One of my favorite things about hip-hop is the way that it brings disparate and seemingly unrelated sights and sounds together in a way that always makes perfect sense. The Danny Brown and Kitty show at the High Noon Saloon on Saturday night, featuring an opening from the ever stellar CRASHprez and *hitmayng, was such a convergence — with a little bit of Glass Nickel Pizza on top.
Nineteen-year old CRASHprez took the stage around 10 PM and did his thing — which is revealing all of the inevitable Odd Future comparisons to be woefully inadequate, pleasantly surprising everyone by taking the extra effort to cut through trap-esque instrumentals, dexterous flow, and engaging stage presence to appreciate his wit and wordplay. The man takes shots at Washington lobbyists on a track with the rhetorical refrain “who put a molly in the Holy Water?” for (Base) God sakes. (He also writes.) All of this, in addition to the set chemistry with DJ/producer and not-manager *hitmayng, set the night off right.
Seventeen-year old Kitty was up next, and it was great to see her on stage given the fact that she didn’t have the greatest experience in Madison the first time around (she was called some nasty things and threatened in nasty ways by some meatheads at a summer/early fall show at the Terrace last year, and allegedly swore she’d never return to Madison). For someone who professed stage fright and carried herself on stage as though she’d memorized the choreography of the movie Juno, Kitty is incredibly self-aware as an artist. She’s funny, modest, and irreverent, deploying her bubbly teenage girl rapper shtick and rap game Hillary Clinton (read: feminist rapper) in equal parts. She flipped the script on her Riff Raff collaboration, “Orion’s Belt,” spectacularly on stage, turning up what appears on YouTube as diminutive, including her own rendition of Riff Raff’s verse. (She also writes.)
He took an hour to follow Kitty’s departure, but the 32-year old headliner Danny Brown stumbled right into his first song, bowling into a crowd that couldn’t wait to get started. In some ways, Brown disappointed — the story of his antics at the previous night’s Minneapolis show, where he got a blowjob on stage, set the bar almost impossibly high. Yes, you read that right.
But he brought his lyrical game, too. Maybe it was because, as he admitted to the crowd, Madison reminded the Detroit-bred MC of home, and he wanted to give the Midwest a good time. And it was a party. Black Brad Pitt pulled out all the stops — material from Xxx, new stuff like the throbbing “Kush Coma” and “Dip,” his trademark vivacity when addressing the crowd in between machine gun bursts of his drawling lyrics — and thankfully, as of this writing, not his dick.