Danny Brown was just seven when N.W.A. dropped their landmark “Straight Outta Compton.” Outfitted with lyrics too profane for radio, a sound sharper than a switchblade, and a gangster image now so iconic as to seem banal, the West Coast rap septet readily gained a devoted following. At first, no one sounded quite like them; soon, no one could afford not to.
In “Really Doe,” Danny Brown’s just-released single from his upcoming album Atrocity Exhibition, Brown harkens back to the early days of hip-hop. What results is neither original nor trite. Instead, Brown has created a mix of moving parts that, assembled by an unlikely quartet, succeeds as a season-defining single.
“Really Doe” assembles an N.W.A.-style crew for a good ol’ posse track. Its star-spangled cast – Kendrick Lamar, Ab-Soul, Earl Sweatshirt, and producer Black Milk – nostalgically revives the gangster rap launched way back in suburban 1980s L.A.
The track kicks off with a drum sample lifted from N.W.A., a stomp-your-feet and bat-your-head rhythm haunted from above by the unsettling lilt of wind chimes. The effect is ghostly, like a midnight adventure through a graveyard. A repeating snare-kickdrum combo carries the song, echoing with the angry beatings of a human heart.
The track succeeds on sparse production — a less-is-more counterweight to the chart-topping maximalism of Kanye West and K-Dot. It’s dark, almost sinister, without being heavy. Like Pusha T, the Kanye protégée whose 2013 My Name is My Name collected the ingredients of his mentor’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy to concoct something distinct, Brown borrows from the unpretentious archives of Nas and Ghostface Killah to create something uniquely his own.
The product is a mesmerizing whirlwind of braggadocio checkered with self-doubt. “They say I got the city on fire,” Kendrick blasts on the hook, which he wrote. Brown, meanwhile, wonders about the onset of fame. “I done made it out the hood / Think I’m goin’ back?” He replies: “I wish a motherfucker would.”
Like any posse cut, “Really Doe” banks on the quality of the featured company. Each rapper delivers: Ab-Soul stuffs uptempo bars on gang relations and drug use into a verse bursting with contented quasi-aggrandizement; Kendrick deploys his renowned knack for wordsmithery on restless meters sure to please fans old and new; Earl Sweatshirt closes the record with a joke (“I’m at your house like, ‘Why you got your couch on my Chucks?’”) masked by his steely cadence.
The gang on “Really Doe” isn’t N.W.A., despite an earnest effort. Brown does, however, succeed in summoning something old and storied: a classic form making a twenty-first century comeback.