“I didn’t even do press for ( Atrocity Exhibition), I wasn’t mentally stable at the time to talk to people like that. I started to realize that in life you only have so many f**ks to give, so you might as well only give a f**k about the things you can control,” Brown tells me today. “Back then … I was emotional, and I think I cared too much. But let me walk through the Beverly Center (in Los Angeles) on a Saturday, no one pays me any attention.”Īnd his last album, 2016’s Atrocity Exhibition, integrated shadowy rock, punk and techno influences while delving into the drug addiction that fueled his own personal nosedive. “Can you imagine me walking round Northland (Center, a now shuttered shopping mall in suburban Detroit) on a Saturday? Sh*t’s crazy.
It’s depressing at times,” Brown said during that 2011 interview. People always talking sh*t back home, but it’s been embraced outside of home. The Danny Brown sitting here today – in the back of a Brooklyn bar with his manager Dart Parker – is far different from the guy whom I last spoke to in 2011, when he was depressed and wondering why his hometown shunned his art and his appearance. And around the time he signed to Canadian EDM DJ A-Trak’s Fool’s Gold Records in 2011 to release his seminal mixtape XXX, he changed his hair from hood-centric braids into an anime-inspired swoop that made him look more like a heavy metal rock star than a Detroit street rapper. He regularly morphs his voice from a guttural snarl to a cartoonish high-pitched yell, recalling the likes of ‘Ol Dirty Bastard circa 1995. His laugh is unmistakable, a charming, goofy shriek that both slips out or is used as a way to disarm an audience. He had a broken front tooth, a result of being hit by a car in a KFC parking lot when he was younger. Over the past decade-plus, Brown has become one of the most distinctive artists in rap – whether it’s concerning his music, his look, or his personality.