Noname, the hypnotic rapper from Chicago, is among the best young wordsmiths working today. The twenty-six-year-old is adept at the technical aspects of verse construction, yes, but she displays preternatural judgment when practicing the hazier, more alchemical art of organizing words in arrangements previously unseen, arrangements that make the hairs on your arms stand up. Her affect is cool—she is sometimes mischaracterized as “sweet”—but she is forging brief and bright storms. She is invested in the potential of poetic language to conceal even as it reveals aspects of herself, and of the political Zeitgeist that her music warily confronts. “Maybe I’m an insomniblack, bad sleep triggered by bad government,” she raps on “Blaxploitation,” a cinematic caper on “Room 25,” her début studio album, which was released on Friday.
Noname was born Fatimah Warner, in Bronzeville, Chicago, to a mother who owned a bookstore and a father who was a book distributor. She cites Toni Morrison as a foundational influence. She told the Fader that she honed her gift for slam poetry via YOUmedia, a prestigious program held at the Harold Washington Library, in downtown Chicago, and made the transition from poet to rapper in her late teens. She went by Noname Gypsy early in her career, before she realized that “gypsy” was an ethnic slur.
When she popped up in Chance the Rapper’s orbit, in the early twenty-tens, she brought with her the gravity of a rapper who is a poet first. There was something surreal in the crystal stainlessness of her delivery and tone. She took an allusive approach toward observing her environment, and even when her songs were bluntly political, she painted scenes; she did not shout slogans. She knew that the rhetorical capacity of the rallying call “Black Lives Matter” was degraded each time the slogan got into hostile or opportunistic mouths. And so she said, instead, “And I am afraid of the dark, blue and the white / badges and pistols rejoice in the night,” on “Casket Pretty,” a stirring standout from her début mixtape, “Telefone,” from 2016.
“Telefone” wasn’t an overtly personal project. Noname slipped into the voice of a phantom “Shadow Man” (“My music was a church when my spirit hopped out”), or a woman entering an abortion clinic, on “Bye Bye Baby” (“Before you leave, don’t look down”). Noname does not casually offer up herself, or the black female condition that she was born into, for facile or pitying consumption. She’ll not have you gawk; she will have you press through her language, to earn understanding through the peeling back of layers and metaphors and coats and prayers. On “Telefone,” she experimented with the emotional remove of the griot, the itinerant storyteller who gives the people their founding lessons on mortality. She spoke from the soul of a generation accustomed to mothers burying their children and not the other way around. Her stage anonymity was a proxy for the exhaustion of living in a black self. “Telefone” seemed haunted by the work that autobiography requires: “Who gon’ remember me? My satellite, my empathy?” she asks on the project’s first song, “Yesterday.”
On the introduction to “Room 25,” Noname is older, and intoxicatingly confident about the task she’s set out for herself. “And y’all still thought a bitch couldn’t rap, huh? Maybe this yo’ answer for that,” she says on the throat-clearing opener, appropriately titled “Self.” The Chicagoan recently moved to Los Angeles, and her new geography is another setting for this coming-of-age work. It is a boast that foretells all the darting and weaving that Noname achieves on this album. She is athletic, using compressed rhyme schemes to comment on gentrification, police brutality, beauty norms, and heartbreak. The central tenet of Christianity—that after the suffering on this earth, there is a heaven—occupies this album, as it has the work of others in the cadre of Chicago musicians of which Noname is part. “Chip, chip away at all the coffins / Approach with caution,” Adam Ness sings on the hook for the exultant “Prayer Song.” This is not canonical gospel music; Noname invites lapsed believers to a new kind of faith.
Independence is on Noname’s mind, in her life both as an artist and as a woman. She is not interested in signing to a label, and she financed the production of “Room 25” using the proceeds from touring “Telefone.” She has pushed back against the pressure of the streaming monopolies, forging artistic autonomy from her Bartleby-like daydream of living utterly undetected. “No name for people to call me small or colonize, optimism / No name for inmate registries if they put me in prison,” she says on “no name.” This fantasy of self-erasure is countered, on “Room 25,” by a newfound interest in, to use her own word, vulgarity. Since recording “Telefone,” Noname experienced a short and intense romantic relationship, her first, and had sex for the first time. On this album, you can hear her experiencing the exuberance and the disappointments of hooking up. The subject gives her droll ways to use her gift for free association: “You want a nasty bitch, psychiatrist that cook like your mama, and all you got was me, me, me,” she raps on “Window.” I loved listening to Noname loosen up, not just for her wryness but for how she erodes the expectation that a woman rapper who is conscious of politics will not also be conscious of sex.
Noname has a great complement in her main producer, the instrumentalist Phoelix, who supports her with docile loops of R. & B. and blues-adjacent compositions. For the first forty seconds of “Windows,” grand, sighing strings have the floor; “Montego Bae” rides on a buoyant, impossibly airy bass. Often, though, I found myself selectively filtering out anything that wasn’t Noname’s voice. She’s just too dexterous, too nimble, too wise to pay attention to much else.
Sourse: newyorker.com
