Danny Brown – XXX (2011) [Fool's Gold] // Grade: A

Looking at the cover for Danny Brown’s latest mixtape XXX, seeing that devilish red tongue with pills on it sticking out from under come hither eyes you could be tempted to think the album was declaration of hedonism and party-all-the-time mentality born from some sexed up bastard love child of Rick James and Andrew W.K.  Examining the stark cocaine white background punctuated minimally by blast of color, you might assume this was an album full of electronic dance jams for girls in high-waisted American Apparel jeans to dance to. If you were prone to getting cute, maybe you’d fuck around and assume from the cover alone that XXX was The Great Gatsby of the super skinny jeans set.

But, that would be missing the key point of design here — Danny Brown’s name across the top. It’s rendered in a serif font that calls back to the posters of Blacksploitation movies like Foxy Brown, where black characters transcend amazingly shitty surroundings to become near superheroic action stars that beat the hell out of cartoonishly racist white people. While Danny Brown isn’t stopping a plot to poison to Detroit’s water supply with a drug  that only effects black people — that’s the actual plot to Blacksploitation classic Three the Hard Way — XXX does play out like a modern day exploitation movie following a rapper who takes mad drugs and gets incredibly good at rap.

In this movie Danny Brown starts off as a normal MC freaking out over his struggle to make it in rap. He considers quitting or suicide as he approaches 30 with a catalog of mixtapes that have gone wood. In his doubt he starts doing copious amounts of drugs (XXX) and is reborn as a more powerful, near superhuman MC spurred on by a collection of beats that bump hard but sound like a collage of soundtrack cues culled from an anime space opera. If Watch The Throne was “Niggas In Paris,” XXX is like those Egyptian aliens on Stargate or that show from the early days of UPN — Niggas In Space.

On “Die Like a Rockstar” Brown paints a picture of the V.I.P section in hell as he parties with a wild cast of dead celebrities and prophesizes his own drug induced death like the Jesus Christ of ketamine. Where this premise would just be a chance to namecheck for normal MCs (see any Game song) Brown manages to paint a psychedelic picture of a hellish orgy of dead celebrities:

I got that Kurt Cobain type of mindframe
Feeling like Keith Moon’s ‘shrooms in my dressing room
Basquiat freestyle feeling like Jimi Hendrix in Ana Nicole’s mouth
River Phoenix, 93, V.I.P,
With some drugged up porn hoes all around me

On “Pac Blood” Brown flaunts his new rap cosmic awareness and connects with the great writers of the world declaring himself the “Bukowski of bars/ Soda pop Pinski” shouting out beat poets and Russian playwrites like it was nothing. From there for about 10 tracks straight Brown weaves through what seems to be every conceivable type of track and straight up slaying them with his off kilter delivery ranging from multi-syllabic to straight screaming. “Lie4” is a flossing celebration tempered by the reality that said flossing is only possible because dude just got his income tax check. “I Will” is a song about eating pussy that’s so graphic it would embarrass both Queen Latifah and The Cunnin’ Lynguists. Brown even crafts a Waka Flocka Flame lite fight track in “Bruiser Brigade.”

The second half of the album finds Brown abandoning the showier punchlines, rhyme patterns and vocal tics to get into narrative stories of fucked up families (“DNA”), lives lost to drugs (“Nosebleeds”) and the general shittiness of Detroit (“Fields”). Brown as narrator has a calm and even voice, laying down six tracks of poverty with no need for embellishment. When you’re talking about breaking into a house you used to live in to steal the water cooler and wiring there’s really not much need for a hard sell. For fans of the storytelling Danny Brown highlighted on The Hybrid, don’t worry he’s still here despite the celestial accoutrements.

XXX drops as one of the best rap albums of the year thus far. It’s equal measure braggadocio, weird, funny and earnest without ever forcing anything or particularly sounding like anyone else. One of the hidden agendas of exploitation movies was to push counter culture ideas onto unsuspecting mass audiences. You have a flick like Shaft showing Richard Roundtree in all his black power, ass kicking glory not only because it was cool, but because it showed a newly (officially) desegregated America that Black people could kick ass. Following in that tradition, XXX serves not only to demonstrate the skills of Danny Brown, but is also a sly argument for drug fueled hyper creative artistry.

Download Danny Brown’s XXX For Free (Click Here)

- Behold the Destroyer