Time. Space. Reality. It's more than a linear path.
It's a prism of endless possibility, where a single choice can branch out into infinite realities, creating alternate worlds from the ones you know. I am the Watcher. I am your guide through these vast new realities. Follow me and ponder the question...
"What if?"
We’ve seen this before. A rapper gets an idea so great it outgrows the platform of its original conception—no song, no album, can convey what Daniel Dewan Sewell, better known as Danny Brown, is trying to say about the bloodline of Jesus Christ.
Known for his eccentric style, dark humor, and experimental music, Brown grows tired of rapping about growing up in Detroit and has been consumed by a recent obsession of one particular Catholic conspiracy theory—the possibility that Jesus and Mary Magdalene fucked and went halves on a baby.
What starts out as just beats in a lab becomes a full on expose’ which criticizes the cover-ups of Catholic dogma and essentially takes down the higher-ups of the Vatican.
Unable to keep his ideas contained in his Brooklyn recording studio, Brown attempts to adapt his ideas to the page and learns more about the conflict between the Opus Dei and Priory of Sion.
After an initial treatment, Brown sees the novel more as a thriller, and develops a streetwise protagonist named Bobby Lang who uses his street smarts and former drug dealer connects to navigate the conspiracy.
While fleshing out the novel, Brown also develops a little hotmosis shorty for Lang to get sprung, his cipher queen, Sofie Newvo, “a grinch bitch with a nose drip.”
Not only do the characters in the novel exchange vulgar yet witty banter, the dialogue gets fucking hyped when they engage in fierce verbal battles, filled with slang, punchlines, and side-splitting rhymes.
Not only do the characters in the novel exchange vulgar yet witty banter, the dialogue gets fucking hyped when they engage in fierce verbal battles, filled with slang, punchlines, and side-splitting rhymes.
The plot takes an even more surreal and unexpected turn when it is revealed that after the big shootout, that Mary wasn’t “the only ho that Jesus know,” and Lang and Newvo uncover an entire line of illegitimate children orphaned by the Lord when he “went out for smokes,” ascending to heaven on the third day.
The following are excerpts from Brown’s original treatment which he sold to the Doubleday Group:
Yo, check it, let me paint you a scene: Louvre Museum, Paris, France. Rain slickin' the cobblestones, spotlights poppin' off Mona Lisa's smug-ass grin. But tonight, ain't nobody lookin' at art. Not when crypto-crackin' prodigy Sofie Newvo bursts in, breathless and wired, spittin' riddles and spinnin’ cyphers.
She drops a doozy on Lang, Harvard's tweed hoodie-sportin' symbology sleuth: curator Jack Sauna’s dead, posed like some Renaissance rap battle loser, cryptic inscription tattooed on his chest. It's a Fibonacci frenzy, man, Fibonacci on fire! Lang's eyes light up like he just racked up a dub rollin’ a four; he smells conspiracy thicker than Parisian fog.
Thus begins a wild goose chase through crack and back alleys, Louvre catacombs drippin' with secrets, and the Vatican itself, where cardinals scheme like hustlers in gold-plated robes. Sofie's the hacker queen, hot-wiring ancient texts and bustin' through firewalls like it's drywalls in a slum. Lang's code-crackin’, unravelin' symbols like yarn balls from a blind cat, spittin' historical facts faster than a beatboxer drinking Red Bull.
But they ain't alone. $ila$, this whitey asshole with eyes like frozen yogurt is on their tail, a Grail-obsessed assassin movin' like a wraith on lean. He's got Opus Dei muscle backing him, ready to crack skulls like dollar store sunflower seeds if they get too close to the truth.
Yo, the beat gets super-gritty… Yo, the plot twists like a pretzel dipped in acid gettin’ eaten by a pigeon…
Templar secrets, hidden societies, bloodlines intertwined like graffiti on a subway car. Every fresco, every statue, hides a clue— a whisper of the past that could fuck history itself. And all the while, the clock's tickin', a digital metronome countin' down to some cataclysmic event that'll rock the world like a rogue bassline from my album Possess the Land.
Can Lang and Sofie decipher the clues before $ila$ spills the holy grail onto humanity's head like a warm, expired Jug Juice? Will their rhymes resonate through the ages, or get lost in the museum of forgotten beats? Buckle up bitch, 'cause this Da Vinci Code ain't your dusty textbook history. It's a synthesizer symphony of secrets, a mosh pit of conspiracies, and a lyrical beatdown that'll leave you breathless, re-evaluatin' everything you thought you knew about art, religion, and the very fabric of yo’ reality.
Unfortunately, the rest is history. Upon the novel’s completion, Brown's prose style has been criticized as clumsy with The Da Vinci Code being described as 'committing style and word choice blunders in almost every paragraph.’ Critics have eviscerated both the accuracy of the author's historic research and the writing itself, considering the book to be not particularly well-written or well-researched. Much of the criticism was centered on Brown's claim that he wrote most of it after taking shots of Hennessy spiked with Molly and “sniffing Adderall off the counter in my kitchen.”
He has since gone sober, kicking his drug and alcohol habit.
Yet despite the negative reactions to his book, it has gone on to sell 80 million copies. The movie adaptation which was released in 2006 has grossed over $224 million worldwide.
Ain't it funny how it happens? Ain't it? Ain't it funny how it happens?