Quaranta

To paraphrase psych-rockers Spacemen 3, 42-year-old rapper Danny Brown loves taking drugs to make music about taking drugs. However, his compulsion collapsed into addiction after lockdown and a painful breakup, and Brown went into rehab to get sober. Quaranta (Italian for 40) was recorded in the maw of his illness yet it’s a hard stare in the mirror, something Brown’s always been brilliant at. “This rap shit done saved my life and fucked it up at the same time” is its opening salvo, with plenty of pithy but bleak shots to…

Since exploding into popular consciousness with XXX, a 2011 masterwork detailing his crazed life of sex, pills, and weed, Danny Brown has served as a lodestone for modern rap’s perilous embrace of hard drugs. The Detroit rapper utilized a manic, strangely hyper cadence seemingly fueled by too much Molly. More importantly, he created music with fearlessness, seemingly unconcerned with how the oft-conservative rap world perceived him. When EDM soared in popularity, he penned Old, a wildly exuberant 2013 valentine to…