Danny Brown - The rapper who wants to die a rockstar

Detroit, 1981: a girl of just 17 and a sixteen-year-old of Filipino descent bring Daniel Dewan Sewell into the world. The young father juggles records, the mother reads him fairy tales in verse to lull him to sleep: music and rhyme as baby food. Helping out the Sewell family are Daniel's grandmothers, well-off and generous. Detroit is no easy city.

Crime is a siren song that lures many of the Motor City's young people, caught in a crisis dragging on since the '70s: the two oil shocks (1973 and 1979) forced the auto industry into massive layoffs, and Mayor Young, the first Black mayor in the city's history, desperately tries to keep the metropolis alive through the Seventies. Shops and hotels empty out, while crime takes root amid decay, unemployment and desperation. In 1980 Detroit has 1.2 million residents: 20% fewer than the census a decade earlier, over 600,000 fewer than the golden age of the postwar years.

At 18 Daniel starts dealing drugs; at 19 come the first charges, for production, distribution and possession of illegal substances. The first of many charges to come, forcing him into life as a fugitive. Inevitably, jail time follows too - 8 months - so by 2007 what had been a passion starts becoming his only way out of a destructive spiral. Daniel always wanted to be a rapper, but never really tried to make it a career until he found himself with nothing left to lose and a criminal record behind him.

Detroit State Of Mind: i primi mixtape. 

He'd already tried, back in 2003, with two friends from Detroit, Chip$ and Dopehead. The project was called Rese'vor Dogs and led to the debut Runispokets-N-Dumpemindariva, an album that sounds a lot less interesting than Daniel's future career.
When he decides to get serious, in 2007, he starts producing mixtapes that he releases as digital downloads, going by the name Danny Brown. The first of these self-produced efforts is Detroit State Of Mind (2007), followed by Hot Soup (2008), Detroit State Of Mind 2 (2008), Detroit State Of Mind 3 (2009) and Detroit State Of Mind 4 (2010).

These are mixtapes that don't really leave a mark, born in the wake of the alternative hip-hop scene but still indebted to the classics, from the Wu Tang Clan to Nas, paid tribute to in "Get Down" from the first Detroit State Of Mind, which also features the festive, brass-heavy march of "Marching Band". The second installment of the Detroit-themed mixtapes clocks in at just 19 minutes, so it's only the third episode, Detroit State Of Mind 3, that marks a significant step forward.
The album boasts a more polished production, a style that often moves away from tradition toward sounds typical of the alternative hip-hop world, trying out sci-fi touches, in some cases abandoning the centrality of the beat, making use of synths and even the occasional rock flourish. Danny Brown's flow has already become capable of adapting to very different musical settings. "Stupid" is already on par with his classics - foul-mouthed and fluid, sharp and disorienting.

2008 also brought Hot Soup, released between the second and third Detroit-themed installments. A mixtape that, in scope and polish, closely resembles a proper album. The obsessive sound of "What Up Doe", drenched in bass and hiccuping synths, is already one of his classics. In April 2014 Hot Soup would be reissued as a double LP with a 7" featuring some bonus tracks, for Record Store Day.

Detroit State Of Mind 4 doesn't surprise when it settles into the smooth style of the classics, but on the fast-paced "Black", a feat of verbal virtuosity, you can already glimpse the makings of a heavyweight, over a hard, jagged beat of the kind he'll make extensive use of in the future. When he raps over evocative Oriental-tinged music on "LoL", he closely recalls Aesop Rock, whose legacy he would partly inherit. You can already hear his knack for building morbid nursery-rhyme cadences, as on "Bag Back", and for rapping over the most absurd samples, like the one underpinning "Contra".
Sharpening his rhymes, Danny Brown learns to speak ever more convincingly and personally about his troubled relationship with drugs, both as a dealer and a user.

Sick fun: the official debut and the G-Unit.

Just 8 days later, his real debut comes out,  The Hybrid (2010). The album introduces the world to his sharp, unsettling tone, so far removed from the macho voice of other rappers, a trademark that completes his long process of stylistic maturation. The album is dense with razor-sharp verses, alternating a sick take on hedonism ("Need Another Drink", "Exotic") with a grim, desperate account of a life cracked by crime, addiction and obsession ("Shootin' Moves", "Generation Rx").
The sci-fi flourishes return ("Greatest Rapper Ever", "New Era"), and for the occasion he also lays down his first bridge to the rock world on "White Stripes", full of raw guitar riffs. Danny Brown makes a few nods to the classics coexist with solutions open to contamination and alternative aesthetics.

In September 2010, alongside G-Unit rapper Tony Yayo, he recorded the mixtape Hawaiian Snow. This time the spotlight has to be shared with a rhyme partner, perhaps less original and certainly less contemporary. The result is a mixtape that lacks the creative force of The Hybrid, but is produced well enough to rival releases by far more famous artists. The synth gusts of "My Cup" are perhaps the record's high point, though it anticipates little of Danny Brown's future.

G-Unit Records, helmed by rap superstar 50 Cent, is interested in Danny Brown but can't find common ground on the dress code: Daniel wears skinny jeans that clash with the baggy clothes of the rest of the crew. It's over trifles like this that the music business lets great artists slip away.

Either way, Danny Brown keeps churning out mixtapes without pause. In 2010, besides those already mentioned, he also adds Browntown, a collaboration with hip-hop duo Johnson&Jonson titled It's Art, and The Hybrid: Cutting Room Floor.
The first is a short, musically very conservative collection, where the rapper sets aside his quirks, recalling East Coast greats like Notorious B.I.G. and Nas. Only on "Demons And Angels" does his sharp timbre and hallucinated style find room to breathe.
It's Art is bolder, though uneven and often amateurish. "Can't Find My Mind", with filtered vocals and cacophonous carousel sounds in the background, is a catchy little rhyme, even if roughly produced. "Lemme Know", a murky mechanism of dirty bass and vintage synth sounds, shows potential but sounds almost improvised. The most interesting moment is "What Yo Name Is", an obsessive arpeggiator and whispered vocal paired with a series of hisses and glitches.

The Hybrid: Cutting Room Floor brings back tracks already released in more or less official form, the ones cut from The Hybrid. Among the excluded tracks are the engaging "Dance With Me" and the sensual "Wake Up", close to the sensibility of Wyclef Jean. It's one of the many occasions on which Danny Brown makes his music available to fans for free, and, all things considered, a collection for aficionados.

Dying at thirty, like a rockstar: the pornographic, desperate masterpiece.

The mixtape era, however, is now drawing to a close, as Danny Brown is ready for the big leap and is working on his masterpiece. In August 2011, in fact, XXX arrives, released as a free download and immediately praised by critics and fans alike.
On first listen the record may seem fairly conventional, but it reveals multiple layers, plays subtly with its production, and enjoys the broad scope of the full tracklist to get its messages across.

Even the title is misleading: "XXX" is the label for pornographic content, but here it should also be read as 30 in Roman numerals. The reason is simple: the Detroit rapper turns thirty in 2011. From this ambiguous double meaning you immediately sense one of the record's most interesting traits: the ability to channel hardcore hip-hop themes into a tightly personal narrative.

Yes, because XXX is an album loaded with pornographic content, as well as references to drugs and violence, but above all it's a record about how an obsession with sex and illicit substances has made Danny Brown's life dark, bleak and anxiety-ridden.

Still on the subject of age, it's worth noting how the album is essentially a late one for a rapper: Nas released "Illmatic" at 21, "Ready To Die" hit the market when Notorious B.I.G. was 22, and Snoop Dogg was the same age at the time of "Doggystyle". Danny Brown, by contrast, arrives at The Hybrid at twenty-nine, even outpacing in years the late debut of Jay-Z, whose "Reasonable Doubt" came out when the Roc-A-Fella boss was almost 27. Inevitably, being thirty allows for a different view of life and the world — in Danny Brown's case, a sardonic edge caught between amusement, exasperation and disillusionment.

The 19 tracks stand out for the brevity of many of them, well under three minutes, and for a stylistic variety guaranteed by a team of producers working at the Detroit rapper's service. The glue holding it together is Danny Brown himself, recognizable in the lyrics for his obsessions and his mocking attitude, as well as for the sharp timbre of his flow.

Loose as it is, there's a connecting thread that allows XXX to be considered an album with a central theme, the autobiographical one: it's a snapshot of the author as he turns thirty. The double meaning of the title is made explicit by the first and last tracks, "XXX" and "30" respectively. In between are tracks about drugs like "Blunt After Blunt", desperate hedonism ("Party All The Time"), and his hometown ("Detroit 187", "Ewnesw"). A dark microcosm, where hip-hop's usual triumphalism is countered by an anguished tension, a void within which the author moves, overexcited now by drugs, now by the most explicit sex, now by the shadow of death.

The opening quartet is sensational. "XXX" opens in a sci-fi atmosphere, with clear nods to 80s futuristic aesthetics, but despite the epic synth lines, it's an anxiety-ridden manifesto. In one of the most intense moments, Danny Brown says:

Say I’m getting old and times running out
Repeating instrumentals tryna figure patterns out
I never leave the house ain’t slept in three days
Popping pills, writing, drinking and smoking haze

Four verses that capture the anxiety, the tension and the unhealthy lifestyle of the author, a world far removed from the comfort, success and luxury recounted by other rappers. The need to finally become a major name in the scene is, more than a dream, the only way out of a self-destructive spiral. Again in "XXX", we find the line “Cause if this shit don't work, nigga I failed at life”, a bitter reflection on himself and on the need to write the breakthrough record, under penalty of giving in to suicidal urges and drug abuse. It lasts less than two minutes, but it's one of the most overwhelming openers one could write, an introduction into the unhealthy world of Danny Brown.

"Die Like A Rockstar" is the album's self-destructive anthem, its most oppressive and claustrophobic moment. As the synths warp and psychedelic froth seeps into the mix, the verses become one long funeral manifesto, steeped in squalid imagery and references to dead celebrities. A sequence of verbal excess, of razor-sharp cynicism, with lines that grow ever more violent, aggressive and tragic. By the end, Danny Brown sounds more exasperated than ever and, having dropped the mask of the likeable neighborhood junkie, puts on that of a man trapped by life, victim of his own excesses and in constant dialogue with death.

The final verse strings together an impressive series of caustic lines about celebrities who died from drug use, sweeping through the American pop imagination: actor Chris Farley, Sublime singer Brad Nowell, Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain, Who drummer Keith Moon, painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, guitar-hero Jimi Hendrix, Playmate Anna Nicole Smith and young actor River Phoenix (dead at just 23). By the end, there's room for one last terrible sequence of images: an orgy in hell with porn stars dead from overdose (Teri Diver and Linda Wong) and an identification with young soprano Frankie Lymon (dead at 25), famous Australian actor Heath Ledger, a slang reference to John Belushi, and finally the wish to get high alongside Brittany Murphy, the actress who died of an overdose and whom many music fans will remember from "8 Mile". A hymn to self-destruction of rare intensity, "Die Like A Rockstar" hits hard with its brutal cynicism and sardonic edge, masking beneath the violence a carefully constructed compositional design.

With the album's tone now set, "Pac Blood" is a gut-punch aimed at the rest of the scene: more sci-fi synths, double-time speed and a more classic style, with more anthology-worthy verses that attack politicians like Sarah Palin, blaspheme the Madonna, but also bring in literary figures like Rudyard Kipling, Maya Angelou, Charles Bukowski and Langston Hughes. Danny Brown blends a vast popular imagination, building meticulously crafted metrical devices.

Fourth track, fourth style: "Radio Song" veers toward a minimal beat, for a lighter, if improbable, radio-friendly song. Having climbed aboard the ride by now, it's a dizzying succession of twists and turns. The diseased dance music of "Lie4", with thriller-style strings, finds him rushing his verses in yet another display of versatility and stylistic flexibility. The dreamlike arrangement of "I Will" contrasts with the apocalyptic one of "Bruiser Brigade" and anticipates the obsessive, electro feel of "Detroit 187" and the pounding one of "Blunt After Blunt". "Outer Space" is a display of virtuosity, proof that he can rap over any beat, even the most hallucinated and asymmetrical. A challenge also taken up by the bad trip of "Adderall Admiral", whose instrumental could pass for a stern piece of cacophonous avant-garde music.
All this musical and stylistic variety serves to tell the various facets of the author's life, often through curious episodes, as in "Scrap Or Die", a tension-filled dance track driven by the sounds of mechanic's tools, recounting the theft of valuable materials from Detroit's abandoned neighborhoods.

The closer, "30", is a nightmare halfway between free jazz and hip-hop, closer to Captain Beefheart or Us Maple than to the genre's classics. The ending couldn't be bleaker, with its harrowing, heart-on-sleeve confession about the fear of not making it, and the wish, every time he gets high, to overdose and die:

When I turned 28 they like what you gonna do now?
And now a nigga 30 so y’all don’t think that hurt me
That the last ten years I been so fucking stressed
Tears in my eyes let me get this off my chest
The thought of no success got a nigga chasing death
Doing all these drugs in hopes of OD’ing next, Triple X

XXX tells the story not only of Danny Brown, but also of the American nightmare lurking in the decay of ghost cities, failed both economically and socially. In this sense, Detroit isn't so different from the radioactive Cleveland of Pere Ubu.

Alternative superstar: collaborations and Old.

After a work of such magnitude, collaborations too began pouring in. A 2011 EP, credited to Brown and producer Black Milk, is titled, fittingly, Black And Brown. Though brief and less ambitious than the album that follows it, this collection contains the biting "Jordan VIII", riding a bed of fizzy synths, and the fun "Dada", warped by hallucinated vocal samples.

In 2012 a new collaboration, with a Detroit collective, crystallized into the EP Bruiser Brigade. Alongside Danny Brown, it features his former Rese'voir Dogs bandmates Chip$ and Dopehead, as well as TRPL BLK, ZelooperZ and producer SKYWLKR. It consists of two very dark tracks, the second of which, "Jooky", uses a curious weave of deafening strings to build tension. Both tracks later got remixes that massively overhaul their sound.

Just 6 days later, Brown released The Od Ep (2012). The curious pill-shaped vinyl packaging houses three tracks and their three respective instrumentals. "The Baseline" is steeped in a desolate atmosphere, with a booming beat, while "Shouldn't Of" is overtaken by mournful orchestration and exotic echoes. These are tracks that follow in the wake of XXX, which is why the EP was tacked onto the end of the tracklist on the album's deluxe edition.

Finally, in 2013, the long-awaited follow-up to his masterpiece arrived: Old, bolstered by faster, more creative tracks packed with ideas, making for a thrilling and unpredictable listen. On "The Return" a sitar surfaces amid a sensual dance groove, while "25 Bucks" leans on the airy sound of Canadian duo Purity Ring to sketch a sterile, desolate futuristic scene with dubstep shadings.

Then things shift again, with the demented dance of "Wonderbread", the psychedelic synth-guitar of "Gremlins", the trap/brostep tension of "Dope Fiend Rental", the psychedelic folk of "Lonely" and the amphetamine-fueled techno pulse of "Red 2 Go", one of the most intense and tense tracks of his entire career. "Kush Coma", featuring A$ap Rocky and ZelooperZ, ventures into trap territory with machine-gun kick drums and ghostly, distorted vocals, sharply at odds with the closing "Float On", a rather conventional hip-hop ballad.

Old seems to find common ground between those who appreciated the intimate confessions of XXX and those who prefer the more party-oriented side of Danny Brown, here often engaged in tracks loaded with bass, trendy rhythms and productions tailor-made to light up club sound systems. Old lacks the previous record's refined design and comes across more as an exhilarating stylistic exploration. It's an album that leans much more on elaborate production than on lyrics, which this time feel less inspired. Danny Brown himself confirms as much, citing Radiohead in an interview with Xxl to underline how important it was to focus on this aspect:

If ‘XXX’ was my ‘OK Computer‘, then I’d have to make my ‘Kid A‘ next. So I studied ‘Kid A’, and I took away that it’s not so much about the lyrics as it is about the way the beats feel, so what drives this album is the production.

Unlike XXX, Old was released through standard retail channels, and it brought Danny Brown to 15,000 copies sold in its first week, reaching number 17 on the Billboard US chart. It marked his definitive consecration, proof that the insecure rapper of XXX had found his way to success.

Promotional tours followed, along with appearances at celebrity shows like Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, and even a slot supporting Eminem at Wembley Stadium in front of 100,000 people. By early 2015, his name was firmly established in the hip-hop world, although Danny Brown then entered a period of lower exposure ahead of releasing a new album.

The (somewhat) post-punk album: Atrocity Exhibition.

Despite his track record, it's hard not to be caught off guard when Atrocity Exhibition arrives in 2016. While it echoes the experimental streak that had surfaced before, nothing quite compares to what these 15 tracks deliver: an unbroken sequence of lopsided experiments, oddball beats and surreal arrangements.
Much has been said about the post-punk echoes, which are indeed present and run through a good part of the tracklist. Yet it seems entirely misleading to single those out, since the record feeds on an arsenal of styles that includes post-punk but also absorbs noise-rock experimentation, the rhythmic destructuring typical of breakbeat and jungle, and the sensual, elaborate basslines of funk. You can certainly spot Joy Division ("Golddust") or Talking Heads ("Dance In The Water") lurking in the folds of these songs, but reducing it all to a fusion of post-punk and hardcore hip-hop feels like an oversimplification.

"The Downward Spiral" is an abstract, cacophonous dub-blues, worthy of a rarefied, psychedelic version of Us Maple. "Rolling Stone" pairs a deep bass with bleak vocal lines and a chilling synth: it's a track lost in an anguished fog, animated only by unsettling hallucinations. "Really Doe", the only piece to run past the 4-minute mark, uses that extra time to bring in Kendrick Lamar, Ab-Soul and Earl Sweatshirt for a jam that sits somewhere between a thriller and a macabre nursery rhyme.

"Lost", with lazy Mexican horns and a funk-based vocal sample worthy of Soul Coughing, is a clear example of how all it takes is 127 seconds for Danny Brown to write a creative track capable of standing out from the daily glut of hip-hop being churned out.

"Golddust" pairs horns in the background with a deafening guitar sample from "People From Out The Space" by Embryo, in one of the album's most outlandish fusions. "Pneumonia" draws heavily from industrial, basking in a funereal arrangement. "Today" even recalls the most spectral vocals of Residents, taking centre stage over an anxious pulse. "Hell For It" closes things out with a piano flight of fancy over cacophonous debris.

Now and then the more festive side resurfaces, as in "Ain't Funny", though still weighed down by a bass-heavy arrangement, and in "White Lies", a nursery rhyme made unsettling by distorted vocals. "Dance In The Water" unleashes a gripping tribal rhythm, with Danny Brown howling like a rockstar. "When It Rain" has a powerful kick drum and a repetitive melody, but quickly reveals itself as a sick dancehall anthem, fuelled by a warped, neurotic sense of fun. Against this backdrop, the drug anthem "Get Hi" feels banal, a sort of stripped-down rehash of Cypress Hill.

Above all this, Danny Brown's high-pitched timbre remains the constant protagonist, able to hold the beat while navigating lopsided, deformed, elusive or overcrowded rhythms. As in the past, the subject matter is his obsessions, paranoia, hallucinations and, of course, drugs and sex. References and nods to pop culture and other musicians abound, starting with the album title itself, identical to a Joy Division song but also to James Graham Ballard's experimental 1970 novel.

Danny Brown is no prophet, nor a sharp interpreter of society, nor a narrator with a social or political breadth, but his lyrics almost always reveal hidden references and double meanings, just as they did on XXX.
A display of creativity, never bloated, Atrocity Exhibition is the uncompromising counterpart to "The Life Of Pablo", steeped in pain, anxiety, drug addiction and a violent, disorienting, destabilizing artistic streak. Danny Brown pulled it off again, when he could have settled into the sophisticated sound of Old and carved out a safe niche for himself in hip-hop.

Stand-up comedy and music that scares girls off.

When he returns in 2019 with Uknowhatimasyin¿, we're facing a change of course for the Detroit rapper, since the lyrical touchstones are stand-up comedians and the music draws on the tradition of comedic rap, as social commentary that's more sarcastic and sardonic than merely comic or parodic. At least that's the author's stated intent. Because behind the mic there's still a psychotic individual, raised in a city in depressing decline like Detroit, with serious drug problems that were never truly resolved. In the end, then, the idea of a comedy show gets twisted by the tormented mind of a musician on the edge of the abyss, and despite the contribution of the ever-reliable Q-Tip (also as executive producer) and other top-tier talents like Flying Lotus, even the best production can only do so much to keep the rapper's nightmares at bay.

The result inevitably recalls the jarring, disturbing punchlines of Todd Phillips' Joker, played by Joaquin Phoenix, more than the hilarious Slick Rick or the famous actor and comedian Dave Chappelle.
Still, it's his most accessible album, helped by its modest runtime, kept to around half an hour, but also by its excellent collaborations, from Run The Jewels to JPEGMAFIA, by way of Thundercat. Anyone hoping for more, perhaps another jarring, experimental concept album, will have to wait for his sixth record.

Ahead of Quaranta, the ideal follow-up to XXX right from the title, comes the collaborative album Scaring The Hoes, with the aforementioned JPEGMAFIA. It's music that's far from inviting, not remotely sensual, often cacophonous and disorienting, music that "scares the hoes", to put it more delicately than the title does. The 14 tracks on the record grant nothing to immediacy, pairing JPEGMAFIA's deafening, dense productions with both rappers' sarcastic, caustic, unpredictable lyrics. Alongside the wealth of sounds, ideas and gags scattered across the album is the interplay between the two voices: Danny Brown's shrill, grating delivery with its acidic rhymes, and JPEGMAFIA's deeper timbre and seemingly more traditional style, despite the eccentricity of so many of his verses.

Despite the joint billing, the album is above all a showcase for JPEGMAFIA's creative flair, mainly as the leading producer of a noisy, glitchy, experimental and unpredictable strain of hip-hop. Danny Brown's contribution is that of a rhyming virtuoso, equally at home amid the sonic assaults assembled by his co-star, but ultimately relegated — partly due to the mix — to a supporting role.

Being reborn after forty: after rehab.

By late 2023, the time has come to reckon more maturely with the passing of time on the already-mentioned Quaranta, titled as such both for the arrival of his fourth decade and for the pandemic quarantine. The once-caustic clown, recently heard again alongside JPEGMAFIA, often sheds his abrasive, shrill, feverish delivery to open up to listeners with moving intensity right from the title-track opener: a nocturnal confession, adorned with a spectral electric guitar.

Alongside this more intimate, measured self-portrait, there's still his usual skewed take on rap as a disorienting, aggressive exercise, as on the obsessive "Tantor", where The Alchemist hammers us with a prog-rock sample, or on the oddball "Jenn's Terrific Vacation", a bitter parable of gentrification set amid jazz drums, whispers and distorted voices.

He can pull back toward sophisticated hip-hop with echoes of the Eighties, as on "Ain't My Concern", or plunge into android-like hallucinations, as on "Dark Sword Angel" with its crowded production courtesy of Quelle Chris and Chris Key, even flirt with light, danceable hip-hop when Bruiser Wolf shows up on "Y.B.P.", following unpredictable paths — yet the fortysomething Danny Brown also needs to stop and reflect on "Down Wit It" and "Celibate", caught between heartache and street life. More than the violent explosion of XXX, the back half of the record seems to drift toward a sunset bringing shadows and melancholy, reflections on choices made and on all that's been lost over the years.

All that tension dissolves, amid nostalgia and a flicker of sweet happiness, on the closing "Bass Jam", a childhood memory recounted in a hypnagogic musical atmosphere, between brushed drums and angelic choirs. It's the moving finale of Quaranta and the conclusion of a musical — and perhaps personal — journey begun many years earlier, the closing of a long crisis that brought Danny Brown within a hair's breadth of losing everything, including himself, and which now lives on as emotional scar tissue. The cover photo, then, is a mirror of the contradictions and complexity of this album, and of one of the greatest rappers alive.

The recovery process, marked by a great deal of solitude, saw him fall for hyperpop, digicore and deconstructed club: in short, he fell in love with contemporary electronic music. Billed as the first album he's written sober, Stardust (2025) is anything but dull or predictable. Freed from the effects of substances, Danny Brown comes across as hyperactive and unpredictable, even joyful at times. Built as a kind of concept album around a semi-autobiographical character named Dusty Star, it picks up the EDM strands already explored on Old, but sounds like a new, disorienting chapter in his ever-shifting career.

Amid the album's fast-moving, disorienting flow, one fixed point comes in "The End", a multi-artist collaboration with Cynthoni, ta Ukrainka, Zheani, Angel Emoji, Rye Mann and Quadeca: across almost 9 minutes, three souls coexist within the same composition, a summary of his recovery from a lifetime's worth of drug abuse.
As before, and more than ever, he presents himself to us naked, covered in scars and carrying a heavy past on his shoulders. When he closes with the lyrics of "All4U", it's easy, once again, to find yourself moved:

Know some failed, I was livin’ in hell
But now it’s heaven on earth
So I spit this verse and it ain’t hard to tell
Y’all ain’t no fan, y’all made me a man
Y’all like my angels on my shoulder
Devil in the rear view, I still hear you
I’ma keep goin’ ‘til my life is over

Now I do it all for you
Now I do it all for you (All for you)
Now I do it all for you
Now I do it all for you (All for you)
Now I do it all for you
Now I do it all for you (All for you)
Now I do it all for you
Now I do it all for you (All for you)