The cumulative message is layered: 1) Stop asking for the old Danny Brown, because I've been working double-time trying to escape him, and 2) Stop asking for the old Danny Brown, because he's obviously still here. The album's structure pokes at the notion of forward motion: At the end of the first track, an unrelentingly ugly crack-sale reminiscence taking place in an abandoned house in Detroit, A-Trak scratches in a hook from "New Era", a song off of Brown's 2010 release The Hybrid. An incident Brown alluded to on XXX's "Fields"-"mommy gave me food stamps, told me buy some Wonderbread/ On the the way, these niggas jumped me, left with knots in my head"-gets expanded to song-length on "Wonderbread" and then referenced again at the end of the album. Bad memories pop up everywhere on Old, including the louder, more festival-ready second half. Side A contains the heaviest, most harrowing material, but the demons he exorcises there don't stay put. The album is 19 songs, ranging across so much emotional terrain that it almost needs to be tackled in stretches. "Problems in my past haunt my future and the present," he moans on "Clean Up". The structure here suggests two LP sides, neatly divided, but one of the best things about Old is how mixed up it is-Brown's past, his present, his deranged side, his reflective side, his party songs and his nightmares. Last year, he famously told a bewildered A$AP Rocky that one of his heroes was Arthur Lee before lecturing him on the merits of Forever Changes. The album is divided into a "Side A" and a "Side B," an act of aesthetic devotion that signals Danny Brown's unusual investment in the arcana of music fandom. The irony of Old, of course, is that Danny Brown's version of a sober, measured, mature album still features plenty of lines about snorting crushed pills, throwing up in hotel sinks, and smoking so much kush you feel yourself falling off of the earth. When I ran into him at SXSW and introduced myself, he gave me a quizzical smile: "I'm challenging ya'll with the next one," he joked, looking slightly uneasy.
"I listened to Old every day and thought, ‘I need to make this more entertaining," he told Pitchfork later. In preparing critics and fans, Brown went to great lengths to warn us not to expect another XXX-"If people are just looking for dick-sucking jokes, there isn't too many of them," he said back in January.
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