Brown's enthusiastic audience periodically joined him during the show, and members were particularly enthused when he sang "Blunt After Blunt," which Brown prefaced by appealing to the joint-lovers in the crowd. The crazy-haired and provocative rapper Brown, who entered the stage with a beer in hand while donning a sweatshirt with angel wings, performed an incredible set with the volume on his microphone turned up to an almost distorting level.
Brown, who has previously opened for acts such as Childish Gambino, enjoys the opportunity to perform at colleges and expand his fan base, he said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
"Colleges are cool I want people to have fun at the end of the day," Brown said. "I just want to sound as good as possible and please the people listening to [my] music."
Brown's unique musical style and inflammatory lyrics made him an interesting choice for Friday Night Rock one of his hits, for instance, is called "Blueberry (Pills and Cocaine)" but this risky decision garnered overwhelmingly positive reactions.
Jake Rosenwald '15, one of Friday Night Rock's venue managers, said he was very pleased with the turnout and open-mindedness of Saturday's audience. Brown's unique and somewhat bizarre musical style, which has been compared to the likes of Odd Future's frontman Tyler, The Creator, is far from a surefire crowd pleaser, but the audience embraced it well.
"We were definitely worried about his provocative nature," Rosenwald said. "But it went over really well. You have to keep an open mind when it comes to his new kind of hip-hop and rap music."
As a performer whose lyrics are extremely personal, graphic and explicit, many wondered if he would be an appropriate act for a show on First-Year Family Weekend. After the positive reactions to the first song or two, however, it was clear that almost everyone in the room enjoyed his style and unique lyrical choices.
Brown, whose latest mixtape "XXX" was voted the best rap album of 2011 by Spin Magazine, has cultivated a serious following in the underground rap scene. Although his unique style is easy to characterize as a nuanced form of hip-hop, Brown doesn't consider his music to be anything different than what might be heard from the popular rap artists on the top of the music charts.
"What I do is just hip-hop I'm not doing anything crazy," Brown said. "I just experiment and try to just be progressive with the genre."
Brown performed a lengthy but incredible set of songs, which mostly included tracks from his two mixtapes "XXX" and "The Hybrid." He also included fun and refreshing freestyle rapping in his performance.
"We do freestyle as a way of having fun on stage and not to make things seem so rehearsed." Brown said. "We do that as something to keep it free."
Although Brown brought an enormous and raucous turnout to "Saturday Night Rap," the two opening acts American Mob (Ian Macomber '13) and The Graduate (Gabe Redel-Traub '14) were also impressive. For Macomber, who has been making music for almost five years, it was his first "real" performance, but with his confident stage presence, it was hard to tell. Macomber and Rede-Traub even garnered an audience of almost the same size as Brown's.
"I'm pretty psyched to open for someone who was on the XXL top freshman list," Macomber said before his performance, "There are some pretty awesome rappers on it."
Although Macomber and Redel-Traub have very different styles than Brown, the opening acts served as a smooth and fun transition into Brown's performance.
With the incredible success of the first "Saturday Night Rap," Friday Night Rock may be more open to expanding their traditional genre of bands to incorporate more acts like Brown in the future.
"Whenever and if ever there's a cool rapper that we think will be a lot of fun, [Friday Night Rock] is totally open to it," Rosenwald said. "I think everyone had a great time, and it was a lot of fun. Danny Brown is an amazing performer and [Friday Night Rock] enjoyed having him."
