“When Danny Brown announced the title of his fourth album, Atrocity Exhibition, commentators were quick to connect the dots to two other works with the same name: the opening track of Joy Division’s 1980 album Closer and J.G. Ballard’s surreal 1970 story collection. While Brown’s Atrocity Exhibition has a touch of the Burroughs-esque stream-of-consciousness and non-linearity which Ballard experimented with in his book, the Joy Division song is more instructive.
Brown finds an analogue with Ian Curtis, who sang obliquely of his mental turmoil on ‘Atrocity Exhibition’: “Asylums with doors open wide / Where people had paid to see inside / For entertainment they watch his body twist / Behind his eyes he says, ‘I still exist.’” The song finds Curtis both encouraging and castigating audiences who saw him as a sideshow, echoed decades later in Brown’s experience of being framed as rap’s hedonist-in-chief: some of Joy Division’s audience were gawking at Curtis’ epileptic fits in the same way that Brown’s fans have fetishized his drug use and abuse.”
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