itself, louder than it ever did.
WINNER: “XXX” by Danny Brown
WHY: It’s so intricately made that three years later, it can still reveal and speak. While there’s no forgiveness for the misogyny either, it’s a shame that such a deliberate act can get lumped into the careless and brutal bullshit of the world.
Fermata over Whole Rest 