From the explosion to popular consciousness with XXX, a 2011 masterpiece detailing his crazy life of sex, pills and weed, Danny Brown has served as a touchstone for modern rap's dangerous embrace of hard drugs. The Detroit rapper employed a manic, weirdly over-the-top beat seemingly fueled by too much molly. Most importantly, he created music fearlessly, seemingly unconcerned with how he was perceived by the often conservative rap world. When EDM grew in popularity, he wrote Old, an outrageously exuberant 2013 valentine to getting lost as an aging thirtysomething MC while collaborating with alt-pop innovators like Charli XCX and Purity Ring. He then used the album's top 20 hit on Advertising sign maps as his passport to festival stages around the world, while garnering celebrity fans like Jonah Hill.
Then, last March, Brown used an episode of his podcast, The Danny Brown Showto complain that Warp Records delayed its release Quarantine, an album written primarily at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021. “Where's the urgency?” he asked during a drunken rant. “Why are you holding me?” Days later, he went to rehab. Now – and then Scaring the hoes, a delirious crossover with underground rapper/producer JPEGMAFIA released earlier this year — Quarantine he finally arrives with a drug and alcohol free Brown.
Brown has always rapped about the physical and mental lows of addiction, as evidenced by 2016's bleak hallucinogen Atrocity exhibition. However, the salacious details of how snorting grams of cocaine and crushed Adderall leave him horny and cracked are part of his rollercoaster appeal. On Quarantine, removes those dopamine rushes. The first half of it Quarantine it's quite entertaining as it spits out the fuzzy and psychedelic production of Quelle Chris & Chris Keys, Kassa Overall and The Alchemist. “Half the shit I say can't be understood by executives,” Brown says of “Dark Sword Angel,” which unfolds over a hypnotic prog-rock loop. But the second half is especially quiet. The tone is not the jittery, excited feeling of falling from too much drinking and banging. He's just awake and sober.
Fittingly, the last five songs on Quarantine it feels like an AAA session defined by confessions and bare vulnerability. Brown experienced a traumatic breakup while making Quarantine, so he uses “Down Wit It” to reprise a Scarface line from the Geto Boys' “Mind Playing Tricks on Me.” “I had a woman with me/But for me, she wanted to take me/She helped me through this mess/Now I realize I love her,” he raps while admitting the breakup was largely a consequence. for his cheating and substance abuse. He ponders a witty wordplay on “Celibate” as he raps over a Samiyam beat, “I used to sell a little/But I ain't fucking no more, I'm single/I've been a little trapped in this cell/Locked up with some pimps who told me 'Sell a bitch.” Meanwhile, his vocals are simple and devoid of the adrenaline-fueled flow he employed in his best-known work. Comparing himself to Miles Davis on Kaelin Ellis' “Shakedown,” Brown he raps, “I feel like Miles without Frances.”
Quarantine shows that Brown has lost none of his musical acumen. Like post-punk icons Hüsker Du in the 80s, Brown knows how to put together a compelling body of work, leaving fans debating who is the prettiest of the bunch. Memorable moments abound like “YBP” (short for “Young Black Poor”) where he and Bruiser Wolf from his Bruiser Brigade crew rock out over SKYWLKR and Kassa Overall's Foster Sylvers loop. He picks out sociological phenomena with a keen wit. In “Jenn's Terrific Vacation” she disapproves of the genteel character, wryly noting, “Cameras in the corner/Now they feel safe.” On “YBP,” he recalls childhood deprivation with the summary: “Every day was like a test/If you fail, it's death.”
However, as Brown tries for a break from his party XXX persona, one wonders if the public, unfairly or not, will see Quarantine like a download from those glorious debauched years. Maybe that's for the best. Whether or not his fans embrace this newly understated alt-rap hero, it's better to be alive and underappreciated than glorified and dead.
