Goff's Pick of the Week- XXX by Danny Brown

Danny Brown is too cool to fit within the frame of this blog post

Of all the albums I’ve ever heard, Danny Brown’s XXX is perhaps the biggest example of a bait and switch I’ve come across, and I mean that it the best possible way you can interpret. What I mean by that is this; come for the explicit songs about oral sex, stay for the seething cultural commentary. XXX has perhaps more dirty jokes condensed on to it than the South Park Movie. Seriously, if you have ever laughed at a joke about a vagina, ever, even once, XXX is the album for you. But that’s not all folks, there are seriously moments where Danny gets real, and these are the albums best songs. They sneak up on you, which is perhaps one of Brown’s most endearing skills, he catches you off guard, which works perfectly for both parts of his rap game.

                Continuing on, Danny Brown is the coolest person ever, or at least that’s the kind of person he embodies on XXX. Misogyny aside, Danny manages to be purely unique in a world where normalcy is more common than actual creativity. There’s nothing creative about lines like “slap that pussy” but it is creative to come up with upwards of sixty or seventy different ways of phrasing it, especially when you consider that each of those phrasings is unique in a world where every rapper on every corner is singing about vaginas. But Danny Brown manages to be so much and more. Everything from the way he sounds, that scratchy voice he sings with to the clothes he wears to his hair and teeth, everything is uniquely his.  And that’s something . Danny Brown proves that its cool to be yourself, especially when yourself is really cool to begin with.

          

         So to the actual songs then. Brown likes rapping over minimalist beats with heavy bass and very little melody. They remind me a lot of what most Odd Future songs sound like. This type of style is bold of course because it requires the rappers voice, his flow and his lyrics to carry the songs, which Danny does with little difficulty. Next is his voice, which I would compare to learning to ride a bike, hear it once and you never forget. Brown conveys himself with such a scratchy and strange sounding voice and attitude, switching back and forth from track to track without any hiccups. His voice screeches through every inch of XXX without really faltering once throughout, its something to see .  There is a reason why he has been so heavily featured in tracks over the past year, he makes appearances on El-P’s Cancer 4 Cure, he spits a verse on The Alchemist’s Flight Confirmation, and is even rumored to appear on the new Avalanches album (no word yet if the Avalanches will also be on that record). He has received all this hype for a reason. Brown proves himself to be a talented and unique rapper, and XXX proves ot be the definitive way to listen to him as of now.

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