Danny Brown is a born performer. He craves the spotlight, grinning, flashing devil horns, waggling his self-proclaimed million-dollar tongue at the crowd. Maybe it’s something to do with only being famous for about a third of his career. Maybe he’s just on a lot of pills. But the guy seems genuinely thrilled to do his thing night after night, even for mollied-out college kids like the ones that packed the WOW Hall at his Eugene tour stop yesterday.
The same couldn’t be said about Maxo Kream, the great but clearly weary Houston rapper who opened the show. He admitted to the crowd he was “coming down off a Xan,” and he was clearly crashing pretty hard. One wonders why he didn’t take it later, but maybe he, like the crowd, wasn’t expecting the DJ to spin for a solid 45 minutes before any sign of a rapper onstage. He barely bothered to rap, spending much of his time onstage desperately entreating the audience to shout his name and put their hands up.
Compare that to Brown, who asked the audience to put their hands up only twice. Not only did they immediately oblige, they cheered while doing it.
The difference a great performer can make at a hip hop show is crucial. Given the frequent lack of anything to watch onstage at rap shows, it can be difficult for those not intimately familiar with the music to have much fun at one. Brown had the benefit of not only being fascinating to watch with all the hair-flipping and tongue-waving and rock-star prancing, but having memorable enough songs that even casual fans probably know a lot of his one-liners by heart. Who doesn’t remember where they were when they first heard Brown spit “She about to go make it rain/thunder-fucking-storm/kush nug get to the brain/pop-fucking-corn?”
Brown’s set was strictly chronological, excluding tracks from his all-but-forgotten debut The Hybrid. He opened with a solid block of songs from his 2011 breakout XXX before segueing into 2013’s Old, non-album single “Grown Up,” Rustie collaboration “Attak,” and a few cuts from the freshly dropped Atrocity Exhibition to finish it off. This worked in part because Brown’s last three albums are roughly equally beloved. Most critics, including this one, would agree XXX is his best work. The songs from Old, an appeal to the festival crowd, worked the best live. And the pessimistic Atrocity Exhibition is hardly a party album, but it’s still fresh in fans’ minds. The venue cut Brown off before he could play more than a handful of songs from that record, but at least he got the bangers — “Really Doe” and “Pneumonia” — out of the way.
Unusually for a WOW show, no re-entries were allowed. Perhaps this explains why the bathroom and bar lines were interminable, seeing as at most WOW shows it’s easy to just go out on the street to do what you’d otherwise do at either of those places.
