Danny Brown - Uknowhatimsayin¿ review

The Guardian 80

(Warp)
He may look less of a mess, but Brown is still full of sap, celebrating sexual escapades in comic, crowd-pleasing style

Danny Brown’s teeth once looked like a cursed mountain range, his hair getting up from his scalp as if it had somewhere to suddenly be. Both are now smartened up for his first new music in three years, to the point where you might buy a car or sofa from him, but the tracks themselves thankfully still give off a malodorous stank.

The Detroit rapper has cultivated, in terms of pure sonics, one of the greatest ever voices in hip-hop: his larynx seems to have its own personality disorder, one minute a gruff sage, the next a raunchy yowling tomcat. The opening track, Change Up, is in the former mode: Brown, with the “mind of a master, blood of a slave”, laments a world where “stand-up niggas take shots to the knees”. But soon enough, his sap rises, eyes glint, and by track three he’s doing “the humpty hump in a Burger King bathroom”.