Shortly before the outbreak of the pandemic, Danny Brown sold his house in the suburbs and moved to a penthouse apartment in downtown Detroit. “I’d just went through a break-up,” explains the 42-year-old underground rap maverick, his voice mellow as it drifts down the line. “I was moving there because there were more parties. I was going down there to be a ho! To party and shit.” He chuckles quietly to himself. Things didn’t quite work out that way. “When everything got locked down,” he remembers, “I just found myself in this big-ass penthouse apartment. Alone.”
Brown, newly single and approaching 40, threw himself into his writing. “I was just doing something to stay busy,” he says. “Music has always been like a form of therapy for me, so I just was getting my feelings out.” During those surreal days of lockdown, he found his mind drawn back to where he’d been ten years prior. It was Brown’s second album ‘XXX’, released in 2011 shortly after he turned 30, that made him a star. An audacious autobiographical concept record with an A Side of party songs and a B Side filled with more
thoughtful, contemplative bars, he wondered if he could repeat the trick for his 40th. “It was just like a: ‘Can I do it again?’ type of feeling,” he says. “When most people have a breakout project, people just know them for that and think: ‘They can’t do that shit again!’ It was me proving to myself that I can still make that kind of music.”
The result is Brown’s electrifying sixth ‘Quaranta’ – named for the Italian word for 40, as well as a nod to its birth during quarantine. Living just around the corner from his studio, a house on Detroit’s Grand Boulevard, on the same strip as the Motown Museum, meant Brown never had to look far for inspiration for Side A. “It was like a non-stop party, man,” he says. “I was always getting fucked up.” That attitude bleeds into songs like ‘Tantor’, which Brown recorded while in the midst of a deep acid trip. “I was super into Parliament at the time, and we talked about how George Clinton would take acid, get in front of the mic and just start saying shit,” he remembers, “So that was really the first song I never wrote. I just took a lot of acid, stood up to the mic, and it came up. I mean, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. I’m not trying to glorify it or anything, but I was still deep in my addiction at the time.”
The Collected Works of Kevin EG Perry 