If the trenchant US rapper Noname had her fondest wish, this show wouldn’t be just another gig in a corporate rock venue, but a free block party. There would be food trucks, stalls for activist groups and Black-owned businesses, plus free legal weed and somewhere for attenders to donate transformational books written by people of colour to those in jail. This is what happened in Fatimah Warner’s home town of Chicago last year, to celebrate the release of her incendiary and highly personal third album, Sundial, which closed 2023 on numerous year-end lists.
Nonetheless, Noname seems delighted to be at the 5,300-capacity Apollo – not least because of the turnout (abundant, if not quite sold out). As she asks for the house lights to be illuminated, she can’t quite believe how many people are here, shouting her lyrics back at her.
Warner’s jazz-inflected hip-hop about personal struggle and radical thought could seem quite a niche affair, compared with the Auto-Tuned juggernaut that is mainstream trap-pop. Not only that: her sound feels luxuriantly retro, even neo-Daisy Age at its breeziest. But her dissections of America’s ills are incisive and up to the minute.
Backed by Greg Paul’s exuberant live drums, Brooke Skye’s bass and keys player and backing vocalist Cisco Swank, Noname bobs around a largely bare stage wearing a black dress, black knee socks and black shoes – what rapper Lupe Fiasco might call “all black everything”. She radiates bonhomie, even as she fulminates against Black co-optation, selling trauma and her ex.
Even before we hit the meat of Sundial, Noname is warming to her subjects, kicking off with Self (2018), a statement of intent whose central refrain – “Y’all thought a bitch couldn’t rap, huh?” – contrasts starkly with her rapid-fire verses, densely allusive and sexually frank. We’re in a “crack era”, in which her vagina is schooling the naysayers. “My pussy teaching ninth grade English! My pussy wrote a thesis on colonialism!”
Sundial itself is perhaps Noname’s best work yet, with some reservations – principally the inclusion on the album of a guest verse by rapper Jay Electronica that seems to contain antisemitic tropes, and in which he allies himself with highly controversial Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
The album nearly didn’t happen; she scrapped a previous effort, and spent a long time away from music, uncomfortable at drawing white audiences rather than the people her work was intended for. Warner established the Noname Book Club, a bid to spread works of Black liberation; getting those books to the incarcerated is a stated aim. Noname may not quite be on the level of Tupac Shakur, the son of a Black Panther, but Warner’s mother ran her own Afrocentric bookshop, the first Black woman in Chicago to do so.
The title Sundial seems to nod subtly at hip-hop’s old preoccupation – knowing what time it is – and, perhaps, at how Noname throws some shade around. One of this engrossing gig’s highlights is a Sundial standout, Namesake. Warner stops this hugely catchy track mid-flow, declaiming most of it as an electrifying a cappella, like a slam poet. She names names – Rihanna, Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar – all artists who have performed during the Super Bowl, despite the increasingly close relationship between the NFL and the military. “War machine get glamorised, we play the game to pass the time,” she notes.
One of Warner’s ambitions on Sundial is to act like a “black mirror”, not just to denounce racism and capitalism (which she does eloquently), but also to call out complacency where she sees it in her community. Warner is canny with it too: she told the New Yorker that “I can sit here and talk about the industrial complex all day long, but n***** don’t look up until I say ‘Rihanna’. Which isn’t right, to use those things. But that’s what people pay attention to.”
Crucially, she knows she “plays the game” too, and is refreshingly honest about it. One verse of Namesake owns up to this hypocrisy – Noname performs at the Coachella festival for the money, despite questions about the festival’s parent company’s donations to organisations with rightwing agendas. As she hits a peak of pique on Namesake, there’s time for a “free Palestine!” shoutout too before she skilfully brings the band back in.
Her more vulnerable personal tracks are as just as deft as the more newsworthy rhymes. Often, Warner wants nothing more than to get high to get away from it all. Sex is another pleasurable escape on the frisky Boomboom – although even there, she can’t resist a reference to WEB Du Bois, the early 20th-century pan-Africanist scholar and activist. Beauty Supply, meanwhile, gnashes over Eurocentric beauty standards that she is still buying into.
The times seem to call for someone like Warner, who feels like a younger sister to righteous figureheads such as Lauryn Hill or Erykah Badu, while simultaneously putting in the work on the ground and online – the consummate 21st-century rapper-activist multitasker. She is also frank and funny; often despairing; a community leader and a young woman still figuring life out.
