When Danny Brown spoke to the Guardian in 2023, he was promoting the near simultaneous release of two albums, his own Quaranta and Scaring the Hoes, a collaboration with Jpegmafia that commenced with perhaps the year’s most diverting opening lyric: “First – fuck off, Elon Musk.” Both albums had been recorded in what sounded like desperate circumstances.
Brown had long played on his image as a drug-guzzling maniac, too crazed to be contained by any of hip-hop’s standard generic boundaries: posing for photographs with his hair wildly backcombed, his missing teeth on full display, his tongue out and his fingers in devil’s horns, telling interviewers “I’m just waiting to die – everything after this point is, like, whatever”; referring to his songs as “trauma dumps” and calling them things like Adderall Admiral, White Lines, Dope Fiend Rental, Need Another Drink and Die Like a Rockstar. By the time he made Quaranta and Scaring the Hoes, however, he was in serious trouble: “blackout drunk” when recording the latter, “in pain all the time, throwing up and shit” during the making of the former. By the time of the interview, he’d been to rehab and got sober: ostensibly a happy ending, but Brown struck a note of caution. “I’ve seen so many artists get sober,” he said. “And their music sucks.”
