Danny Brown, Back for the First Time

Danny Brown has made a habit of not fitting in. Even though he came up worshipping hip-hop traditionalists like Nas, he’s always preferred to hook his skills onto music scenes and sounds most rappers of his era wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole. Ever since he first broke out 15 years ago, his embrace of EDM, psych rock, and internet-adjacent scenes like digicore has cemented his place as one of independent rap’s most adventurous stars. 

It wasn’t always easy on Brown, though. “I would drift off and make some electronic shit, but then the hip-hop heads would be like, Oh, this nigga’s on some skinny- jeans bullshit again,” he says over the phone. “And because I’m so deep into the rap shit, I feel like I was never fully accepted into those other worlds.”

Stardust, his seventh album and best since 2016’s Atrocity Exhibition, finds the 44-year-old at a different precipice. Once known to jump between gleeful hedonism and nihilistic self-destruction, he’s now two years sober, levelheaded, and settled down in Texas. Stardust is the first album he’s ever recorded drug-free, and there are noticeably fewer songs about dying like a rockstar or numbing trauma with endless seas of drugs and sex. “I had to fall in love with music again,” he says, likening the Stardust’s writing and recording process to re-learning how to ride a bike or flex a muscle. 

When he would get brief access to his phone while in rehab a couple of years ago, the two artists he was usually listening to were underground Gen Z idols Underscores and Jane Remover. Both are heavily associated with hyperpop, the oft-misunderstood subgenre that sits at the constantly mutating intersection where EDM, hip-hop, post-punk, and lowbrow internet references collide. Once Brown was back outside, he did what he always does: fan out and make connections with an exciting new generation of artists. Stardust features some of the biggest names in hyperpop, including Jane and Underscores as well as rising stars like Quadeca, Nnamdi, and Johnnascus. Angel Phrost, one-half of the pop duo Frost Children, reads poetry across a handful of tracks, acting as a narrator to a loose narrative Brown compares to Prince’s Purple Rain. 

But for all the jumps between new-age glitchiness and old-school electronica, Brown is still here to rap. He soars across these screaming beats, his elastic delivery matching each and every wild beat switch. In many ways, Stardust scans as a mature remix of 2013’s Old, which also had him zipping across avant-garde digital soundscapes. He’s still capable of hitting frenetic highs and depressing lows, but he’s no longer spiraling through them. When so many other rappers his age are going through the motions or wallowing in nostalgia, Brown feels like he’s finally found his true self.

If you're in the NY area, catch Danny playing the album at The Lighthouse Brooklyn Campus tonight, Wednesday November 5, at 7PM. RSVP here.

Stardust’s opening song, “Book of Daniel,” feels like the inverse of “30” from your breakout mixtape from 2011, XXX.  On “30,” you were rapping like you were ready to die and needed to get all your words out. But on “Daniel,” you’ve turned the corner in a big way. Talk to me about recording that one and why it felt like the best way to open the album.

Danny Brown: I was still on my sober shit. When you’re first really getting into sobriety, that’s all you can think about—doing everything you can to not fuck up. When you in that mode, you’re more vulnerable than normal, much more emotional and open to talking about shit. I was talking to [producer] Ben [Lasky, aka Quadeca]  like I knew him for 10 years type shit. I was telling him about all my fuck-ups and exactly where and when I went wrong, and about where I was most proud of myself. He’s a great producer because he was able to find that. He’d be like, “You should make a song about that.” Then he’d make the beat at my crib, and I’d listen to it for hours, go to bed, and write the song. I wrote [“Book of Daniel”] in the first 10 minutes after I woke up—had a cup of coffee, then recorded it. I wrote it at 9 in the morning, and Ben came over at 10 and was like, “Damn, you just wrote that? Sleep on your raps, then.” And I’ve been doing that ever since.

Most of the album was more about the people I worked on it with, because I’m damn near 20 years older than everybody. The way we hear music is gonna be totally different, so I wanted to come at it from their perspective: What do you think I should do? What does a Danny Brown record sound like to you? And I can execute my part. That’s what made it easy for me, because I could just focus on rapping, and they could focus on the hooks, which I feel is one of the weaker parts of my songwriting.

You also label the big three in rap as you, Kendrick, and Earl Sweatshirt on that song. Those are big claims.

I’ve been saying that forever, though. That’s always been my top three. As a rapper, you’re supposed to feel like you’re the best and nobody can fuck with you, and they’re the only two niggas I feel can fuck with me. Them and Billy Woods and Freddie Gibbs. Anybody else, I’ll give the business, I’m sorry. I’m just sayin’ I can’t fuck with Dot and I can’t fuck with Thebe. [laughs] 

To this day, I’m still jumping between whether you or Thebe had the best verse on “Really Doe” from Atrocity Exhibition, which also features Kendrick. That’s a perfect rap song to me, and the Black Milk beat complements it perfectly.   

It’s Thebe, man. It’s Thebe. And I forced that outta him. Dot turned his verse in last, but I spent four or five months tracking [Thebe] down to do that verse. It was worth it! And I’m glad you mentioned Black Milk, because getting K.Dot on a Black Milk beat was important to me. 

And you care about that shit! A lotta people don’t care to make those rap-nerd connections. That’s part of the reason why your music is so special to me. 

Even now, thinking about who I wanted to work with on Stardust, I was seeing people like Jane Remover and Underscores and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get them to work with me. I was thinking, Why ain’t nobody else working with them, though? Is it because of all of this trans shit that people don’t wanna embrace them? That made me wanna fuck with them even harder, because I’ve always been about that. When I first came out, people were hardcore judging you based on what you look like instead of judging the fucking music. Those artists are making the sickest shit out, so that was my goal: to shed light on that scene.

You’re keeping up in a way a lotta people 10 years younger than you couldn’t say. How did you find this new tribe?

I gotta give all the credit to Jesse [Taconelli], who runs deadAir Records and is Jane’s manager. Jesse really guided me through so much of this shit. It was a lotta conversations with him about how to execute it, so it was a lot of planning before we even started making music. He just gave me a good method. It’s a concept album in some sense, but also coming at it from a Purple Rain perspective. In Purple Rain, it wasn’t Prince, it was The Kid, but you knew the story was about Prince. It’s me creating an alter-ego, Dusty Star, and writing from that perspective.

There’s so many different styles of music on here: folktronica, dubstep, drum’n’bass, house, techno, and, of course, hyperpop. What’s your favorite beat on the album? 

I’ma probably say “The End,” but the second half. That’s my touchdown. The way I’m rapping on that is a style Dizzee Rascal would do, and I would tell myself I’d never be able to rap like that. But for the first time, I was able to finally do that. It was my Bruce Lee movie: I made it to the top of the mountain, got my black belt, and beat my master. To do that, only the bars on the four rhyme with each other, and to be talking about something at the same time? Ugghh! Being in the gym really helped me with the discipline that comes with that, too. Even if I suck, one day, I’ma perfect it.

Another one that jumped out at me was “Baby.” You’ve been vulnerable on record before, but this might be your first honest-to-goodness love song ever. 

April [Grey, aka Underscores] came to Austin, and we made “Copycats” in the first 30 minutes of meeting each other—then we had two more days left booked in the studio. We decided to take the time to kick it and came back the next day thinking that we’d do some edits and change around a few bars. But then I started playing Dizzee Rascal shit, and I played “I Luv U.” We said, “Let’s make some shit like this!” 

That’s also where I’m at in my life. I’ve made so many “getting my dick sucked” songs, and you gotta pay your tithes, but I’m probably gonna be married soon, so it felt right. 

It’s such a dope shift to see you in this heart-in-my-hand space of infatuation. 

You know the funny part about it? Doing that is way harder than writing the “getting your dick sucked” song! [laughs] Oh my God! You never know if you’re being corny and you second-guess yourself. When you’re being misogynistic, you’re just like, Oh, this shit hard. [laughs] But when you try to make shit like this, you get scared. So I’m glad you like it, bro. April and I talk about that one a lot, it’s one of our favorites. And out of everyone I’ve worked with in the studio, working with her is the most impressed I’ve ever been. I’ve never seen nothing like that in my life. I told her people should be lined up around the corner to work with her because nobody’s doing it like her, and I’ve worked with a lotta motherfuckers. She grew up in the studio, so she like Kobe in this bitch.                

Working with all these artists who are quite a bit younger than you, I imagine you were pushing them as much as they were pushing you. Was there any one specific moment while making this record where you felt like you were pushed the furthest out of your comfort zone?

Nah, because this is what I wanted to do. Being pushed out of my comfort zone was when they would try to make a rap beat, you get what I’m sayin’? Some would be sending me shit they would send like NBA YoungBoy or Chief Keef. I’d be like, Do you! I can rap to everything, do what you like. Don’t worry about what Danny Brown fans will like or what I would like. I’m in y’all world now. 

There’s quite a few times where you mention how you’d be doing all this if you got paid minimum wage, and you also say, “fuck a first-week sale.” Hearing that brought me back to the infamous Atrocity Exhibition story where you claim to have paid $70,000 to clear samples for that album, and how that was a mistake that tripped you up. Looking back now, do you feel differently about how AE was crafted?

I wouldn’t change one thing. I would’ve tried to make the “Really Doe” video happen, that’s one thing I felt I really fucked up. But as far as everything else, not really. 

As far as me pushing myself, I actually think Stardust is the easiest album I’ve ever made. The only thing that was hard was me learning how to write again sober, it happens through repetition. But I’ve really been trying to make this album since the first time I heard Dizzee Rascal. Nas and Dizzee Rascal were always my favorite rappers. From the time I heard Boy in Da Corner, I knew I wanted to make that. This album is heavily grime-influenced.

Every album, I play with the style some type of way. Obviously, the last two albums were fully mature hip-hop albums, but it has some flashes of the other shit in there. I’ve been practicing making this type of album my whole career. Really, Stardust feels like the first Danny Brown album without me being influenced. You still wanna make songs like who you look up to—you can see me jumping in my Nas and Prodigy bag. Now, this is where it really sounds like Danny Brown for the first time. It just took some time for me to find my people; the type of motherfuckers who were into the type of shit I was on didn’t exist 10 years ago. Now, all these kids are genre-blending.

When the tracklist for this album first dropped, there was a lotta conversation about how white your collaborators are—which is ridiculous on its face, since several of the featured artists are Black or people of color. But it speaks to the general public’s perception of this type of music as whites-only shit. As an elder rap statesman, you taking a stand with these different genres, and specifically with trans artists, is a big deal. Do you have any words for people who might be a bit older who are afraid of stumbling over themselves trying to keep up with the times? 

I kinda knew all this discourse was gonna happen by making this project, but I would feel like shit right now if I let that control me. With every album that I make, I already know there’s a certain group that’s not gonna like it, because the records are all so different. Uknowhatimsayin? and Quaranta might be the only instances where two albums were close together, but I was fucked up at those times, so it makes a lotta sense. I wasn’t in my right mind! At the end of the day, I feel like I’m a fan first, and I’m honored to be able to share studios with some of these motherfuckers. The sky’s the limit for them—I don’t know where they’re gonna be in 10 years. But if it’s crypto, I’m holding right now, I’m not selling!