I just wanted to meditate for a minute on these five moments from pre-makeover Danny Brown’s Greatest Rapper Ever.
1) The double-layered Miami Vice reference in the Phil Collins-assisted death threat of ”throw you in the river, hands tied tight, watch your ass drown, Feel It in the Air Tonight.” Instead of the usual kilo-indebted, cop-ducking head nod, Danny pulls from the locale of the climactic showdown in “Brother’s Keeper,” knocking off both the body-dropping pier and the “if you told me you were drowning, i would not lend a hand” line from the song used to score it. Obviously, he ups the ante and actively constricts said hands, calling on the song’s prayer-laden chorus to add insult to injury.
2) The hilarious way he tops common CV-style boasts of aspiring rappers with “ringing 16’s like internet child predators.” Though for the most part just a creatively tasteless punch line about his bottomless well of talent, there’s something to be said about the way it can simultaneously invoke the attention-baiting desperation of pushing a perfect set of bars to make it in an exploitive industry.
3) The oral sex metaphors of “hit the head, Mario” and “gave her that Yoshi.” Maybe he was watching the Super Mario Bros movie, which mines Blue Velvet as a template for psychosexual undercurrents, and noticed the kind of steamy affection Princess Daisy displays for a chained up Yoshi. Also, “Sorry yo, my tongue long” is a pretty great caption for this photo:
4) The way his self-authentication as a crack dealer really rubs the listener in the muck of it with an anecdote about selling rock to a pregnant fiend. The dueling desperations of his hunger and her need for a fix rub against the palatability of the now digestible trope of “doing what what I needed to get by.” While understandable in socio-economic terms the horrid aspects of it have kind of been scrubbed clean by Rick Ross types. A good bit of Danny’s stuff reads like stream-of-consciousness, beneath-the-tenement-floorboards horror stories of Selby and Burroughs. Appropriately, his description of the fiend’s post-crack haze is something straight out of the insect-heavy Naked Lunch movie: “titties out smacking herself on the back, talking bout SOMETHING CRAWLING ON HER, looking like the world falling on her.” Not only do you get the shit he’s seen but the feeling you’re standing there watching it with him, unable to alleviate the situation’s severe gravity, having to resort either to cognitive dissonance or the unhinged confessional attempted here.
5) “Popping pills to Donuts” Danny Brown’s more recent gender-bucking haircut, skinny jeans and thrift store rock shirts flirt with rockist standards for acceptability while messing with the doorman. Dilla’s contributions to expanded definitions of what a beat is capable of doing are vast, but his namesake is sometimes dragged through the mud as an acceptable signifier of the genre’s “potential,” what it’s a stone’s throw (ahem) away from being able to accomplish (if you will). What’s awesome here is the way Dilla and pills are combined as a coping mechanism for something like witnessing the shit from number 4, wresting his music’s “potential” from standard notions of progressive remedy.
