TALKING DIRTY WITH DANNY BROWN

Why was it such big news when rapper, Danny Brown, got a blowjob onstage? We delve into the aftermath of a show that was unforgettable - for all the wrong reasons.

If you believe the eyewitnesses, this is what happened. The Triple Rock Social Club in Minneapolis is packed to the roof. Everyone’s here to see the man onstage, grinning at the crowd as he raps, showing off the smashed-out front tooth that’s become his bizarre trademark. Danny Brown - lanky, goofy, dressed like a punk rocker with a hairstyle to match - is a rapper that inspires insane levels of devotion from his fans, who ink Xs on their hands before the show in honour of his last album, XXX. His high-pitched flow and wonderfully dirty rhymes have made him one of the most hyped artists in rap. And although not even he knows it yet, he’s about to deliver a show that people will remember for a long, long time.

Mid-set, Danny (born Daniel Sewell in Detroit) jumps down to walk the front line of the crowd, spitting rhymes right into their faces. And this is where things got a little weird. A woman - she’s never been formally identified - reaches out, grabs hold of his trousers, and yanks them down. She then leans forward and starts giving him a blowjob.

Brown doesn’t stop rapping. Not for a second. After a moment, he slowly backs away.

There is no record of the reaction from the crowd; the show continues. Aside from the sketchy testimony from those few eyewitnesses, the only ‘evidence’ that any of this actually happened is a photo and a cell phone video. Squint really, really hard, you might be able to believe there’s sexual act involved. Maybe.

If we didn’t live in an age of Twitter and Facebook, it might have been nothing more than an urban legend. But the Internet exploded - rumour and conjecture and speculation, fuelled partly by Danny himself (Kendrick Lamar tweeted him: “U really just got the head on stage stanny?” Danny’s response: “And didn’t miss one bar bruh bruh.”) In the wake of the show, National Public Radio held a sober debate about gender and black identity. A Reddit thread on the subject attracted over 500 comments. Some condemned Danny as a misogynist; others, as a bit of a legend. Type ‘Danny Brown’ into Google today, and the second phrase that comes up is ‘Danny Brown gets head onstage’. The show and its outcome have been seared into our collective memory - whether we were there or not.

A few days later, Kitty Pryde - Danny’s opening act and tour companion, and no stranger to raucous live shows herself - posted a blog on Vice Magazine’s Noisey site in support of her friend. “Now I’m prepared to kick a motherfucker in the teeth if he touches me at all,” she wrote, “and I equip myself with giant boots for that reason. What is Danny supposed to do?

Two months later, Danny Brown is sitting in the backstage dressing room at London’s Scala club. “I’ve been in way more difficult situations,” he says to us. “I felt cool. As long as she didn’t bite. That could have turned into a bad situation, if she’d bit down with all her might.”

Why exactly did the world of hip-hop explode just because an artist got involved in a sexual act onstage?

When hundreds of big-name MCs rap about graphic sex, when getting your rocks off is as much a part of rap as sampling and scratching, why is everybody so surprised when a sex act jumped out of the music and into the real world? (Yes, there are questions of sexual assault, but we’ll get to that.) What made this so memorable?

Nobody reacts this way when explicit sex happens as part of heavy metal shows. And Jim Morrison famously got naked onstage in what came to be known as The Miami Incident. These things are par for the course, and seem to raise no more than a weary eyebrow. It’s rock and roll, baby.

But when it comes to hip-hop, music and sex have stayed connected only in rhymes. The few times things did get a little raunchy, the details have been fuzzier than the Triple Rock video footage: the Gathering Of The Juggalos, a festival organised by the Insane Clown Posse, regularly breeds stories of sex in public, but nothing has ever been recorded as happening onstage. Even Necro - the New York rapper generally regarded as one of the most graphic and hardcore MCs on the planet, and someone who actually does produce porn films as a side business - has had nothing come out of his shows that’s made real news.

(When contacted by MIDDLE 8, Necro declined to be interviewed. Kitty Pryde, too - her manager’s reply was, “We aren't interested in bringing any more attention to that situation nor are we trying to have her career based on overt sexuality and the proclivities of her friends and touring partners.”)

Kyza (born Adam James Henry) is one of the few artists who could conceivably match Danny Brown bar-for-bar when it comes to sex talk. It would be wrong to say the UK rapper and former Terra Firma member has built his career rapping about sex, but Kyza has made some of the more explicit tracks to come out of the country - Dirty and Porno would make anybody’s list.

We meet at a Nando’s in Shepherd’s Bush. He’s gently dismissive of Danny Brown’s predicament - “At the end of the day, it was a bit of a fail” - but says that despite hosting some amazingly intense shows, he’s never encountered anything quite as hairy.

“Not onstage, anyway!” he laughs, speaking between bites of chicken. “The worst you can say that happened to me was at the Ghostface Killah show in Cambridge, with Terra Firma. Grinding chicks onstage, but nothing explicit or newsworthy.

We expect him to say that camera phones and the constant buzz of online conversation mean that events like Danny’s are blown out of proportion, but he takes the opposite tack. “This would still have been a big deal if it happened in the 90s - and it would have had a more lasting effect. It would have been legendary…The whole shock-value thing is getting corny now. Next week, there’ll be something new.”

Another rapper no stranger to sexually explicit rhymes is Dekay - although instead of spitting them, they’re usually being thrown in her direction. One of the few women in the UK’s Don’t Flop rap battle league, she’s used to facing opponents who suggest she perform biologically impossible acts. It’s part of the reason she won’t reveal her real name to us - less ammunition for her opponents.

Rap battles get aggressive enough that sometimes violence seems like a real possibility, but Dekay says she’s never been part of or even seen anything sexually explicit in a live situation. “I can’t really imagine it happening [to me]. You just don’t do that - not in a battle, anyway. If someone tried to touch you, you’d go fucking mad. There’d be severe consequences. People know that. Unless you were completely off your nut, a complete lunatic, you wouldn’t get the lines between reality and a battle confused.”

More importantly, she can’t understand why people got so riled up at what happened to Danny Brown. “Things are getting more acceptable in terms of what you can and cannot do publicly, or show in the media,” she says. “The lines have gotten blurred. It’s not shocking anymore. When you go to a hip-hop gig, you don’t see any mad shit going on in the mosh pit - people don’t really jump around like they do at metal gigs. It’s a different kind of crowd. If it happened at a rock show, nobody would’ve given a shit.”

Rappers - and their fans - are different to those of other genres. In rock, dance and jazz, the music is the most important thing. But in rap, the music is tied up in so much more, chiefly the personalities and allegiances of the people who make it. Rappers and fans have teams, crews, squads. They rep their city, their set. It would be a stretch to say that those into hip-hop are more aggressive than in other genres, but there’s certainly a lot more to argue over.

As a consequence, Dekay says, things like personal space become more of an issue. “Rap fans don’t go bumping into people - that’s just not on,” she says. “There’s more a sense of personal space, even at a show that’s really full. You wouldn’t start throwing yourself around like a nutter.”

Tyler The Creator is one of the few artists prepared to be more graphic than Danny Brown: dinosaur sex? Check. Extensive use of the word ‘faggot’? Check. In June this year, Tyler The Creator set off on a tour of Australia. Talitha Stone, a feminist campaigner and part of the campaign group Collective Shout, tweeted that she had taken exception to his lyrics and intended to protest a planned appearance at the Culture Kings store in Sydney. Tyler promptly retweeted this to his 1.7m fans. Stone was suddenly on the receiving end of a deluge of pretty nasty responses. And at the show, Tyler dedicated his track 'Bitch Suck Dick' to her.

The crowd went wild. Unlike what happened to Danny Brown, the video was crystal clear.

There’s a question of how seriously one can actually take all of this.

So what if a rapper rhymes about graphic sex? It’s just music, and you can vote with your Next Track button if you’re offended. So what if, every so often, some fan gets a little overzealous? Frankly, we’re surprised it hasn’t happened at a Justin Bieber show yet.

But Kyza says that musicians do have a responsibility - something he hopes people like Tyler will learn as they get older. “A lot of rappers want excuses to act and wild out and not answer for their behaviour. It’s boring. Again, it might seem a little biased, but I do think it’s an age thing. You grow mentally, and I don’t think a lot of these guys have. When I was their age, I was wilding too. But then you start getting responsibility for other people, you can’t go around doing what you used to.” (For the record, Tyler is 22 and Danny Brown is in his thirties)

Take a closer look at violence in rap. Not in the sense of it being wrong to rap about, but the form it takes. Men get shot, beaten up. But women get raped and sexually abused - unless you’re Tyler, in which case they get murdered and dumped in the woods as well. And yet, it’s telling that while so much hip-hop makes casual threats against women, there are hardly any recorded incidents of sexual assault on a female rap artist in a live setting - if it happens, it’s behind closed doors. The closest we’ve come in recent times - and it didn’t even happen to a rapper - was someone groping Beyonce’s butt at a concert. She told the person in question to get lost, or she’d call security.

You could argue that of the hundreds of fans at Tyler’s concert, or his nearly 2m followers on Twitter, some may have taken his comments about Talitha Stone a little too literally. But then again, there’s scant evidence that hip-hop fans actually act on the words of the rappers they listen to - and when something does happen, it’s shocking enough that the entire Internet explodes. For all their posturing, hip-hop fans are a pretty conservative bunch.

And of course, there’s that question of sexual assault. As in: can someone actually wind up in court for this? Michael Hall III is a lawyer specialising in sexual assault and working with the Minnesota firm Hall Injury Law. In terms of what happened to Danny Brown - and our own lawyers are looking over our shoulders to make sure we say that Hall is not giving specific legal advice pertaining to what happened at the Triple Rock, and there’s no sign of any pending legal proceedings whatsoever - there are definitely some problems.

Things like on-stage booty-shaking contests - which get rarer as the years go by, but still pop up from time to time - are usually OK legally, simply because the people are clothed and have consented. But any touching of a person’s intimate parts - “breasts, buttocks, groin, genitals,” says Hall - would constitute sexual contact. And it gets more problematic when it involves force or coercion, or when the victim is underage.

Back to the Scala in London. Danny Brown is eating chicken livers as he talks, shovelling them into his mouth with a plastic fork, gloopy grey sauce dripping back into the takeaway box. It’s impossible to look away.

He is not in the most welcoming frame of mind. He’s been doing interviews all afternoon, after a full morning of travelling, and still has a show to rock. Past interviews we’ve read have made it clear that he won’t discuss what Kitty Pryde termed ‘The Thing’. We’re going to have to back into this slowly. Still, at least he isn’t hungry anymore.

Danny’s toured Europe before, most notably performing at Hip-Hop Kemp in the Czech Republic. “People come to the show not necessarily because they’re liking your music, but because it’s going to be a good turnout,” he says. “But anybody in Europe who comes to your shows, it’s because they’re real fans. People out here are more open-minded. Out here, people who do what they want to do.”

He’s also enthusiastic about his work on his new album Old, specifically with UK producer Paul White. “It was great to have a chance to work with him some more. I’m a fan of his sound - I like producers that have a personality, not just producers that sell you shit. Paul White makes beats without needing anyone to rap on ‘em. He makes ‘em for himself.”

We decide to ask him about Tyler’s adventures in Australia. “I don’t care about Odd Future, cuz,” he says, incredulous. Too late, we remember that he and Odd Future aren't on the best of terms - in 2011, they accused him and his friends of throwing a bottle onstage at one of their shows. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about," he continues. "I don’t know what they did. I don’t give a fuck man…That type of shit is not involved in my world. I can say whatever the fuck I want. My fans don’t give a fuck - they want me to say that type of shit. That’s the position he’s in - me? I don’t think that’ll happen. Feminist bitches love me calling them bitches. Let’s leave it at that.”

That gets a big laugh from his entourage, but his manager interjects. “Anything else about the album? We’re kind of tired, and we have a show later.”

Nothing else about the album, no. Time to get to the meat of the matter - so to speak. What did he think about what Kitty Pryde wrote? “That was her opinion. That’s all it is.”

And was he surprised at the reaction from his fans?

Danny looks us in the eyes. “Was I surprised about it? Yeah. I didn’t think it was a big deal. Niggas get their dicks sucked every day, B. Why would they care about me getting my dick sucked? At the end of the day, I rapped about my dick so much, she just wanted some shine, man. It’s cool.”