The other day I was walking around listening to the new Future & Freeband Gang mixtape* and thinking about how artists these days (especially in hip-hop and dance music) are pretty much expected to collaborate with other musicians—and how cool that phenomenon is. On one hand it's produced a lot of good music, either by uncovering synergy between the artists or by introducing an element of head-to-head competition. (I will never tire of listening to Missy Elliott, Ludacris, and Jay-Z trying to one-up each other on the remix to Missy's "One Minute Man.") There's also an aspect to team-ups that taps into the comic book geek part of my brain and offers the same sort of appeal as seeing Wolverine pop up in a Hulk comic.

One of the side effects of the craze for collaborations is that when a rapper starts blowing up they can be inescapable, showing up on tracks alongside possibly dozens of producers and rappers looking to catch some of their reflected shine. For a particularly popular rapper with a robust work ethic this can mean way too many tracks for anyone but the most obsessive fan to keep up with.

For instance Danny Brown, whose eccentric talents resulted in a plethora of guest appearances in 2012. One of them was a team-up with British dance-music duo Evil Nine called "The Black Brad Pitt" (presumably a reference to a line from Jay-Z's version of Panjabi MC's "Mundian To Bach Ke") that came out back in August and that I had no idea even existed until its video debuted earlier today. Kinda wish I had caught that one earlier, but hearing Danny Brown's typically nasty flow for the first time while watching a guy dancing sinuously in a jungle and another guy dressed in an African-dicatator-ish outfit was pretty enjoyable.

*If you are at all interested in Future, or were just wondering why people are freaking out so intensely over him, do yourself a favor and read Rob Harvilla's essay on the man who he says "uses Auto-Tune the way Picasso used nude women." It's really good and somehow made me like Future even more than I already did, which was a whole lot.