Star Power
Nov. 11th, 2025 04:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
utilitymonstergirlwomen will go on a 1st date with a guy and things will be going well until the guy casually mentions that he's bi and she'll go home and start posting stuff like "we need to normalize being straight" and "whatever happened to beauty" and meanwhile the guy went home to play video games with a bunch of weird discord transsexuals and he named his character 'the grungler' and he keeps saying stuff like 'check it out guys, I'm the grungler'
—@bonkey_bong, 12/6/22
After a run of features with all the most exciting gay nerds in music today, Danny Brown has invited them all to his new album Stardust.1 He's spoken about getting into 100 gecs during rehab, and quickly exploring the broader hyperpop-et-al scene as soon as he came home. He's lent his manic double-time energy to Psychoboost and M3 n MIN3,2 been introspective about recovery on Bird W/O Nest, and meshed with throwback pop on G.I.R.L. and Shake It Like A. And now, on his first post-rehab album, he's doing all that and more at the same time.
//
The first three tracks lay out the interplay beautifully. Book of Daniel is a blindingly earnest ode to rekindling your love of life, with a soaring outro from Quadeca. If you're starting to worry that the album's going to be catastrophically schmaltzy, Starburst swoops in with a squealingly weird beat and the funniest bars on the album.3 It ends with the first of several poems from Angel Prost, which I'm still not quite sure what to make of. Next, Copycats is an airtight pop earworm of acidic self-loathing, with production and choruses from Underscores.4 She's already notched a remarkable career at 25: a buzzy bedroom-pop debut, a breakout genre-hopping concept album about the economic and spiritual hollowing-out of a fictional Michigan town, and now a turn toward relentlessly sleek Y2K-reconstruction pop.5 Her style dovetails beautifully with Danny, and it's very cool to see him interpolate some of Spoiled Little Brat.
I'd only heard of JOHNNASCUS through his verse on a FUKOUNA GIRL remix and a shoutout from zombAe, but he gives 1999 a jaggedness unlike anything else on the album, with an Angles Cut Me When I Try To Think-type beat. It's an interesting dip into techno-dystopianism, where even the braggadocious first verse has bars about the dot-com bubble and The Compulsory U2 Album. This track sets up the most oldhead (affectionate) stretch of the album; here Danny is a man out of time, an old-school purist but refusing to stagnate, referencing the Zoot Suit Riots and Kangols on a truly hoe-scaring beat.
Flowers is Danny at his most dad-jokey, with a whole verse of flower puns, but by God he makes it work. Lift You Up then provides the full oldhead package, a pristine 90s house beat with sage advice on how to stop being such a self-sabotaging loser. It doesn't fall into preachiness because he's clearly talking to his younger self, too:
Think you need to get your ass up off the couch
You ain't never outside, always in the house
And from XXX's title track:
I never leave the house, ain't slept in three days
Poppin' pills, writin', drinkin' and smokin' haze
But that's the thing, isn't it: even if you're trying your damnedest to Work Hard, if you have no sense of how to rest or nourish or engage with the rest of the world, you won't accomplish shit. Add in substance abuse, and things get dark fast. But anyway, pivoting right from this to another Angel poem starting with "essencemaxxing" just cracks me up.
Green Light is... a very sweet song about road head. Hm. It's a collab with Frost Children, who are all about channeling the sleaziest side of recession pop, but there's absolutely no irony or Freak Register. It reminds me of the Twerk/Mr. Blue Sky segment of All Day, a celebration of joyous, life-affirming horniness.
It clicks into place better with the next two tracks, forming a trio of love songs with drastically different tones. What You See is about the parallel tasks of getting sober and taking women seriously, tied together with Quadeca's wrenching chorus: I wanna know what you see in me / I wanna know what you need from me. Once you recognize your faults, you can't just spiral into useless shame over them; you need to trust in your moral judgement and capacity to improve, or else you'll just treat everyone as your confessional priest or worse.
Baby strikes the balance of horny and sentimental with another assist from Underscores. I've seen this called the least structurally-interesting track on the album, but I disagree: it's the control group, showing that this team could make normal-sounding pop and are choosing not to. It's pretty neat in its own right, too, with a delirious forward momentum that reminds me of Love Again and bars from new-to-me queer rapper Rodney Chrome.6 He gives it a delightful boost of libidinal fagginess, and Danny's more restrained lyrics still have some delightful vocal stims; I can't lose when you're on my TEAM will be echoing in my head for years.
If this album is an elegy for SOPHIE, then Whatever the Case is the fucked-up and evil twin of Yeah Right. The feature here is ISSBROKIE, among the best of the white gen-Z tgirl rappers, but I respect her more than I like her.7 While she has her8 share9 of bangers,10 I just don't click with the bulk of her work, but I am a decade removed from her target audience;11 I would've been a huge fan (and probably had some Realizations earlier) if she'd been around when I was in high school. But I'm still very impressed with the network and audience she's built, and I have high hopes for her career.
Anyway, she does a great job here in the role of an up-and-comer who can be as crass and gonzo as Danny's ever been; a gen-Z tgirl Danny would open a verse with a Bad Dragon joke.12 God willing, this can be her Nicki-Minaj-on-Monster-style breakout.13
1L0v3myL1f3! threw me off at first; this much joie de vivre on a Femtanyl beat is such a swerve from most of her usual themes. But that's the point, innit - Black American music and trans music are both just casually expected to perform pain and anguish on demand, and while that's a necessary thing to convey, sometimes you're just fuckin' happy for once. Femtanyl would've been right at home on Atrocity Exhibition, but she's just as equipped to kick off the cathartic climax of the album. (I appreciate the deranged vocal sample and guitar feedback at the end, too.)
NNAMDÏ adds some melancholy wistfulness to RIGHT FROM WRONG; even when you're proud of your recovery and basking in hard-won optimism, there's still the mourning of mistakes and lost time. The End maintains that tone,14 with the bluntest verses yet about his history of addiction and the jagged path out of it. And despite all this, he hasn't turned into a stiff unfunny moralizer because that would be its own type of surrender. as Angel puts it, can we enjoy something before we crest and sink into sleep forever?
Lastly, All4U has Jane Remover's production on the polar opposite of Revengeseekerz's finale. That track was a blast of caustic resentment for the pressures of their audience; Danny is profusely thankful for his. He's already made a searing statement on crowds guffawing at his worst suffering, but here his audience blends seamlessly with God. It's an extension of What You See - you have to trust that you're still capable of growth as both a person and an artist, and he ends this album by consecrating himself to both.
//
So that's Stardust! I've jokingly pitched it as “a concept album about sobriety and loving life and fatherly wisdom, but don’t worry, it's also got a bunch of weird faggots.” But the sobriety and the faggots are inseparable; digging into the most vivid, fascinating music of in any era will inevitably turn up a lot of them. With a new lease on life, doubling down on the craft and joy of music will quickly put you among them, and recoiling from them would be just another type of suicidal stagnation.
Stardust is not, explicitly, a Political Album. It doesn't have a Same Love or an Auntie Diaries15, but that's because it would make no sense - the queers aren't some distant Other, they're right here on both sides of the booth. The allyship is expressed by letting us fuckin' cook. And it worked - the reactions I've seen have been a delightful split of "holy shit, it's [feature]!" and "who the fuck is [feature], because I need to binge their discography right now."
And it's... this album won't save the world. I still stand by my messy feelings about the visibility of queer art. But it feels like something, a win on some scoreboard that matters, to have art this faggy be this well-built and well-received.
I have a ticket to see Danny and Underscores this Sunday. I'll report back on that soon.
//
1. Given the Kendrick and Earl features on Atrocity Exhibition (on one of the all-time-great Evil Faggot Beats, no less), this album does very funny things to the music industry's degrees-of-separation chart.
2. I am delighted that M3 n MIN3 proves that Danny is familiar with Ram Ranch.
3. It's a four-way tie between In Bruno Magli shoes, I'm leavin' tracks Orenthal; I'm lockin' up the game, like punishment from your mama; Punchlines weak, like puttin' water in ketchup; and So when I get up on 'em, I'm stealin' shit like Winona.
4. I first heard of her through Vylet Pony's praise of Wallsocket, and between that and the horseshoe cover art I briefly thought it was going to be another pony fandom concept album.16
5. As a trans woman utterly mortified at the thought of ever dancing in public, it's been very cool to see her dancing front-and-center in the video for Do It, even with a whole secondary video to teach the choreography.
6. Good lord can he make a music video.
7. SoundCloud-rap sex brags and dick jokes from a bi trans girl: A Fascinating Text On GenderTM
8. I fucking adore this zoomer using a Dr. Strangelove sample as a producer tag.
9. The cover art to this one made me think Lil Darkie was transfem for a hot minute.
10. Given how three of these are collabs or posse cuts, I think she's at her best when she's playing off of other weirdos.
11. "If you can’t look at their names without getting annoyed, then they probably weren’t making music for you anyway, and I say that as one of the people who couldn’t look at their names without getting annoyed." —Tom Breihan
12. Though the flow is a bit overstuffed in places, the run from "bitch, you disgust me" to "feeling like Buffy" is immaculate.
13. Seems like people are broadly digging it, but it was very funny to see NME call it "marred by the casual flinging of the F-slur." Did You Not Get The Memo.
14. I love the audacity of having multiple verses in Polish and Ukrainian on the grand climax of your otherwise-completely-English concept album.
15. Though Danny wisely chose not to write an Ally Anthem, I would trust him to write a song about being horny for a trans woman, and a bar like "I got more dolls than Mattel" would be funny as fuck.
16. Vylet's on my wishlist of future Danny collabs, along with Backxwash, clipping., Devi McCallion, GODHANDUSA, Kneecap, RXKNephew, and zombAe. And while it was the right call for the pacing and focus to not have any posse cuts here, my God, he could arrange some bonkers lineups now.
—@bonkey_bong, 12/6/22
After a run of features with all the most exciting gay nerds in music today, Danny Brown has invited them all to his new album Stardust.1 He's spoken about getting into 100 gecs during rehab, and quickly exploring the broader hyperpop-et-al scene as soon as he came home. He's lent his manic double-time energy to Psychoboost and M3 n MIN3,2 been introspective about recovery on Bird W/O Nest, and meshed with throwback pop on G.I.R.L. and Shake It Like A. And now, on his first post-rehab album, he's doing all that and more at the same time.
//
The first three tracks lay out the interplay beautifully. Book of Daniel is a blindingly earnest ode to rekindling your love of life, with a soaring outro from Quadeca. If you're starting to worry that the album's going to be catastrophically schmaltzy, Starburst swoops in with a squealingly weird beat and the funniest bars on the album.3 It ends with the first of several poems from Angel Prost, which I'm still not quite sure what to make of. Next, Copycats is an airtight pop earworm of acidic self-loathing, with production and choruses from Underscores.4 She's already notched a remarkable career at 25: a buzzy bedroom-pop debut, a breakout genre-hopping concept album about the economic and spiritual hollowing-out of a fictional Michigan town, and now a turn toward relentlessly sleek Y2K-reconstruction pop.5 Her style dovetails beautifully with Danny, and it's very cool to see him interpolate some of Spoiled Little Brat.
I'd only heard of JOHNNASCUS through his verse on a FUKOUNA GIRL remix and a shoutout from zombAe, but he gives 1999 a jaggedness unlike anything else on the album, with an Angles Cut Me When I Try To Think-type beat. It's an interesting dip into techno-dystopianism, where even the braggadocious first verse has bars about the dot-com bubble and The Compulsory U2 Album. This track sets up the most oldhead (affectionate) stretch of the album; here Danny is a man out of time, an old-school purist but refusing to stagnate, referencing the Zoot Suit Riots and Kangols on a truly hoe-scaring beat.
Flowers is Danny at his most dad-jokey, with a whole verse of flower puns, but by God he makes it work. Lift You Up then provides the full oldhead package, a pristine 90s house beat with sage advice on how to stop being such a self-sabotaging loser. It doesn't fall into preachiness because he's clearly talking to his younger self, too:
Think you need to get your ass up off the couch
You ain't never outside, always in the house
And from XXX's title track:
I never leave the house, ain't slept in three days
Poppin' pills, writin', drinkin' and smokin' haze
But that's the thing, isn't it: even if you're trying your damnedest to Work Hard, if you have no sense of how to rest or nourish or engage with the rest of the world, you won't accomplish shit. Add in substance abuse, and things get dark fast. But anyway, pivoting right from this to another Angel poem starting with "essencemaxxing" just cracks me up.
Green Light is... a very sweet song about road head. Hm. It's a collab with Frost Children, who are all about channeling the sleaziest side of recession pop, but there's absolutely no irony or Freak Register. It reminds me of the Twerk/Mr. Blue Sky segment of All Day, a celebration of joyous, life-affirming horniness.
It clicks into place better with the next two tracks, forming a trio of love songs with drastically different tones. What You See is about the parallel tasks of getting sober and taking women seriously, tied together with Quadeca's wrenching chorus: I wanna know what you see in me / I wanna know what you need from me. Once you recognize your faults, you can't just spiral into useless shame over them; you need to trust in your moral judgement and capacity to improve, or else you'll just treat everyone as your confessional priest or worse.
Baby strikes the balance of horny and sentimental with another assist from Underscores. I've seen this called the least structurally-interesting track on the album, but I disagree: it's the control group, showing that this team could make normal-sounding pop and are choosing not to. It's pretty neat in its own right, too, with a delirious forward momentum that reminds me of Love Again and bars from new-to-me queer rapper Rodney Chrome.6 He gives it a delightful boost of libidinal fagginess, and Danny's more restrained lyrics still have some delightful vocal stims; I can't lose when you're on my TEAM will be echoing in my head for years.
If this album is an elegy for SOPHIE, then Whatever the Case is the fucked-up and evil twin of Yeah Right. The feature here is ISSBROKIE, among the best of the white gen-Z tgirl rappers, but I respect her more than I like her.7 While she has her8 share9 of bangers,10 I just don't click with the bulk of her work, but I am a decade removed from her target audience;11 I would've been a huge fan (and probably had some Realizations earlier) if she'd been around when I was in high school. But I'm still very impressed with the network and audience she's built, and I have high hopes for her career.
Anyway, she does a great job here in the role of an up-and-comer who can be as crass and gonzo as Danny's ever been; a gen-Z tgirl Danny would open a verse with a Bad Dragon joke.12 God willing, this can be her Nicki-Minaj-on-Monster-style breakout.13
1L0v3myL1f3! threw me off at first; this much joie de vivre on a Femtanyl beat is such a swerve from most of her usual themes. But that's the point, innit - Black American music and trans music are both just casually expected to perform pain and anguish on demand, and while that's a necessary thing to convey, sometimes you're just fuckin' happy for once. Femtanyl would've been right at home on Atrocity Exhibition, but she's just as equipped to kick off the cathartic climax of the album. (I appreciate the deranged vocal sample and guitar feedback at the end, too.)
NNAMDÏ adds some melancholy wistfulness to RIGHT FROM WRONG; even when you're proud of your recovery and basking in hard-won optimism, there's still the mourning of mistakes and lost time. The End maintains that tone,14 with the bluntest verses yet about his history of addiction and the jagged path out of it. And despite all this, he hasn't turned into a stiff unfunny moralizer because that would be its own type of surrender. as Angel puts it, can we enjoy something before we crest and sink into sleep forever?
Lastly, All4U has Jane Remover's production on the polar opposite of Revengeseekerz's finale. That track was a blast of caustic resentment for the pressures of their audience; Danny is profusely thankful for his. He's already made a searing statement on crowds guffawing at his worst suffering, but here his audience blends seamlessly with God. It's an extension of What You See - you have to trust that you're still capable of growth as both a person and an artist, and he ends this album by consecrating himself to both.
//
So that's Stardust! I've jokingly pitched it as “a concept album about sobriety and loving life and fatherly wisdom, but don’t worry, it's also got a bunch of weird faggots.” But the sobriety and the faggots are inseparable; digging into the most vivid, fascinating music of in any era will inevitably turn up a lot of them. With a new lease on life, doubling down on the craft and joy of music will quickly put you among them, and recoiling from them would be just another type of suicidal stagnation.
Stardust is not, explicitly, a Political Album. It doesn't have a Same Love or an Auntie Diaries15, but that's because it would make no sense - the queers aren't some distant Other, they're right here on both sides of the booth. The allyship is expressed by letting us fuckin' cook. And it worked - the reactions I've seen have been a delightful split of "holy shit, it's [feature]!" and "who the fuck is [feature], because I need to binge their discography right now."
And it's... this album won't save the world. I still stand by my messy feelings about the visibility of queer art. But it feels like something, a win on some scoreboard that matters, to have art this faggy be this well-built and well-received.
I have a ticket to see Danny and Underscores this Sunday. I'll report back on that soon.
//
1. Given the Kendrick and Earl features on Atrocity Exhibition (on one of the all-time-great Evil Faggot Beats, no less), this album does very funny things to the music industry's degrees-of-separation chart.
2. I am delighted that M3 n MIN3 proves that Danny is familiar with Ram Ranch.
3. It's a four-way tie between In Bruno Magli shoes, I'm leavin' tracks Orenthal; I'm lockin' up the game, like punishment from your mama; Punchlines weak, like puttin' water in ketchup; and So when I get up on 'em, I'm stealin' shit like Winona.
4. I first heard of her through Vylet Pony's praise of Wallsocket, and between that and the horseshoe cover art I briefly thought it was going to be another pony fandom concept album.16
5. As a trans woman utterly mortified at the thought of ever dancing in public, it's been very cool to see her dancing front-and-center in the video for Do It, even with a whole secondary video to teach the choreography.
6. Good lord can he make a music video.
7. SoundCloud-rap sex brags and dick jokes from a bi trans girl: A Fascinating Text On GenderTM
8. I fucking adore this zoomer using a Dr. Strangelove sample as a producer tag.
9. The cover art to this one made me think Lil Darkie was transfem for a hot minute.
10. Given how three of these are collabs or posse cuts, I think she's at her best when she's playing off of other weirdos.
11. "If you can’t look at their names without getting annoyed, then they probably weren’t making music for you anyway, and I say that as one of the people who couldn’t look at their names without getting annoyed." —Tom Breihan
12. Though the flow is a bit overstuffed in places, the run from "bitch, you disgust me" to "feeling like Buffy" is immaculate.
13. Seems like people are broadly digging it, but it was very funny to see NME call it "marred by the casual flinging of the F-slur." Did You Not Get The Memo.
14. I love the audacity of having multiple verses in Polish and Ukrainian on the grand climax of your otherwise-completely-English concept album.
15. Though Danny wisely chose not to write an Ally Anthem, I would trust him to write a song about being horny for a trans woman, and a bar like "I got more dolls than Mattel" would be funny as fuck.
16. Vylet's on my wishlist of future Danny collabs, along with Backxwash, clipping., Devi McCallion, GODHANDUSA, Kneecap, RXKNephew, and zombAe. And while it was the right call for the pacing and focus to not have any posse cuts here, my God, he could arrange some bonkers lineups now.
