When It Rain

Album: Atrocity Exhibition (2016)
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Songfacts®:

  • Danny Brown grew up on the Detroit streets all too familiar with the violence that exists in gang life. The rapper's dark rhymes play here on the idiom, "When it rains it pours." He is saying that when the bullets start raining down, things then tend to spiral out of control. The best thing to do is "get your ass on the floor."
  • The song's music video was inspired by the Talking Heads 1984 tour documentary Stop Making Sense. "I really got the idea from this Talking Heads documentary that I saw," Brown told Zane Lowe. "I was really into that, and wanted it to look like that."
  • Danny Brown commented in an interview with Beats I Radio that Paul White's production for the song made him feel nostalgic. "It reminded me of those ghettotech instrumentals you'd be jiting to at the house parties," he said. "It took me back to them days, the middle school days."
  • This was released as the lead single from Atrocity Exhibition, an album named after a 1980 Joy Division song. Brown explained the title to NME: "People are infatuated with car crashes. Something entertaining, but you also wanna look away from it. And as I got deeper into making the album that's how I felt."

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