Consumer Guide Album

Danny Brown: Quaranta [Warp, 2023]
For sheer artistic grace and reach--flow, clarity, character, presence, verbal wit, verbal command--long-paroled 42-year-old ex-dealer Brown has few true rivals anywhere in hip-hop. But if you doubt he's feeling not just his age but his existential limitations, ask yourself why he called his seventh album since 2010 "forty" (in Italian, not Spanish, where it would be "cuarenta"). Buried in this swift verbiage are the kind of adult anxieties hip-hoppers never cop to, such as marriages floundering and two-bedroom apartments going for three grand a month. The most revealing and also the cleverest is "Celibate": "I used to sell a bit/But I don't fuck around no more/ I'm celibate/Had me trapped in that cell a bit/Locked up with some pimps told me 'Sell a bitch.'" Which I'm of course relieved he seems disinclined to do. A-