Written by: Nazeeh Alghazawneh

This was my second time seeing Danny Brown perform live. This time however, it was at the Music Box, in the heart of San Diego’s Little Italy. I missed the opening performers’ sets, Ashnikko and Zelooperz, and arrived right at the beginning of Brown’s set in the worst mood. The reason for my sour mood didn’t matter. It’s only relevant as a gauge for how I was feeling: an aggressive overwhelming of ephemeral irritability, consumed by an inability to process through the bad feelings and only swim around in them. It was lost on me how much my abject shittiness came from the same ethos found so wrought among my favorite Danny Brown songs. Who better to drag me out of my nearly self-mastubatory misery than the artist that just fucking gets it; the guy who’s had the worst day for a lot of days and still got back up. No other artist in hip-hop within the last decade (with the exception of maybe Kanye) has better explored the emotional pendulum of swinging back and forth from the compulsion to be euthanized to the compulsion of euphoria.

It was my first time at the Music Box. I admired how its structure served as a literal host for its name as there were no curves to the architecture. The venue was the ideal size to accommodate the elastic cacophony of Brown’s beats to wash over me, continually undulating back and forth off the walls until the hum of the noise and the hum of my internal clock became inseparable. The experience was far more immersive and appropriate than the first time I saw him at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco a few years ago when he opened for the A$AP Rocky X Tyler, the Creator tour. There’s simply too much vastness in that venue to properly accentuate Brown’s beats as there’s nowhere for them to travel so they just get lost in the mass innerspace. Another thing I really appreciated about the place is that they did an excellent job keeping everyone in the crowd properly air-conditioned; the entire night I was constantly surrounded by a lot of people but never got hot or uncomfortable.

In other words, the show absolutely fucking slapped. It was one of the best shows I’ve ever been to. Brown’s stage presence was kind of like an uncle in that calm, effortless demeanor you develop when you’ve been in the game as long as he has and just really know what you’re doing.

The songs he chose to perform were a near perfect medley of the best parts of his last four projects with a majority of the set being XXX but also a healthy amount of Atrocity Exhibition as well. It’s always been very well-known and clearly documented within Brown’s career that he can rap over any kind of beat but seeing him perform the stretch of songs starting with “Outer Space” (my favorite Danny Brown song) and ending with “Attak” while maintaining perfect breathe control and cadence frankly cemented him as one of the greatest artists to emerge from the rap scene in the last decade for me. Of course his whole set was incredible but it’s that stretch of songs specifically that were such an immaculate example of Brown's best essence; a synopsis of what his whole style is about. There’s this strange thing that artists do live sometimes that I hate where they know exactly what songs everyone came to their show to see but instead of playing those songs, they play some other shit that no one wants to hear. Thankfully, Danny Brown wasn’t there to waste anyone’s time. He knows his fan base very well and gave us exactly what we wanted.

Speaking of Brown’s fan base, the majority demographic of his crowd being young, white men wasn’t surprising at all but for a guy from Detroit, the lack of people of color present (especially black people) is always very dubious when it comes to rap shows. Hip-hop is the most popular music genre in the world so rap shows attract everyone wanting to be a part of the cultural zeitgeist and you never know who’s there as a fan and who’s there just to be there. Thankfully, this wasn’t an issue and the crowd really seemed to fuck with Brown’s music as almost everyone there knew and were shouting every lyric. Another positive aspect of the night was that everyone around me was relatively calm and respectful in regards to personal space/moving around and there wasn’t really any moshing being done even though the abrasiveness of Brown’s music is perfectly suited for it. Crowd energy is such an important factor in how stellar of a performance artist gives live which is tricky because there’s no way to really control the dynamic of a collective experience but when everything comes together it makes all the difference.

It’s tempting to view Danny Brown’s career/music in a very binary trajectory of before and after in regards to his lifestyle, mental health, front teeth and just overall state of his mind, but I think it’s kind of reductive to what he’s accomplished. When you apply the “before and after” dichotomy to Brown’s career, there is an implication of rigidness that causes one to disregard what happened in between the beginning and the current present of Brown’s life, a lack of respect for the process of what he’s been through to get to where he is. The transcendence of his music lies in how it’s always been in celebration of the messy, flawed, supremely fucked up sides of ourselves that we can’t help and making that okay. Thinking about all of this reminds me of Mac Miller, only because what happened to Mac is always something that was a real scenario for Danny Brown, according to the man himself through his music. I am so happy that he’s still with us, performing across the world for all of his fans. If you get the chance to see him live and are even remotely a fan, I would highly suggest you take the opportunity.

Danny Brown’s Set List:

“Dirty Laundry”

“Black Brad Pitt”

"Kool Aid”

“Side B (Dope Song)”

“Smokin’ and Drinkin’”

“Break It (Go)”

“Dip”

“I Will”

“Lie4”

“Outer Space”

“Adderall Admiral”

“Monopoly”

“Die Like a Rockstar”

“Ain’t It Funny”

“Really Doe”

“When It Rain”

“Pneumonia”

“Attak”

“25 Bucks”

“Grown Up”

“3 Tearz”

“Savage Nomad”

“Best Life”