LIVE REVIEW: Danny Brown @ the Sylvee

WORDS BY OLIVER GERHARZ, photos by macy chen

A friend had put me onto Danny Brown just a few months before the tour for his sixth studio album Quaranta started. The way that same friend talked about the wild crowd at Brown’s show in Chicago the day before had me very ready to hear Danny Brown that Thursday.

Before this show I’d never been to The Sylvee, and when I got there I couldn’t believe that I’d missed such a physically and culturally huge venue in Madison. 

Bruiser Wolf was the first opener, hitting the stage wearing his trademark hat and merch for his new album My Story Got Stories. In what I felt was an indication of how much love there was for Bruiser Wolf in the crowd, they went wild the second he appeared. 

Thanks to an electric stage presence Bruiser kept that initial excitement running through his entire set. Even with the crowd’s response to the call “BRUISER” being pretty evenly divided between mimicry and the intended “BRIGADE” revealing their lack of membership in the wolfpack. 

Most of the Bruiser Wolf set was his high-energy hits like “2 Bad” and “I’m A Instrument,” but the set ended with the slow and sad “Momma Was a Dopefiend,” leaving the crowd pretty calm while they waited for Hook, the second opener.

I hadn’t heard Hook’s music before this show, but she was excellent live. Zig-zagging back and forth across the stage and jumping down into the press pit to get right up to the crowd kept things energized for most of her set. At the slower points Hook demonstrated her versatility, locking her mic into a stand and adopting a stiller position as she sang.

I had thought the cheers when Bruiser Wolf was performing were intense, but the sound inside the Sylvee before Brown even got on stage when the fog machine started was like nothing that had come before it that night. The crowd was loud to the point of making more smoke than the fog machine for the whole first song.

The crowd got even louder when Brown stepped out wearing an outfit that really left an impression. In a pair of Balenciaga boots and an obscuring gray robe that put together made him look pretty imposing, Brown riled the crowd up with songs off of Quaranta. Brown also performed a lot of songs off of SCARING THE HOES, a recent and wildly popular collaboration with JPEGMAFIA.

The crowd stepped up to a new level once Brown got towards the end of his set, particularly with “Y.B.P.” (Young, Black, and Poor), where Brown brought Bruiser Wolf back out for his feature on the song. The stage chemistry for the combination was amazing, and Brown kept the energy of the crowd up even after he put his opener back away. 

Brown closed the set out with “Jenn’s Terrific Vacation” and “Grown Up.” I thought that “Jenn’s Terrific Vacation,” one of the singles from Quaranta, was one of the best performances of the night because Brown matched the energy of the song to that of the crowd. Since the song is about gentrification, it always kind of bummed me out when I listened on my own, so seeing the energy brought to the live performance was really interesting. After he performed “Grown Up,” one of his older hits, Brown left the crowd yearning for more - which he gave them in an encore.

Towards the end of things, Brown came out and told the crowd that this show was just a few days after he celebrated 11 months of sobriety. With his new album a reflection on his years of heavy drug use, this is a fitting milestone to celebrate on the tour for Quaranta. The tour’s last show will happen just three days before Brown can celebrate a year clean.

Of course Brown also told the crowd just how much he loves cheese curds, as is obligatory of any tour making a stop in America’s Dairyland.