Danny Brown Recaps The Gathering of the Juggalos: "I Ate Three Funnel Cakes, To Be Honest"

Danny Brown, the Detroit-based oddball rapper known for his cuckoo-crazy flow, performed at The Gathering of the Juggalos the other weekend in Cave-In-Rock, IL and was kind enough to share his tour diary with PAPERMAG.  Read about his adventures below, check him out in the latest issue of PAPER (on stands Monday!) and -- for anyone in NYC -- catch his show this Saturday at MoMA PS1's weekly Warm Up party.

We drove to [The Gathering] from Michigan and we got there Thursday morning. I performed on Thursday, too. The drive took nine hours. We walked around a little bit earlier and later on that night, we got a golf cart and rode around in a golf cart for a bit. We got to see a bunch of shit. The set was cool because I played a little earlier in the day and there was a bunch of shit going on so it was really just the people who were there to see me at my set.  Most of the crowd that was there you could tell knew who I was and was there to see me so they were into it.  It wasn't like random juggalos who didn't know who I was and thought, "Who the fuck is this guy?"  There was too much shit going on at the time of the performance for them to do. The people who really came to the stage to see me was people who were really into my shit. So it wasn't too many people -- maybe 100/200 people.

There were girls walking around without shirts. People were just throwing Faygos onstage.  I'm from Detroit so I'm familiar with ICP [Insane Clown Posse]. I did it. They threw one Faygo and my homie caught it and drank it. I think it was a 20 oz.  We're from Detroit so Faygo's in our veins.

I think the one thing I didn't understand [before] was how freaky it was. Just riding around and seeing girls flashing us a lot and seeing blow jobs in public. It was fun, though. That was at night when I was riding around in the golf carts around peoples' tents. I saw a lot of crazy shit.  It didn't freak me out but next year we want to go without cameras. There were cameras following me so I couldn't be who I wanted to be.


We just got drunk and were smoking and then I hung out with ICP's Violent J for a minute.  He picked me up in a golf cart to show me around.  Violent J and I sat down and talked and, at the end of the day, we're Detroit guys. We're both from the same shit.  We got that connection instantly.  We talk the same, we walk the same. It's like, "That's my brother." 

So we were riding around and he was showing me the festival break-down and telling me the history of it. I think the craziest thing was when we were riding around, some girl was chasing the cart and was like, "Violent J!  Fuck all three of my holes!"  You could see she really chased the cart for a long time.  Put it like that, she was a really fast runner.  She was like, "Violent J, touch my pussy!"  It was funny.

Then after, I was like, "Look, this shit's tight.  Let me get a cart and ride around myself."  I didn't want to walk around.  I was walking around and I was getting fucked with too much.  Not in a bad way but I just wanted to get a funnel cake.  I didn't want to take pictures, you know what I'm saying?  I ate like three funnel cakes, to be honest.  And I had this big ass chicken on a stick. They had a lot of food out there.  The cool thing about their festival was that I don't know if juggalos really eat. The lines at the food [vendors] were really easy to get through and that's not normal at every festival so we were just trying a lot of different shit.  Anything weird, we just ate that shit.

We went over by the "Drug Bridge."  At this time right now, I'm just trying to smoke weed until I finish my album and then I'll start back doing Molly and shit.  Molly is too crazy for me.  So I didn't even really want to go over there to get tempted, you know?  I went over there and they had Molly for $5 -- it's like "What the fuck?  Get me out of here!"   People weren't trying to sell me drugs, they were just giving them to me.

There were a few girls talking to me here and there but I just wasn't down to make out in a tent.  It was cool but I couldn't really do my thing out there.  I was just keeping it cool.  I wasn't going to go fuck in a trailer or something and my hotel was two hours away and there wasn't any chick who was going to leave all the way for two hours to get back to the hotel and then how's she going to get back to The Gathering the next day?  I was really just being cool and I was there to do my show and I left.  I just went home to Detroit.

As told to Abby Schreiber