Danny Brown
Stardust
WARP
How do you go from being the loud-mouthed, bleakly humorous life of the drug-addled party to something more starkly sober—literally—without losing the laugh tracks? Ask Danny Brown, the self-confessed try-any-drug-twice hip-hop practitioner whose XXX was a manic-panicked rap-rush classic through the aural equivalent of pink cocaine. Now chem-free and ruminative about the practice (perhaps less so than on his last, more downtempo album, 2023’s Quaranta), Brown’s new project Stardust must sally forth and find the still-weird and the inventively wondrous within all of that still-new teetotaling.
Clarity and clean living aren’t necessarily qualities that lend themselves to uproariousness as the jokes one tells when high. Then again, did you ever hear a recording of the stupid things you think are hilarious when you’re flying? Luckily, Brown isn’t that scared-straight or overly cautious on Stardust. Continuing on with the flustered, filtered tracks of keening EDM and wobbly house music, he still insists that the low-lit dance floors be filled, and the sweaty energy is high and mighty. Together with the electro-house sibling duo Frost Children, Brown lyrically runs the red lights on “Green Light” and claims with what is borderline dad-joke humor that he’s still “Driving fast while she do it slow / I’m about to Busta.”
When it comes to maximizing his best rhymes and kicking rhythms, Brown is still an untouchable vocalist as he leapfrogs licentiously from wispy whispers to garrulous hollers on “Baby.” But that track winds up an interesting turning point within the sparkle of Stardust. Created with San Francisco’s underscores, Brown’s match up of the menacingly sensual with his collaborator’s magic-realism production is a study in what makes the rapper unique: he’s a wise-ass who uses clever lyrics and a cleverer delivery mechanism to take the track over the top.
Their other pairing, however, the buoyant-but-bland “Copycats,” is just about the money with tired lyrics such as “When the money talk, listening ain't cheap.” I mean this sincerely when I say that such boring wordplays of wisdom have never appeared on a Danny Brown record. Neither has commonplace shit-talking and braggadocio, the likes of which fill the industrial strength “1999” with lyrical noise to match the glitching instrumental rather than the usual catty nuance and originality. As his first full album after the side effects have worn off, Stardust is inventive and footing-finding, if also occasionally unstable.
