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Danny Brown has spent his music career being anything but ordinary. Touring his sixth studio album, “Stardust,” released earlier this month, the Detroit rapper once again showcases his unpredictable and innovative approach to rap music, with some help from hyperpop acts Underscores and Femtanyl.
This outing is quite different for Danny. Stardust is his first venture sober. Danny, infamous for his raucous high-pitched delivery and penchant for party drugs, entered rehab in 2023, having spent decades seemingly trying to turn his song “Die Like A Rockstar” into a grim reality.
“Stardust,” released in November of this year, is a triumphant celebration of this journey, from rockstar to rock bottom and back again. “Book of Daniel,” a self-reflective, puffed-out-chest of an opening track, shows Danny defying death and taking the flowers owed to him with the openifng lines “Before they chisel the last four numbers on my tombstone/know I left so many sons behind/could fill a group home” continuing the bold statement with “Inspired your favorite/so label me the greatest/this road was filled with potholes ’til I came through and paved it”.
Unquestionably, Danny Brown has carved a unique path in rap music, pulling inspiration from the Detroit house music scene and being the only rapper to not sign with 50 Cent’s G-Unit rap group for being “too weird”.
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Danny Brown has never quite fit in, and that’s what makes him so provocative, especially when viewed in the class of rap artists he rode in with. Gracing the cover of the 2012 XXL freshman class of new rap acts that included names like Macklemore, Iggy Azalea and Future, who went on to become the preeminent face of drug-addled rap, Danny became the flipside of that coin. Where Future ushered in a wave of disaffected trap rap enthusiasts, Danny became the electrifying face of rave rap. Songs like “Adderall Admiral,” “Blunt After Blunt” and “Dope Fiend” solidified him as the poster boy rapper of the party scene.
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“Stardust” leaves its opening number and launches directly into the clawing frenetic “Starburst,” which feels exactly as its namesake: a burst of plasmic 808 thumping and screeching interstellar synth. The track concludes with an existential poetic diatribe from Frost Children member Angel before launching back into the hyperpop gutpunch Copycats featuring tour buddy Underscores. Danny Brown is no stranger to this realm.
Before ‘Brat Summer’ bathed the globe in lime green, Danny Brown partnered with Charli XCX as well as the aforementioned Purity Ring on his second studio album, “Old.” This sound is the fabric of his impact on rap and pop music. It’s this unexpected juxtaposition of grimy Detroit rap and dreamlike pop landscapes that fans expect Danny to blindside them with every year Danny is up at bat.
Brown represents to some an era of rap artists that pushed the genre into unexplored new territory. In the same room with acts such as ScHoolboy Q, Vic Mensa, and JPEGMAFIA, Danny Brown feels like a necessary component of a super team of rappers who have taken risks, pushing rap music forward into the warm, familiar embrace of rock and electronic music. Danny Brown musically puts a finger into our sternum, asking how we could forget where this all started with Run-DMC? How dare we forget how the party nights peaked in the late ’80s and early ’90s — with house music?
Danny Brown lays out a techno pop charcuterie board for listeners on “Stardust.” The classic house bump of “Lift Me Up,” the agile drum and bass of “1Lov3L1f3!” featuring Femtanyl, the rush of “The End” featuring Ta Ukrainka and Zheani in a head-spinning 8-minute breakbeat onslaught. Danny celebrates the fractures of life against a backdrop of ethereal soundscapes and visceral electronic BPMs before ending the album showing himself grace and forgiveness on the closing track, “All4U.”
“Stardust” may seem like a fresh start for Brown to some, but it feels more like a return to form to others, this time with clarity and intention. Much like ScHoolboy Q, the passing of friend Mac Miller via overdose in 2018 seems to have made a profound and lasting impact on the rapper.
The ’90s pop-rockstar facade that Danny Brown plays up for “Stardust” is a provocative shell housing a painful fight against the grips of death.
Stardust eschews all classic rap aesthetics. In true Danny Brown fashion, Stardust Danny Brown doesn’t fit into what we’ve even come to expect from Danny Brown, yet feels completely in character for the Detroit legend.
Danny Brown performs at 7 p.m. on December 2 at the Marquee Theatre.
