Danny Brown’s five best songs
It’s not for nothing that Danny Brown is so widely considered to be one of contemporary rap’s most unusual, innovative forces. His wildly eclectic style makes him an impossible artist to pigeonhole, but what can certainly be said for him is that everything he does, even if it doesn’t land right away, is interesting. He is, truly, one of a kind.
Even as hip-hop has evolved over the last couple of decades, Brown has stood out as especially boundary-pushing. Arguably more than any other truly popular rapper out there, he has experimented with new sounds and techniques that, certainly at first, can be extremely jarring to hear. Yet admiration for his approach endures.
Brown’s musical taste is suitably all over the place, and he has cited so many different artists as inspirations. In terms of rap, he’s looked to the greats, like Jay-Z, Nas, Eminem and Outkast, as well as to pioneers of some of hip-hop’s subgenres, like British grime legend Dizzee Rascal. Tonally Brown has looked to plenty of rock groups, like Joy Division, Radiohead and Talking Heads, and he’s also mentioned stranger pop artists like Björk as influencing his sound, too. By 2024, he was listening to a lot of hyperpop, too, which then found its way into his work. He’s all over the place.
Danny Brown’s music is often very strange: a musical mishmash bearing manic vocals, vivid imagery and lewd storytelling. But there are quieter moments in his songs, too, as well as funny and melancholic ones. His work can’t be collapsed into a single characterisation, so let’s instead look at five of his best and let his music do the talking.
Danny Brown’s five best songs
5. ‘Grown Up’
Certainly one of Brown’s more conventional-sounding songs, 2011’s ‘Grown Up’ sounds almost like it could have been released by A Tribe Called Quest during their mid-’90s heyday. It’s all really laid-back and positive, a warm song with a vinyl crackle and an old-skool beat that, actually, was sampled from the early Gorillaz song ‘Tomorrow Comes Today,’ which featured on the virtual band’s debut album from 2001.
Musically, ‘Grown Up’ is nostalgic, and lyrically, too, Brown is looking backwards. His verses reflect on his childhood, a period in which his “first meal was school lunch” and “for dinner all we ate was Captain Crunch.” They were tough times, but he contrasts those troubles with his newfound success in the music business, celebrating the fact that, now that he’s all grown up, he’s made it.
4. ‘Dirty Laundry’
Not content with only releasing a song, in the form of ‘Grown Up,’ that sounded like a tribute to A Tribe Called Quest, Brown went straight to the source for his fourth album UKnoWhatImSayin? He tapped up Q-Tip to executive produce the record, and Tip’s attention to detail had a huge bearing on his own performance on it. “I almost had to relearn how to rap again—an ego death type thing,” Brown said in a press release. “[Q-Tip] gave me this whole new outlook on music. I can’t go back to how I was before.”
The album’s lead single, ‘Dirty Laundry,’ encapsulates the rapport that Brown and Tip established on the project. Tip produced it himself, laying down a frantic, fretful sort of track with a hard beat and lots of beeping and booping. It suits Brown’s mood down to the ground, as he tells a tale of his own lurid sex life.
3. ‘Torture’
‘Torture,’ as per its writer’s intention, is a tough listen. The song is about some of the awful things that Brown has seen and experienced in his life, having grown up in and around Detroit’s street crime and gang scene. He became a drug dealer when he was 18, and, clearly, some of the things that he witnessed around that time left him traumatised. The song offers a snapshot of some of those episodes in horribly vivid detail.
Explaining the song’s meaning to Complex, Brown once said, “‘Torture’ is about how I can’t sleep at the end of the day because of all the shit I’ve been through. No matter where I’m at, I can still close my eyes and see baseheads.” His experiences left their mark on him, as the song’s chorus makes clear: “And it’s torture / Look in my mind and see the horrors / All the shit that I’ve seen, n—a, it’s torture.”
2. ‘Really Doe’
Brown’s fourth album, Atrocity Exhibition, was one of the albums of 2016, and is arguably the greatest he’s ever created. It’s filled with great tracks, but one of the best is ‘Really Doe,’ which featured Kendrick Lamar, Ab-Soul and Earl Sweatshirt and was produced by Black Milk. Brown has credited Kendrick with making the song what it was, but, clearly, this was a group effort that really paid off.
Speaking to NPR about how the song came together, Brown said, “Me and Kendrick always talked about doing stuff, and I had the idea to get K.Dot and Earl together… but first I got me and Ab-Soul. And then one day when I was mixing the album with Ali, K.Dot snuck in and just laced it. I had to be patient and wait on Earl, but it was all worth it you know because hip-hop needs that posse cut.”
1. ‘Ain’t It Funny’
‘Ain’t It Funny’: two minutes, 57 seconds, of utter, slap-across-the-face intensity. Quite how this song works is an open question, because it should, by rights, be an unlistenable cacophony. It’s faster than hip-hop songs typically are; Brown’s rapping is entirely manic; the rhythm is difficult to get a handle on; and the saxophone stabs are aggressive and discordant. All in all, this song is a freaky, angry mutant—and it’s great.
The fact a song this weird was released as a single says everything about the sort of artist Danny Brown is. This is, by no means, an easy song, but, even though it can be nerve-jangling, there’s something intensely rewarding in it. That’s why it’s widely considered to be Brown’s greatest singular achievement so far.