Scaring the Hoes, Embracing the Dolls
Dec. 2nd, 2025 10:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
utilitymonstergirlIf you think you're unworthy of life
If you're tired of just playing nice
If you're looking for one light of hope
Inside the last days of Rome
Well, you can come with us tonight
Maybe you can recognize
There's still some life inside these
Bones, dry bones, in American towns...
—Car Seat Headrest, The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man)
While it's true that Danny Brown left so many sons behind, could fill a group home, they do have a noted tendency to become daughters. Some of the foremost among them have joined in on his Stardust tour: Underscores, Femtanyl, and perhaps an unannounced guest if you're lucky.
I saw the tour on its Chicago stop as my fourth concert this year, following Alice Longyu Gao/Tommy Fleece in May,1 Femtanyl/Metaroom in June,2 and Stomach Book/Girls Rituals in September.3 This had by far the best balance of enthusiasm for the openers and main event; calling them 'openers' even feels like selling them short, with a dynamic and energy closer to a festival lineup.
Femtanyl and Underscores make a great yin-yang pairing: the weird kid in the Machine Girl shirt who can command a stage with the best of them, and the puckish pop star who is not-so-secretly a huge dork. My first Femtanyl show was all-ages, which impressed on me how much of a landmark artist she's become for a lot of kids in such a short time. Even in a much bigger 18+ crowd, P3T and KATAMARI and GIRL HELL 1999 still went hard as hell;4 I see her on track for being a fixture at festivals while still preserving the energy of a grungy basement show.
Underscores5 is a master of pop songcraft, but like Girl Talk, this is because she loves the form as it is rather than trying to save it from itself. Her set opened with Locals (Girls like us), the cuntiest dysphoria jam since FACESHOPPING; hearing a whole crowd belt out STOP / ME IF / YOU'VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE: / GIRLS / LIKE US / ARE ROTTEN TO THE CORE dislodged something deep within my soul.
Danny's set began with no stage banter or buildup, just launching right into Starburst with infectious energy. After the first volley of Stardust tracks, the setlist took on a narrative arc about how working with weird fags will save your life. He played a run of hedonistic bangers from XXX and Old and Atrocity Exhibition, which now feel safely past-tense rather than an active crisis. Midway through is the inflection point, Ain't it Funny and Scaring the Hoes: confronting your own worst failings and the fear of others' disdain before any true growth is possible. We emerge from the katabasis with Psychoboost,6 featuring surprise guest Jane Remover. In my opinion, this is the best of Danny's recent collab tracks, and its energy was perfect for this point of the show. The crowd lost its goddamn mind; hollering WHOSE DICK YOU SUCK, NOW? at the emotional peak of the show felt phenomenal.
Hearing Stardust tracks live in a crowd is a fundamentally different beast from hearing them on headphones, or even playing them at work. Copycats and Starburst and so on go hard as singles, but a lot of tracks work much better within the flow and context of the album, and even better in a setlist that can pull from across his career. The songs from the darkest times in his life can now be approached as relics, and Stardust is an album striving to make itself a relic too: yearning for a world where bringing on a dozen queer collaborators for a major album is unremarkable, where the features here have evolved from up-and-comers to established icons. Not a passing of the torch - he's clearly got a lot more to say with his career - but spreading the flame tenfold.
It's been said that this turn towards experimental and electronic-dance sounds didn't come out of nowhere; Old had features from Purity Ring and Charli XCX back in 2013. Hell, Atrocity Exhibition was named after a Joy Division song. But I don't think the queer resonances came out of nowhere either.7 Danny's always been stubbornly weird, even losing a deal with G-Unit in 2010 due to his fondness for skinny jeans. He recognizes that same spirit in queer artists, as he's said outright:
Even now, thinking about who I wanted to work with on Stardust, I was seeing people like Jane Remover8 and Underscores and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get them to work with me. I was thinking, Why ain’t nobody else working with them, though? Is it because of all of this trans shit that people don’t wanna embrace them? That made me wanna fuck with them even harder, because I’ve always been about that. When I first came out, people were hardcore judging you based on what you look like instead of judging the fucking music. Those artists are making the sickest shit out, so that was my goal: to shed light on that scene.9
As slippery as the concept of "trans art" may be, I think that broader cultures beginning to take it seriously is inseparable from trans rights as an urgent political cause; transphobia as not just offensive but pathetically uncool. I've seen the claim that the birth of "poptimism" is inseparable from the mainstream acceptance of gay rights, since the bar for critically-lauded pop music often came down to "do the gays like it?" Poptimists of the 2000s re-evaluated the homophobic backlash to disco, and now trans artists are plundering the most critically-derided genres of that era and winning accolades for it.
In 2002, Pitchfork reviewed Kylie Minogue's Fever as a joke. In 2025, it gave Love & Ponystep a higher score than Let God Sort Em Out.
So, what now? A long rest after the marathon tour, for sure. But I hope that Danny follows the same trajectory as Denzel Curry: "I made my introspective concept album, now to call up all my friends for some fucking bangers."
1. I was delighted that the Stardust show's interlude playlist included Let's Hope Heteros Fail, Learn, and Retire.
2. I spotted a girl I briefly dated and a friend-of-a-friend I mainly know through furry cons, because we truly are just Like This.
3. I thought "oh, that girl setting up the merch table has tattoos that look like Devi McCallion's— wait a goddamn minute." (The other girl at the table was zombAe, which I didn't realize until she got onstage for BAMBI.)
4. Live Femtanyl shows are an interesting proposition because on their recordings, the vocals are glitched and bitcrushed and used as just another instrumental line, like a fucked-up and evil Nujabes. Thus, I know the flow of these songs by heart, but very few of the actual lyrics, so I'm just sort of hollering nonsense to the beat.
5. Underscores' current headphone-hair-dye style looks great on her and probably literally nobody else.
6. A song that literally opens with it feels like you a part of me, part of me, part of me...
7. Anecdotally, I first heard Danny in a Spotify playlist made by a friend in my queer youth group circa 2014.
8. He's also said that Jane inspired some of the production on Scaring the Hoes, especially Fentanyl Tester. I absolutely see it.
9. This reminds me of Nabokov's position of "segregation is bullshit, Pushkin was black and he's the best to ever do it."
If you're tired of just playing nice
If you're looking for one light of hope
Inside the last days of Rome
Well, you can come with us tonight
Maybe you can recognize
There's still some life inside these
Bones, dry bones, in American towns...
—Car Seat Headrest, The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man)
While it's true that Danny Brown left so many sons behind, could fill a group home, they do have a noted tendency to become daughters. Some of the foremost among them have joined in on his Stardust tour: Underscores, Femtanyl, and perhaps an unannounced guest if you're lucky.
I saw the tour on its Chicago stop as my fourth concert this year, following Alice Longyu Gao/Tommy Fleece in May,1 Femtanyl/Metaroom in June,2 and Stomach Book/Girls Rituals in September.3 This had by far the best balance of enthusiasm for the openers and main event; calling them 'openers' even feels like selling them short, with a dynamic and energy closer to a festival lineup.
Femtanyl and Underscores make a great yin-yang pairing: the weird kid in the Machine Girl shirt who can command a stage with the best of them, and the puckish pop star who is not-so-secretly a huge dork. My first Femtanyl show was all-ages, which impressed on me how much of a landmark artist she's become for a lot of kids in such a short time. Even in a much bigger 18+ crowd, P3T and KATAMARI and GIRL HELL 1999 still went hard as hell;4 I see her on track for being a fixture at festivals while still preserving the energy of a grungy basement show.
Underscores5 is a master of pop songcraft, but like Girl Talk, this is because she loves the form as it is rather than trying to save it from itself. Her set opened with Locals (Girls like us), the cuntiest dysphoria jam since FACESHOPPING; hearing a whole crowd belt out STOP / ME IF / YOU'VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE: / GIRLS / LIKE US / ARE ROTTEN TO THE CORE dislodged something deep within my soul.
Danny's set began with no stage banter or buildup, just launching right into Starburst with infectious energy. After the first volley of Stardust tracks, the setlist took on a narrative arc about how working with weird fags will save your life. He played a run of hedonistic bangers from XXX and Old and Atrocity Exhibition, which now feel safely past-tense rather than an active crisis. Midway through is the inflection point, Ain't it Funny and Scaring the Hoes: confronting your own worst failings and the fear of others' disdain before any true growth is possible. We emerge from the katabasis with Psychoboost,6 featuring surprise guest Jane Remover. In my opinion, this is the best of Danny's recent collab tracks, and its energy was perfect for this point of the show. The crowd lost its goddamn mind; hollering WHOSE DICK YOU SUCK, NOW? at the emotional peak of the show felt phenomenal.
Hearing Stardust tracks live in a crowd is a fundamentally different beast from hearing them on headphones, or even playing them at work. Copycats and Starburst and so on go hard as singles, but a lot of tracks work much better within the flow and context of the album, and even better in a setlist that can pull from across his career. The songs from the darkest times in his life can now be approached as relics, and Stardust is an album striving to make itself a relic too: yearning for a world where bringing on a dozen queer collaborators for a major album is unremarkable, where the features here have evolved from up-and-comers to established icons. Not a passing of the torch - he's clearly got a lot more to say with his career - but spreading the flame tenfold.
It's been said that this turn towards experimental and electronic-dance sounds didn't come out of nowhere; Old had features from Purity Ring and Charli XCX back in 2013. Hell, Atrocity Exhibition was named after a Joy Division song. But I don't think the queer resonances came out of nowhere either.7 Danny's always been stubbornly weird, even losing a deal with G-Unit in 2010 due to his fondness for skinny jeans. He recognizes that same spirit in queer artists, as he's said outright:
Even now, thinking about who I wanted to work with on Stardust, I was seeing people like Jane Remover8 and Underscores and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get them to work with me. I was thinking, Why ain’t nobody else working with them, though? Is it because of all of this trans shit that people don’t wanna embrace them? That made me wanna fuck with them even harder, because I’ve always been about that. When I first came out, people were hardcore judging you based on what you look like instead of judging the fucking music. Those artists are making the sickest shit out, so that was my goal: to shed light on that scene.9
As slippery as the concept of "trans art" may be, I think that broader cultures beginning to take it seriously is inseparable from trans rights as an urgent political cause; transphobia as not just offensive but pathetically uncool. I've seen the claim that the birth of "poptimism" is inseparable from the mainstream acceptance of gay rights, since the bar for critically-lauded pop music often came down to "do the gays like it?" Poptimists of the 2000s re-evaluated the homophobic backlash to disco, and now trans artists are plundering the most critically-derided genres of that era and winning accolades for it.
In 2002, Pitchfork reviewed Kylie Minogue's Fever as a joke. In 2025, it gave Love & Ponystep a higher score than Let God Sort Em Out.
So, what now? A long rest after the marathon tour, for sure. But I hope that Danny follows the same trajectory as Denzel Curry: "I made my introspective concept album, now to call up all my friends for some fucking bangers."
1. I was delighted that the Stardust show's interlude playlist included Let's Hope Heteros Fail, Learn, and Retire.
2. I spotted a girl I briefly dated and a friend-of-a-friend I mainly know through furry cons, because we truly are just Like This.
3. I thought "oh, that girl setting up the merch table has tattoos that look like Devi McCallion's— wait a goddamn minute." (The other girl at the table was zombAe, which I didn't realize until she got onstage for BAMBI.)
4. Live Femtanyl shows are an interesting proposition because on their recordings, the vocals are glitched and bitcrushed and used as just another instrumental line, like a fucked-up and evil Nujabes. Thus, I know the flow of these songs by heart, but very few of the actual lyrics, so I'm just sort of hollering nonsense to the beat.
5. Underscores' current headphone-hair-dye style looks great on her and probably literally nobody else.
6. A song that literally opens with it feels like you a part of me, part of me, part of me...
7. Anecdotally, I first heard Danny in a Spotify playlist made by a friend in my queer youth group circa 2014.
8. He's also said that Jane inspired some of the production on Scaring the Hoes, especially Fentanyl Tester. I absolutely see it.
9. This reminds me of Nabokov's position of "segregation is bullshit, Pushkin was black and he's the best to ever do it."
