After keeping a low profile for a few years, Danny Brown is back in the rap limelight, as he gears up to release his heavily anticipated album Atrocity Exhibition. When you take three years in between albums, the expectations are raised quite high, but if there's an artist you can count on for quality, creativity, quirkiness ("if it ain't risky it ain't fun") and bars all at once, it's probably Danny.
In a lead-up to the album, the Detroit spitter sat down with NPR for an interview, where he also premiered a new record off Atrocity Exhibition. In the interview, Danny speaks on mediocrity, which is running rampant these days, giving his perspective (which makes complete sense given that three-year hiatus): "People don't even care about putting out a classic no more. They just putting something out to keep they name relevant, as long as they see people retweeting them on twitter, and talking about they new video they put out that people gon' forget about the next day, they just happy with that."
While some people are cool with being average, Danny says, "I never wanna be in an in-the-middle type of person, 'cause that's boring. You either gunna love it or you gunna hate it."
The song the debuts mid-episode (skip to 26 minute mark), and mainly consists of a funky bassline and clanging pot and pan-like noises. It features Petite Noire on a rather downtrodden hook. Thoughts?
Following the record, Danny explains how it happened. "Twitter," he says, "I was up 4 in the morning just checking my DMs, and I had a DM from Petite Noire, and he liked my music, and check his music out, that's pretty much what it was...I checked it out, it was 4 in the morning, I had nothing else to do." There's hope for all you struggle rappers out there DM'ing any and everybody.
Atrocity Exhibition drops on September 30th. Check out the art and tracklist here.
Quotable Lyrics
Living like a rolling stone
When I die, I leave alone
Getting high, I feel low
But we all know life goes on