This is a picture of Miley Cyrus expressing herself, which is a thing that Danny Brown made a song about.
Near the end of her new record Bangerz, Miley Cyrus, paints the very picture of irony. “I feel like I’ve become somebody else,” she sings, her voice distorting, the music pausing, threatening to dissipate into a massive dubstep drop that never comes. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the modern Miley: all signifier, nothing signified. Meanwhile, on Danny Brown’s new album Old, there is a song called “Dubstep.” It is a song about drug dealing. It too contains no drop. Much like Cyrus, Danny Brown plays with the listener’s expectations only to subvert them. But while Miley has taken an aesthetic—informed by hip-hop, underground dance music, art school pranksterdom, weed, and “Party” as an abstract concept articulated by Andrew W.K.—and used it to rebrand herself as America’s Worst (But Still Extremely Marketable) Nightmare, Brown has accomplished something worlds more audacious. He’s used channels classically reserved for indie music to force his way into the hip-hop conversation. With Old, he’s out here trying to revolutionize the way we think about the relationship between hip-hop and dance music. The only thing Miley was able to revolutionize was herself.
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Though it may seem ridiculous to speak of Miley Cyrus and Danny Brown in the same breath, consider this: As a persona, “Miley Cyrus”—young, impressionable, addled by hip-hop and drug culture in equal measure—would listen to Danny Brown. His music (specifically, songs like “Handstand,” which takes Diplo’s “Express Yourself” meme to its logical conclusion) plays to this new breed of rap fan—open-minded, enthusiastic but a little undereducated, well-meaning but a little cavalier with signifiers of authenticity. This is a long way of saying that both Miley Cyrus and Danny Brown have uttered the phrase “turn up” with absolutely zero percent irony.
In many ways, major pop stars are like the replicants from Blade Runner—perfect, empty vessels, meant to be programmed, commodified, and subsequently capitalized off of. When one guise no longer fits, another can easily be created. Those paying attention to Cyrus saw her transformation from mall-country tween diva into a cultural firebrand capable of launching a thinkpiece with a single twitch of her ass muscles coming from a mile away. She abandoned pop-country in favor of dance-pop with her third record Can’t Be Tamed, and had been using her Twitter to make overtures at hipness months before “We Can’t Stop” was a gleam in Mike Will’s eye. Though she might have effectively joined hip-hop’s mainstream, Miley Cyrus is still very much a pop star, one who has obligations to a core audience which is still very young. Hence, while Bangerz contains swear-words and the video for “Wrecking Ball” might depict Miley naked swinging around on an actual wrecking ball, the record is still watering-down of vague idea of “ratchet.” For all of Miley’s pre-release bluster, she still put out a pop album, one that—shocks aside—is relatively devoid of both tooth and spine.
On his 2010 album The Hybrid, Danny Brown rapped, “I rap like I bet my life / because in all actuality, nigga I did.” Even on his most ebullient tracks, there is still an edge to Danny’s voice, a certain desperation communicating the fact that this dude is a former drug dealer whose entire livelihood is based on his ability to string words together. At 32, Danny Brown’s window for creating a sustainable career for himself is closing. But ever since his 2011 record XXX, he’s made every move count, eschewing a traditional label model and instead aligning himself with the indie-dance label Fool’s Gold, embracing the galaxy of high fashion, and modeling his signature sound as an American version of Grime, located somewhere between the dance and hip-hop worlds. But though many of his tracks could find themselves nestled between Baauer and Flosstradamus in a DJ set, Danny Brown is still very much a hard, grimy MC from Detroit, as evidenced by Side A of Old. Originally called ODB for “Old Danny Brown,” the first half of Old is more AZ than A-Trak and is more in line with Danny’s fruitful back catalogue than indie culture’s current understanding of him. It finds Danny exorcising his plentiful demons over beats that might surprise those who flocked to him off the strength of XXX. Rhetorically, Miley and Danny have accomplished similar things: what they are and what they posit to be are different, and the impending success or failure of their records hinges upon that sense of cognitive dissonance.
What’s great about what Brown has done is he’s using his status as a fixture in indie hip-hop to say what he wants in a way that he wants to say it. Old is Illmatic and Stankonia in one: half hard-boiled traditionalist storytelling, half bizarro journey into the mind of a maniacal visionary. It remains to be seen if there’s a legitimate radio single on Old, but “Smokin’ & Drinkin’” and the Schoolboy Q-featuring “Dope Fiend Rental,” both of which present a hellish, dystopian take on current rap trends, have a legitimate shot at finding a spot on Hot 97 playlists. As evidenced by the 360-degree rebranding of Miley Cyrus, stranger things have happened.
Drew Millard has never Expressed Himself. He’s on Twitter – @drewmillard
