It’s been a tough few years for younger males. The position fashions supplied up in at this time’s crop of alpha male podcasters and crypto grifters present little within the face of the world’s dizzying buffet of hostilities. So it’s comforting to see Detroit hip-hop maximalist Danny Brown’s virtuosic model of weirdo make its method to the TikTok technology. His podcast The Danny Brown Present (think about Joe Rogan put via Grownup Swim’s mental filter) is a dependable supply for viral snippets. It additionally supplied the promotional glue for Brown’s newest album, a joint venture with fellow rap-electronic eccentric JPEGMAFIA, successfully titled Scaring The Hoes. In a single clip, Brown asks his good friend and collaborator about getting surgical procedure to repair his hairline, imploring audiences to purchase the file so as to make the expense worthwhile.
Each artists lean into this kind of radical, maybe barely unhinged, type of honesty all through the album. It wouldn’t be solely unfair to see your complete venture as an elaborate send-up of rap advertising. If the industrial thrust of the previous decade of the style have been R&B crossovers cynically aimed toward ladies, Danny Brown and Jpegmafia set out, and succeeded, at creating the precise reverse.
Whereas the pair have labored collectively up to now Jpegmafia’s manufacturing on this venture is his most freewheeling, taking refuge in decidedly chaotic registers by introducing downbeats and drum sequences like a gambler at a slot machine. “Lean Beef Patty,” the album’s lead single and opening monitor, rides a pitched up pattern of Diddy’s “I Want a Lady (Half 2),” warped into Gen Z oblivion earlier than a staggered synth pulse coaxes a rhythm out of the clashing parts. In the meantime, the ever referential Jpegmafia opens with what may be the most effective line of the yr, opting to declare, “fuck Elon Musk,” as if it had been merely the primary thought his thoughts might muster.
It’s the album’s unpolished edges that rope you in. The inexplicable mastering – Brown’s vocals by no means fairly punch within the combine, as if coming in from a automobile parked outdoors the studio – makes it really feel as uncut as an Instagram Reside. On “Fentanyl Tester,” the pattern of Kelis’ “Milkshake” sublimates right into a stuttering lure rhythm, replete with a roaring, subterranean bass, till all of it vanishes and a blissful breakbeat ushers in Danny Brown, mid dash, rapping about copious consumption. The music’s most discernible sound is Brown’s darkly infectious chant, “Palms on the wheel no accident.”
Elsewhere, like on the album’s title monitor, a devious chorus of echoed handclaps — the sort you wouldn’t need somebody strolling by your bed room door to misread. The sound makes manner for an much more sinister string association that juts out and in of Brown’s frenetic verse. Someplace, obliterated by the swell of noise, he’s surveying the passage of time. “Fuck that hip-hop and that outdated man move / The place the AutoTune at?” he raps. “Give a fuck a few lure / ‘Trigger it’s all in regards to the scams, catch up, outdated man.”
Nonetheless, Brown is as vibrantly devious as ever, whilst his lyrics counsel a deeper decline into the grips of substance use. The album’s second half has the sensation of an after-hours get together. Issues are slower solely by necessity. We’re greeted with the Cocteau Twins-sounding “Kingdom Hearts Key,” which samples the well-known anime composer Yoko Kanno. JPEG’s move arrives with an uninhibited abandon. The punchy one-liner, “Hittin whip-its and consuming Halal,” lands virtually solely in service of a later reference to neo-soul crooner Bilal. On the gospel-sampling “God Loves You,” Danny Brown finds as some ways to make church attractive as he can, opening his verse by rapping, “sit on my face I wanna communicate in tongues.”
The album’s pop cultural sensibility finally ends up doing a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to cohesion. References to every part from King of the Hill to tracks with titles like “Jack Harlow Combo Meal” have the mischievous feeling of early Eminem or, extra aptly, South Park, unafraid to take jabs at industrial orthodoxy. The album seems in full on YouTube with an imposing purple font with its tongue-in-cheek title printed as if it had been a bombastic Drake loosie.
Each Danny Brown and JPEGMAFIA transmit the type of disjointed nervousness that lurks beneath the fashionable situation. “HOE (Heaven on Earth),” the album’s penultimate monitor, brings us again into the choir. Nearly like a core reminiscence, Brown’s verse appears to tumble out of him. “Fell on my knees after I caught a felony / Inform me who there for me / Suppose I would like remedy, despatched God a textual content however his message flip inexperienced,” he raps. Like deciphering an historical cassette tape, distorted proper as much as the purpose of destruction, Scaring the Hoes is, in actual fact, a little bit scary. And that’s what makes it so compelling. The chaos makes manner for readability.