Art by Evan Solano
Son Raw is really happy he didn’t submit any 75BPM drumless for this album.
My favorite piece of late blog-era cultural ephemera–followed closely by reactions to Kendrick’s “Control” verse and that time DJ Khaled got lost at sea–has got to be Noisey’s infamous five-part poolside conversation between Danny Brown and A$AP Rocky. Swagged out and geeked up beyond belief, the two rappers emblematized the best of their generation’s moment: widely popular, able to synthesize and hybridize various strains of regional rap and dance music, and deeply committed to hip-hop without falling prey to their elders’ preconceptions of how it should sound. As the 2010s recede into memory, it’s a reminder that while the unwashed masses may have wasted their youth wallowing in the muck that was stomp-clap-hey and millennial cringe, those of us with taste who survived rap’s transition era of ’06 to ’09 got to experience our own musical golden age.
Like many zeniths, however, that era didn’t come without a cost. While Rocky eventually eased into semi-retirement as Rihanna’s stay-at-home baby daddy, Danny Brown has spent the past decade wrestling with the image that this Noisey conversation saddled him with: goofy, intoxicated, and the life of the party while drowning on the inside. To be fair, that’s always been part of his story, explored in side-splitting and dopamine-flooding detail on the back half of 2013’s Old and again eventually on 2023’s Scaring the Hoes.
Fun as that music was, it unfortunately eclipsed the other side of Danny’s art: the heartfelt and unfiltered exploration of his trauma and addiction. These demons came to an inflection point after 2023’s Quaranta. Now, sobriety well in hand, Danny Brown’s trying to square the circle of his musical dichotomy on Stardust, perhaps the riskiest rap album of the year, but also one of the most rewarding.
If there’s one thing that listeners are meant to take away from Stardust, it’s the foregrounding of Danny Brown’s greatest musical strength, one too often eclipsed by his hard-partying reputation. That is, the guy is a true music nerd with vast tastes and the ability to make unexpected influences work as part of rap’s musical form. While he was sold to listeners as a millennial ODB with the pathos of a Biggie, Stardust is a reminder that he also has the ear of an (old) Kanye or Outkast–acts whose adventurousness and eclecticism were just as important as their rhymes.
On Stardust, this mostly plays out as a head-first dive into the high speed, over-stimulated, extremely online world of hyperpop, a genre that will probably scan as bewilderingly intense to most 40-year-old hip-hop fans. Think about it for a second, though, and it makes perfect sense that the guy who spent half the EDM era slumming it up with rave weirdo Rustie and grime producer Darq E Freaker would recognize that same energy amidst the musical overload of Gen Z’s answer to hardcore techno. It’s a bold move, particularly considering contemporary audiences have been trained to believe that Travis Scott adding James Blake to a trap beat is peak musical experimentation.
Still, it mostly works, largely thanks to Danny’s Detroit foundation. While outsiders usually focus on a specific area of the city’s musical lineage, be that classic Motown, Dilla Time rhythms, or smart post-Belleville Three techno, Danny Brown’s omnivorous approach to his city’s rich musical history has always been the secret sauce that ties together his expansive palette. On Stardust that means that grime-meets-CharliXCX glitchiness, classic deep house, pastoral electronica, post-Sophie industrial, and eight-minute long multi-movement jungle, all essentially become next-gen Ghettotech beats.
Danny has always been the rare emcee able to tackle any BPM, but this is the first time he’s focused so single-mindedly on acceleration. That’s a swerve in itself. The last musical space you’d expect to find a newly sober rapper is the dance floor, but whereas Old’s clubby half and Scaring The Hoes’ turn up music featured Danny leaping headfirst into trouble, Stardust’s bangers see him running towards the light. Though he’s still processing trauma, this is the most liberated the rapper has ever sounded, as if doing away with his self-destruction freed him from both the need to live up to an outdated public image and the desire to rhyme over slower, darker tracks. That he’s done so without missing a beat, lyrically, is inspiring. Though albums like XXX, Atrocity Exhibition, and Quaranta will remain favorites for getting me through hard times, it’s impossible not to root for this happier Danny when the music is so adventurous and the sentiment so honest.
That’s not to say that the album’s eclecticism doesn’t occasionally misfire. Opener “Book of Daniel” has an inspirational statement of purpose that would have landed stronger if Danny hadn’t rhymed over what sounds like revivalist Britpop. The beat does a whole lot but still ends up sounding like a fancier version of a Chance The Rapper gospel track. On the flip side, “1999” is so abrasive as to fuck up the vibe–I don’t know when I’ll ever want to listen to screamo vocals, but it’s not here, which is a shame because the lyrics and the rest of that track’s apocalyptic digicore-meets-funkadelic vibes are exhilarating. More generally, I suspect the Frost Children spoken word interludes tying the album together will be divisive upon repeat listens, and as exciting as the new direction is, my inner hip-hop head kind of wishes he’d balanced out the hyper pop with some red meat for the base. Yes, Stardust is a way bigger swing than your average old head rapper’s Alchemist album and Danny should be commended for blazing new paths… but also, I really like Alchemist albums.
Not to worry: if Danny Brown has made one thing clear, both explicitly in his rhymes and throughout his winding career, it’s that every album is another chapter and that he has no interest in artistic stasis. Time will tell whether Stardust end up as Danny’s new baseline or a curveball like his Q-Tip-influenced UKnoWhatImSayin?, but either way, it’s a record worth celebrating: one that actually takes big risks and brings rap music to new places, rather than your average event release gesturing at new ideas without ever defying audience expectations.
Just as importantly, it’s an opportunity to hear one of our generation’s finest unclouded by addiction and negativity, and it’s a thrill to hear that his newfound sunny disposition hasn’t blunted his pen. The skinny jeans, asymmetrical haircut, gap teeth and molly may be long gone, but Stardust proves that those were never the things that made Danny Brown a thrilling artist.
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