Up and Down with Danny Brown and His New Documentary ‘Live at the Majestic’

Photo by Laura June Kirsch, courtesy of House of Vans

Danny Brown, as he tends to do in his music, moves through different registers in the span of a sentence. He settles into a low drawl when he tries to explain an idea and rises to an ecstatic, high-pitched cackle without warning. He speeds up and finds a rhythm and rattles off his thoughts before exhausting himself and slowing his tempo back down, his voice a revving moped. He’s in thrall to his own mind; he rolls along with whatever it throws up at whatever pace it decides to do so. Every clause, every word, has its own cadence, but it’s all a part of a wider process, a sentence or an idea that can change shape as soon as it comes on.

Watching Live at the Majestic, the new Andrew Cohn-directed documentary about Brown, this quality is almost immediately apparent. The film follows Brown in the lead-up to his first hometown headlining show in five years, trying to detail the connection between the rapper and his native Detroit. But it goes much further than that. It was shot over the space of two years and it’s cut up with radio and magazine interviews; it shows Brown at home smoking blunts and watching soccer, playing with his cat and feeling lethargic; it cuts back to old footage shot in the late 2000s, his 20s, a difficult time in which he had no artistic balance, no confidence, and absolutely no money. It shows a breadth of character that belies its sub-60-minute running time. In the first two minutes of the film—between a live performance of “Jealousy,” a brief interview, and a conversation with his manager about health supplements—Brown uses four different octaves to get his point across.

“I’m an actor in this movie, man! I can’t take no credit for this,” he tells me as he drags on a Newport menthol in the backyard of the Greenpoint House of Vans venue where the film is about to be publicly shown for the first time. “They said they’re making a documentary… next thing I know they got a mic on me and cameras in my face.” Leaning back into a small couch, his feet crossed on the table in front of him, he starts to go through the registers: “I watch so much TV, and I know you gotta be natural,” he says deliberately. “That’s the way to come across it. So it was like I just ignored that shit. You put a camera in my face, the best thing for me to do is just not pay attention to it.”

Screenshot from Live At The Majestic

Tonight he’ll follow the film viewing with a fan-led Q&A and a live performance. The line stretched most of the way back to Williamsburg before doors opened, and the room’s already packed to capacity by the time we sit down to talk. He’s been touring recently, but Live at the Majestic is the first new work Danny Brown has shared publicly since the release of 2013’s Old.

“It’s kinda embarrassing to see that type of shit in front of other people. I mean, I’m a little goofy. It shows my goofy moments. I wanna be a rapper. I want to be the cool rapper. I’m still that goofy guy.” He smiles and rises to a giggle, hunching forwards. Quickly the discomfort gets a disclaimer: “I know who I am at this point, at 35 years old. I’m comfortable in my skin.”

One of Live at the Majestic’s most poignant moments comes when Brown talks about those difficult middle years, his penniless 20s. The music he was putting out was straightforward, cliché Detroit gangster rap, and it wasn’t taking him anywhere. He was pretty good at playing the role, but he hadn’t built up the belief that he’d be better at playing Danny Brown. “I was just saying stuff that I thought other people would like,” he says in the film. “I wasn’t being Danny Brown… I didn’t know what else to do—I didn’t even have any confidence to really make music in that sense.”

The more honest, reflexive lyricism that Brown dove into from there, starting with 2010’s The Hybrid and locking in with 2011’s XXX, comes with the risk of embarrassment, of putting too much out there and worrying about what the public might see. He addresses depression and addiction just as much as he celebrates the drugs and booze that push him there. Flick through any of his last three albums and you can find it. “Clean Up,” from Old, lays it out succinctly: “The thoughts are cloudy / In the marijuana sky, but it started raining molly / It got me feeling sorry while I’m feeling on myself.” Eventually he lays it bare: “Been stressing so long, think depression done settled,” he raps.

Screenshot from Live at the Majestic

“I knew how you portray yourself on camera was a big stepping stone,” he tells me, starting slow and speeding up. “A lot of times, I fucking come out here with a missing tooth, looking crazy. I had to get comfortable. And learning it was just not giving a fuck about it. Just like anything else.” He talks about rewatching the footage from his 20s, seeing a reflection of a former self that he worked hard to move away from. “It’s a little emotional for me,” he says, “but I’ll never let me think I’m so gangster that I’ll never let that side come out.”

Throughout Live at the Majestic, there’s a focus on the connection that this catharsis brings with his deeply committed followers. After the flawlessly recorded live sets, the film cuts to conversations with Brown’s fans in the crowd. There’s a young white guy stuck in a small town, soon to check into rehab, who turned to Brown’s music in search of a way out. There’s an artist who uses Brown in his comic books, creating off Brown’s creations, reassured by Brown’s own nagging worries over his creations and bolstered by his perseverance through doubt. There’s a woman who covers Brown’s songs on her ukulele, who embraced Brown’s music while trying to cope with her mother’s alcoholism and her own depression.

“That’s why I do it,” Brown tells me. “That’s what I do it for. That’s better than any fucking material item you can get. Your music fucking affecting somebody, that’s better than any shit. Somebody’s like, “Man, XXX helped me with my addiction and I was fucked up.” That shit means a lot to me. Some real shit. It makes me feel like it’s all worth it, no matter what. Somebody got something out of it.”

He’s animated, ecstatic again. “Words is one thing, music is another. A lot of songs, you can hear them, but if you read it you would take a totally different meaning from it. So I feel like these are kids that are reading between the lines and just taking it deeper into the songs. That’s what I do a lot of times with my favorite musicians. I’m very thankful that somebody looks to me like that.”

Screenshot from Live at the Majestic

The fans that the film focuses on are focused on Brown’s manic sensibility, that force that takes him to transcendent highs and dire lows, with drugs or without. And much of Live at the Majestic’s power comes from capturing these highs and lows of Danny Brown, keeping the camera rolling through every turn on the ride. “For me it’s a rollercoaster,” he says. “Either up or down. Never middle. If it’s the middle, then it’s something to be paranoid about. That means something’s about to happen. Maybe it might be a high, maybe it’ll be a low, who knows? But if it’s the middle, I’m a little uneasy about shit. I’m now worrying that something’s about to happen. It’s either gotta be going crazy good or I’m fucking depressed.”

It’s bound up in his performances, too. In a couple hours, around 10 PM, Brown will take to the stage, roll through roughly 30 minutes of his best-known material—“Grown Up,” “25 Bucks,” “Smokin & Drinkin”—and then walk off. The hundreds that turned up to see him wander away happy and move on. But Brown will probably feel like shit. When he walks offstage in Detroit at the end of the movie, he’s almost silent, his engine burnt out, the lowest of his registers.

“It’s like you’re Superman and you’ve used all your powers,” he tells me. “Now it’s just back to Clark Kent again. I used all my shit.” He switches superheroes to get his point across. “How does Batman feel after he just killed some villains and just gone back to the cage or some shit? Now he’s with Albert.”

So what does he do then? “All you can do. Just wait for the Batsignal to go back up in the air.”

Alex Robert Ross just saw a Batsignal flash across the sky. Follow him on Twitter.