Album Review: The Answer by Billy Danze
The Brownsville half of M.O.P. reunites with his Swiss producer for a second solo full-length that spends most of its energy yelling at rappers who don’t deserve the mic.
M.O.P. recorded three albums that nobody heard: Ghetto Warfare shelved at Roc-A-Fella, another vanished at G-Unit, a third dead between handshake deals and voided contracts. Billy Danze and Lil’ Fame kept touring and kept shouting, booking shows off the strength of “Ante Up” for a quarter century, and when Danze started making solo records with the Swiss producer TooBusy in 2020, nobody threw a parade. The Listening Session came and went, and The Answer, his second full-length with TooBusy, stacks the guest list with every New York rapper over forty who still picks up the phone. It sounds exactly how you’d expect, and that’s a compliment and a limitation in the same sentence.
Most of The Answer is addressed to somebody Danze can’t stand—a young rapper who can’t write, a disloyal friend, the culture at large. He lectures track after track, and you start to wonder who, exactly, needs this much correction. But on “Got Time,” he stops. He describes printing T-shirts with a dead father’s face so a nephew can wear them to his basketball games, and the difference between that image and the chest-puffing around it is the whole album in miniature. “That’s gotta hurt,” he adds. Jadakiss picks up the thread on “Got Time” too, asking how it feels to be a Black man:
“Outstanding like the Gap Band
Not according to the lifespan
All the obituaries on the nightstand.”
For a verse the record opens its chest, and then the lecture resumes. Conway the Machine’s verse on “What If” is the most precisely written thing on the entire album, and nothing else comes close. He names his mother’s addiction recovery and thanks God for her sobriety in the same breath he mentions the bullet scars. He names the mother’s son, killed by a drunk driver on New Year’s Eve, and the father’s son, killed by gunfire a month earlier. “I pulled over my truck, and I cried,” Conway says, and you believe him, given the fact that the details are too specific to be performance. Danze’s own contribution to “What If” contains his strongest writing on the record, “I ain’t stressed over war/I’m depressed over war,” and the distance between those two words does more than any of his chest-puffing tracks. “Blessings and Prayers” runs a similar current; Danze thanks his father for leaving the light on, says washing away sorrows in a bottle is just hanging on, admits a man shouldn’t plan his fate. And when the guard drops on The Answer, Danze can actually write.
TooBusy’s production keeps the whole thing on steady ground, maybe too steady. The beats are muscular without much variety, and the consistency helps the guest verses but also makes the mid-album tracks blur together. “Gotham” has enough snarl to match Ghostface Killah, who shows up and immediately starts talking about cleaning his stones with his fingers glued to a saxophone, writing raps until his hand caught carpal tunnel. I laughed out loud at Ghost’s verse—he outclasses everyone here, including his host:
“Some niggas blew up off one song and an ad
And my old ass’d be like, ‘What the fuck was that?’”
Ghostface backs up his trash talk through detail, giving you the saxophone, the carpal tunnel, the career worn down to the bone in a chair. Danze just insists he’s the greatest and moves on to the next track.
Danze calls himself the mayor, presidential, the hardest, the most quotable—you could fill a pamphlet with the titles he assigns himself on this record alone. On “Brooklyn Confidential,” he’s an opium distributor whose dosage could be lethal, the kind of bar that rattles in the booth and disappears the second you think about it. “The Fix” asks the same question differently. Can the new generation give people that Black Rob “Whoa”? It would hit harder if the entire track weren’t also sixteen ways of saying Billy Danze is better than you. “In Case You Forgot” pairs him with Lil’ Fame for the M.O.P. reunion, and Fame matches his intensity with less self-regard:
“I ain’t one of them punk bitches that be scared of y’all
Haven’t met a warrant
I keep telling y’all.”
Fame comes off like he’s in a fight, and Danze, too often, comes off like he’s grading papers.
Buried near the end of The Answer, Danze turns to someone who betrayed him. “He assassinated the character of a man that really hoped you would win,” he raps on “No Losses,” and the hurt catches you off guard after fifteen tracks of chest-beating. The hook spells it out: “There’s no love lost ‘cause it was never none there.”
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Got Time,” “Gotham,” “What If”