XXX
I first listened to Danny Brown’s XXX in the winter of 2014, three years after its initial release. I was well aware of Danny Brown. His third album, Old, was a critical darling and I just listened to an episode of Juan Epstein where he talked about driving a golf cart around the Gathering of the Juggalos with naked women chasing him and being sixteen and watching a woman stick a flashlight into her rectum. It was roughly at this point in the podcast that I bought XXX, expecting fun ignorant rap record. Forgive me, dear reader. I'm only a man.
What I found was quite the opposite. If you’re not paying attention, XXX seems like another hip hop album about debauchery and living the good rapper life. In reality, it's an album about addiction, oblivion, and the cracking facade of the party.
The opening track, “XXX,” finds Danny sleep deprived, delirious from hunger, and suicidal. He’s been trying to launch his rap career for a while. He’s been writing, listening to instrumentals, perfecting drum patterns. However, he’s getting older, and hip hop isn’t kind to its elders. So to relieve the stress, he’s been getting fucked up a lot lately. It hasn’t been going well. “Turning to these drugs, now these drugs turned my life/And it’s the downward spiral, got me suicidal/But too scared to do it, so these pills will be the rifle.”
And that’s how XXX starts: A declaration that if he doesn’t make it as a rapper, he’ll let the party take him forever.
I added the frame so the album cover doesn't blend in with the background. I didn't make the album cover the thumbnail because you wouldn't be able to see the title. I don't like it either.
Track two, “Die Like a Rockstar,” begins with the drum sample from Melvin Bliss’s, “Synthetic Substitution,” one of the most famous drum loops in sampling history. It's a pattern any fan with even a casual knowledge of hip hop history would recognize, but it's been rearranged. The snare’s in the wrong place. The symbol’s out of order. Something’s not quite right here, but before we can catch our bearings, an extremely off-putting synth kicks in and Danny raps about being “Fried off the same shit that rockstars died from.” The hook repeats, “I'mma die like a rockstar." Then the second verse kicks in.
This verse describes doing hard drugs with actors, musicians, and porn stars who all died from overdoses. “River Phoenix ’93 VIP/With some drugged up porn hoes all around me/Like Teri Diver, Linda Wong/All in hell having orgies where the horns grown long.” Other cameos include, among others, Brad Nowell, Frankie Lymon, Heath Ledger, and Brittany Murphy. The specter of death looms large in the background, and Danny's already seeing ghosts.
And so the “downward spiral” continues for the next couple of tracks. As Danny keeps the high going, his ego inflates (“Pac Blood”, “I Will”), the bravado sky rockets (“Bruiser Brigade”, “Monopoly”), and more and more drugs enter his system (“Blunt After Blunt”, “Adderall Admiral”) while the beats remain disorienting and strange.
If you listen closely enough, you can hear what's boiling underneath the surface. “Life4,” a track about extravagant wealth and excess, ends with “Nah, nigga, I’m lying you know that I be frontin’." The whole track’s a lie, and given the content of the previous tracks, he’s probably still broke. The next song, “I Will” is an entire song about his skills at cunnilingus. (Pretend I didn’t phrase that like a sex ed teacher.) It ends, “And I’m swagged up/I’m off a pill/Could fuck you for an hour cause I can’t feel.” The pleasure's all hers because he's psychically and, more than likely, emotionally incapable of feeling any for himself.
The most blatant vulnerability is in “Detroit187.” In the song, Detroit’s skyrocketing murder rate is all over the news, and he raps, “I’m so institutionalized/I wake up at 6 A.M. because I think it’s chow time.” (Brown served an eight month sentence which ended in 2007.) Though he’s home, he’s still surrounded by violence and struggle, and it still feels like jail. Rapper Chip$ then provides one of the only guest verses on the album. The verse starts with him washing down some barbiturates and amphetamines with some beer and busting into someone’s house with “two K’s” and “one mag” and kidnapping that someone's girlfriend. But then he raps, “You was popping pills and drinking liquor/Now you thinking you a gangsta killer.” Hopefully, the irony isn’t lost on anyone, including Chip$.
After “Adderall Admiral,” the beats calm down and his delivery is less frenetic. Yet the topics he raps about become more introspective and darker. In “DNA,” he raps about the usual getting high, living in luxury, and hating your mixtape. However, Danny raps in the chorus about how his mother and father got high and partied just like he did. Even if Danny becomes a famous rapper, he’s still predestined to “go hard ’til it ain’t a dollar to my name.”
“Nosebleeds” and “Party All The Time” talk about a college girl with a coke problem that gets worse with each song. (It’s unclear if both songs are about the same girl, but I like to think they are.) She’s relapsing after a court ordered rehab stint. She’s dropping out of school. She doesn’t get any pleasure from sex anymore. Danny sees the suffering of the people around him who live a similar lifestyle to his own. Some have it worse, and some won’t end up a successful rapper.
“EWNESW” and “Fields” talk about Detroit. Detroit's reputation is already bad enough, but Danny still finds a way to make it a little more personal. On “EWNESW” (Eastside, Westside, North End, and South West), he describes playing with pistols in crack houses as a child, eating Lunchables for dinner, and having sex in abandoned houses. On “Fields,” Danny talks about how as a child, he didn’t tell people which neighborhood he lived in so he could avoid getting sucked into turf wars. Somehow it got out, so he started skipping school to avoid a beatdown.
He also describes the decay of the city itself. The chorus of “Fields” goes, “And where I lived, it was house, field, field/Field, field, house/Abandoned house, field, field” and later he raps, “We living in the streets where the options is limited/‘Cause its burnt buildings instead of jobs and businesses.“ The broken infrastructure of Detroit is present throughout most of the album, yet as he states in the beginning of “EWNESW,” it’s where he got his soul. Detroit could have been beautiful, but now it might be too far gone to ever rebuild. The only thing left to turn to is drugs and crime.
Thus the beats, starting with "Fields," start to sound crazy again.
In “Scrap or Die,” Danny and his family, all of whom are addicts, break into a recently vacated house and strip it for copper, wiring, aluminum, and even the hot water heater. They sell the stolen scrap at the junkyard, but they get ripped off. They have to plan another job. A school recently closed down, so they go to scrap it but end up getting arrested. Danny once used the abandoned houses for fun. Now he's cannibalizing them out of pure necessity.
The album officially ends with “30,” a reflection on everything he’s overcome to sign to his label and succeed in the rap game. Before, when he closed his eyes, he would have nightmares of dying of an overdose and becoming another dead “thirty something black male” in the ghetto and leaving behind another fatherless daughter in the process. However, he used this fear as motivation. If rap didn’t work out, the drugs surly would have killed him. “The thought of no success got a nigga chasing death/Doing all these drugs in hopes of OD’ing next, Triple X.”
Though XXX officially ends with “30,” the album pulls off a rare feat by effectively using the deluxe edition bonus songs to flesh out the albums themes. (This is how I first listened to the XXX, unaware of the album’s actual ending. Indulge me here.) The bonus tracks, “Baseline,” “Witit,” and “Shouldn’t Of,” all return to the mercurial high energy drug use and partying of the first section of the album, with the same kind of strange beats and weird flows. Thus, I think you can listen to the album like this:
The first section is the party. There’s some chinks in the armor, but they’ll go over your head if you’re not paying attention. The second section is the comedown. The high’s wearing off and reality sets back in. He achieves success, but then he takes another sniff and the party rages on. The last line we hear on the album is “Shoulda never gave my ass no money,” possibly fulfilling the predetermined genetic failure he talked about in “DNA.” Then we go back to "XXX." You can listen to the album as an endless loop. Despair leads to partying. Partying leads back to despair.
XXX is an album about many things, but one of the more prominent subjects is the shadow world behind the party life. Drinking can be fun, and maybe drugs if that that's your thing. But pleasure is fleeting by nature, and all this is here to distract you from your problems and, ultimately, your impending death. Add on top of that the hardships of being poor in America. It's one thing to feel doomed by poverty, drugs, racism, and your circumstance. It's quite another thing, however, to know that you're doomed and let the inevitability of it wash over you as a form of slow suicide. Luckily, that’s not how it has to end, and Danny lived long enough to see it.
There's two albums in XXX. There's "triple X," the raucous drug fueled rap record and there's XXX's roman numeral namesake, "30," an album about where the party life can end. Much like the choice Danny Brown made between success and suicide, which album you get depends entirely on you.
