Danny Brown: Back to Detroit, back to the long game

Danny Brown is having wildlife problems. “The deer are savages in my neighbourhood,” the rapper sighs. “They’re hardcore. They eat up all my f***ing plants. Every time I landscape and redo my garden, I come back and they’ve chewed up my flowers and plants.” The deer are not just picking on Brown, though, and he isn’t the only home-owner in his Michigan ’hood with big gardening bills as a result of pesky invaders.

“They’re trying to figure out something here and there’s a petition about it going around in my neighbourhood, but I don’t really know what to do. You have any ideas what to do?”

There are many things you expected to talk to the Detroit rapper about today, but pest control was not one of them. For a start, there's a fine new album, Atrocity Exhibition, with its title inspired by Joy Division's Closer, to join those standout collections in his back pages like Old.

He says the album turned into “a whole different kind of monster” when he and his producer Paul White went deep into it over the couple of years they spent on it. “I’ve been making music for a nice old bit of time now and I’m maturing and my songwriting is getting better and I just wanted to progress what I’m doing.

“I wouldn’t say that refers to the lyrics, it’s more about the sound and how I make music. I didn’t really care about any outside voices or what was trendy or what was going on in hip-hop or in music in general. I wanted to make the music that I felt Danny Brown should make.”

One album, though, which had a huge effect on Brown was Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly and Lamar features on his new album.

“That album made me step my game up. If you were a rapper who heard that album and it didn’t make you want to f***ing go hard, then you don’t really care about your career. That album made me go further. Kendrick is one of my favourite rappers, I look up to him and it was an honour to have him involved with the record.”

Having spent a bunch of time and money on the new album, Brown wonders about the attention span of his audience for a work like this in a time of musical abundance.

“Our tolerance is so f***ing short when it comes to music. It used to be that you’d get an album once a month and you’d live with it. If you didn’t like it, you’d listen to it a bunch of times anyway to get your money’s worth.

“Now we dismiss something which doesn’t stick,” he adds. “We give it one listen. We’re not prepared to give it the time it needs to bed in because we always think there is something better around the corner.

“But being creative with music is always going to take time and demand time. You have to sit with it and realise what is going on. But the nature of the internet is such that albums come out every week, people talk about them for a week and it’s then gone.

“ I want to make records that people are still talking about a year from now,” he says. “They’re not just for two weeks. You’ve got to give people time to miss you and that means not releasing music as much. You look at Frank Ocean and you can see it. That album is going to stay around for a long time because people missed him and want to try the new one out. It satisfied everyone’s appetite because it was that good. That’s the gimmick right now.

“Forget about work-work-work and putting out all these albums and concentrate on being the art and the creativity. You have to have more creativity than ambition.”

Brown has always been a rapper with a vivid, colourful and idiosyncratic lean to his sound and rhymes, someone equally at home shoulder to shoulder with experimental collaborators as the usual cast of hip-hop plus ones. It’s part curiosity and part environment.

“I was born in the early 1980s and my dad was a house DJ so I was hearing ghetto-tech and techno and house for as long as I can remember. We listened to hip-hop, but when we went to party, it was techno and stuff like that, so it was natural for me to go for that too.”

It was LL Cool J who made him think about hip-hop for the first time. “The very first time I heard people rap I was in school, real young. My uncle picked me up from school and he rushed him home through the rain and I was like ‘why are we rushing?’. He wanted to listen to the LL Cool J record which had just came out and he was mad ’cos he had to pick me up from school first.

“He ripped open the plastic, took the vinyl and put it on the plate. From the time the first note dropped, I knew I wanted to be a rapper.”

When Brown was growing up in Detroit, he didn’t really take much notice of his peers in the city. “For me, it was always beyond the city. I was always influenced by what was happening away from the city. I didn’t realise how good Detroit stuff was until it was too late.

“I was one of those guys who was probably a hater,” he says, “because I was living amongst them and wanting to be what they were and dissing them. When I was old enough and mature enough to realise what they were doing, I realised I was living among legends. I’d a lot of pressure on my shoulder to be a rapper coming out of Detroit.”

The city itself has naturally found its way into his rhymes over the years. “I don’t try to exaggerate things, I don’t try to make it sound cool or whatever. I know it’s f***ed up so that’s the way I want to present it.

“Detroit today is great and has progressed in so many ways,” he adds, “but if I took you to Linwood, it would be a much different trip. But it’s like that in any city worldwide. Detroit is my inspiration and drive. I can’t go anywhere else to create music, I have to be there and around the people because that’s where my music comes from.”

Atrocity Exhibition is out on Warp on September 30th