There are actually two points that I want to make here, both revolving around Atrocity Exhibition. Rather than breaking them out into distinct, formalized pieces, I’ve combined them for a couple reasons: primarily that this style of writing is atrociously exposition-heavy and it would be pretty boring to re-tread the contextual stuff, and secondarily that I just don’t like the album enough to spend two weeks writing on it.

Anyway, the first is about how people talk about rap as the genre evolves and expands beyond its tightly-bound definition seemingly concretized in 1991. Specifically, there’s some kind of insane collective impulse to re-frame any sort of new development in rap as actually belonging to some other musical tradition entirely. Depending on which way the wind is blowing, Young Thug is either glam rock or a country musician. All rap is actually punk. Danny Brown’s Atrocity Exhibition is the best post-punk album of the 21st century (that galaxy brain meme really works anywhere, huh?).

But Corrigan, you say, this is just another outgrowth of the bizarre path that article titles have semi-recently taken, simultaneously infuriating post-punk devotees and pandering to the artist’s mega-fans and causing both to click. It’s harmless! That may be true, but I still can’t believe that this sort of stuff has been given a pass. Not only is the notion that rappers must only rap a little suspect (it’s surprising that no article to the effect of critics insist on discussing rap’s ongoing evolution in terms of ‘white’ genres has been written), it also makes no sense whatsoever. Take Love Will Tear Us Apart and slide it in between any two tracks on Atrocity Exhibition and absolutely no one will be fooled. There’s a Danny Brown track on which an actual post-punk artist (Pere Ubu) was sampled, and no one was pulling this bullshit then. As far as I can discern, the post-punk label comes from some combination of a generally dour atmosphere, the occasional presence of guitars, and one hook from somebody named Petite Noir. More likely, it’s a function of some choice press release keywording and the budding music enthusiast’s desire to be included when confronted simultaneously with the new concepts of post-punk and Danny Brown. In any event, the label was applied selectively as hell to that particular album - two years prior, Earl Sweatshirt left the sound obsolete with Hoarse.

Thus far, I’ve been a little naive about how these sorts of things come about, because impassioned naivete is far more fun than cynical certainty. Pivoting to the latter, the fact is that Atrocity Exhibition is talked about as a post-punk album because it was marketed as one. Danny Brown has made no secret of his obsession with critical response, at times displaying a weird degree of intentionality in modelling his career after artists who have achieved the sort of legacy he’s looking for. Beyond the title itself (a nod to Joy Division), in the run-up to Atrocity Exhibition he repeatedly cited Talking Heads, Bjork, System of a Down and, again, Joy Division, as inspirations for the album. This kind of names-out-of-a-hat referentiality isn’t unheard of in pre-release press cycles, but I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen the reaction to an album be so incapable of freeing itself from the vague invocations of influence that were used to advertise it. It’s like how people used to trot out check out Das Racist, they reference Kierkegaard!, which would turn out to mean that they said the word Kierkegaard (between Queens Boulevard and hustle hard, no less).

This bothers me, and I’d like it to bother you too (sorry). Is it not obvious that the critical response to an album constructed with acclaim in mind is meaningless at best and disingenuous at worst? Give the people what they want is kind of stupid as an artistic method in general, but doubly so when the people in question are music critics. It reinforces the idea of a canon, that music’s value is not something for the listener herself to decide. You can like Atrocity Exhibition because you dig the sounds, or you can like it because it’s deemed important and you risk your credibility by staying in the dark. For a lot of people, those are the only two options.

That's the most troubling part of the whole ordeal: these weird, stuck-on labels are very much a result of the unbelievably large part of the music nerd population that actively dismisses rap as a whole. Those artists who receive them (Danny Brown, Death Grips) are those who enter the canon despite their rap roots, and whose presence must then be justified to a bunch of squares whose default stance towards any and all music that black people have made this century is suspicion (I’m about out of time on this, but Kendrick Lamar and Childish Gambino’s heavy, album-ruining reliance on extended narrative interludes is another concession to this crowd). Anthony Fantano’s a perfect example of this, and as you’ve probably heard, that dude’s got major problems.

This is the single trope of modern rap discourse that makes me angriest, if the fact that I had several example tweets on deck didn’t tip you off. Just know that rap never ceases to be rap, music’s worth is not necessarily related to its perceived quality, and it’s lame as hell to decide that you’re making music for critics to listen to.