Nas Is the Reason Danny Brown Started Smoking Weed

In the past, Detroit rapper Danny Brown has talked about his affinity for Nas and made his reverence for the Queens MC known time and again. In a new interview, Danny reveals that it was Nas who actually spurred him to start smoking weed.

"Nas, my favorite rapper, and Nas used to always talk about smoking blunts and drinking Hennessey, you know, and this and that," he says in a new interview with Vice. "Everybody around me smoked weed, of course. I tried weed a few times, but I couldn’t handle it. It was when I Am came out. The rollout was so big. I remember the day it came out, I bought me—I never really drank like that—I bought me a pint of Hennessy and I got me some weed and I’m a sit here and I’m gonna listen to it.

"And I swear, this shit tasted fucking disgusting when I first tasted Hennessy. I couldn’t believe what the fuck it was," remembers Danny. "It tasted like ass, you know what I‘m saying? But I drunk it and I smoked and I listened to the album. And then I got high. I mean, I got high. But it was like, I heard the music. I didn’t never hear music like that before. Something clicked like this shit sound like I don’t know, it just did something, it made me rap in my head at the same time while I was listening to the songs and ideas was coming."

When asked if he thinks about the influence he has on kids, Danny says no and shoots back with an excellent answer: "I still want to keep the essence in it because that’s what rap music is. This ain’t fucking folk, this ain’t country, this ain’t jazz, it’s rap. It’s supposed to be abrasive, it’s supposed to be some shit you supposed to not listen to around your fucking mom and your grandma. They don’t supposed to like it. So I want to keep that because now if you don’t look at it, rap is starting to become that way where you can listen to it with your mom or your grandma might fucking like it. But me, I want to keep that element of it to where it’s like no, you don’t supposed to play this in public. This is real bad. It’s a lot of dirty language. That’s what rap music is to me."

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