Danny Brown Has Released His Long-Awaited 5th Studio Album: UknowwhatImsaying¿
He’s cleaned up his appearance this time around, but not his act.
It’s been three years since music fans have been blessed with an album from Detroit rapper Danny Brown, but we can all rejoice as hip-hops prodigal son has finally returned. His fifth studio release carries the name badge of producers Q-Tip, JPegmafia, Flying Lotus, Thundercat, Cartie Curt, White, and Playa Haze, as well as features from Run The Jewels, Blood Orange, Jpegmafia, and Obongjayar.
Danny Brown has one of the most distinct voices in the history of hip-hop. While the nasally, high-pitched tone from his previous albums gives way to a deeper — albeit not by much — sound, you are still able to instantly recognize Danny right from first the track Change Up as he welcomes you back into his world with the line
“They thought I was gone, back from the grave”
You may know the voice, but you might catch yourself asking who the face on the album cover belongs to. After dropping Atrocity Exhibition in 2016, Brown began to take on an ambitious appearance transition. No longer do his teeth look like someone dumped a bag of Scrabble pieces into his mouth and his hair stopped doing.. whatever the fuck it was that his hair was doing.
Just because he has cleaned up his appearance; however, doesn’t mean that he has cleaned up his lyrics. Brown has never been shy to talk about the sex and drugs that fill the hours in his days. On the albums lead single Dirty Laundry he raps
“Once got a ho, ain’t have money for the room, so we did the humpty hump in a Burger King bathroom”
as a nod to the Digital Underground member Shock G, but if I heard that Danny also got his freak on while waiting for a Whopper it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest. A plethora of other distinctive lyrics that only Danny can make work are sprinkled around the album. He has the beautiful ability to say revolting things in a way that makes them somehow enjoyable. Lines like
“I take a piss in that same sink you wash dishes with”
and
“I eat so many shrimp I got iodine poison / Hoes on my dick ’cause I look like Roy Orbison / Got a foursome with four fours and I called it a twelve / One was chubby, one was ugly, wack as hell”
can somehow make you bop your head and shudder all at the same time. Something that I love about the foursome line is that he is either counting himself as a four, so he was with three girls that all were fours to equal twelve or his math is just incorrect. Either way, I’m happy with it.
Whatever your thoughts are on his music, you can’t deny that Danny Brown is one of the most authentic, creative, and entertaining musicians to grace a microphone not only in this era, but potentially all-time. Few have existed before him who possessed the same ability to seamlessly intertwine the bombastic
“I sip on fine wines, fine dine with dimes and nines / I got an Einstein mind and I still tote iron”
with the introspective
“Jumped off the porch, really, I wasn’t ready for it / Get up out the hood, find a way out / Route I’m on, either death or jailhouse / Wanna get away from all this stress / For me, mama just wanted the best”
throughout an individual album. UknowwhatImsaying¿ shows that Danny has been able to mature himself alongside his music without losing that weird creativity that we have all come to know, love, and still somehow be shocked by.
