Danny Brown has said that hitting the road with Donald Glover was among his “worst” touring experiences to date. During the latest episode of his podcast, The Danny Brown Show, the Detroit rapper spoke about his first time sharing the same stage as the actor, who was rapping under the name Childish Gambino at the time.
“I remember when he asked me to go on that tour. My manager at the time was like, ‘You sure you wanna do this?’” Brown recalled. “I’m like, ‘Hell yeah, f**k that. I’m tryna get on the road.’ Which was, I will say, that was like one of the worst tours I ever played.”
He continued, adding that his music failed to connect with Gambino’s audience, which caused him to cry after being booed during one particular performance. “They hated my guts every night – I was getting booed off stage. I remember I was crying one night, crying crocodile tears like a little bi**h, sitting in some diner. We had some h*es with us and everything. I ain’t even wanna do it with the bi**hes, man. I’m like, ‘They hate me, man. This sh*t sucks. I’m really trash,’” he said.
However, more than a decade later, the outspoken artist says he understands the chasm between his and Gambino’s style of music, and that he would later gain more of an appreciation for Gambino’s skills after personally working with him. “They was hating my a**, dawg, that whole entire tour,” he said. “But when I look at it, man, our music was so different. Like, I was coming from a whole different perspective than what he was coming on. But then when I got in the studio, I’m like, ‘Oh no, this ni**a is dope.’ So I would say, more than anything, I’ve been impressed by people that I didn’t really think were like that. He’s just an all around talented muthaf**ka in that sense, and I be jealous of them muthaf**kas, too.”
He then likened the chart-topping multi-hyphenate and similar musicians to art school students due to their versatility and creativity. “I call them ‘art school kids.’ Like, this muthaf**ka can really do anything – why you wanna rap?! This all I got! This all I know how to do,” he said. Danny Brown and Childish Gambino toured together in 2011, which the XXX rapper voiced his excitement over at the time. The pair would later collaborate on the track “Toxic” from Gambino’s 2012 project Royalty.
Watch Danny Brown speak about Childish Gambino on The Danny Brown Show below.