6 Noname: Sundial

The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth

proverb of unknown origins, likely African

We could scapegoat everything
We could penny-pinch the homie for defendin’ the dream
A simpler thing, by any mean
Niggas will kill they team
Say the gun did it, run with it
White man or frontman, a whole vision

We just see self in his image
Won’t be a self-critic, burn up our whole village
That wasn’t us, that was colonialism
We keep our babies fed, we don’t beat and rape on our women, we good
We is Wakanda, we Queen Rwanda
First black president and he the one who bombed us, yeah

hold me down

Noname. Fucking. Gets it.

On Black Mirror, the opening track of her third album that arrives five years after her second, Fatimah Warner gives a quick introduction, listing off what they identity as. Sure, they’re a “shadow walker, moon stalker, Black author”, obviously, that goes without saying. But they’re also a librarian, as since their last album they’ve launched Noname Book Club, which recommends two radical books per month written by people from marginalised communities and also provides these books to people in prison (“We believe building community through political education is crucial for our liberation and should be accessible to everyone—which is why all our programming is free, including the books we send to incarcerated homies”). I think we’d disagree on the benefits of segregating the people these important pieces of education need to be disseminated to, but I do note with approval that this month’s recommended books are Angela Davis’s ‘Freedom is a Constant Struggle’ and ‘The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine’ by Rashid Khalidi. And they’re a “Socialist sister”, which can’t help but make them the “Contrarian” that they’ve already mentioned, as trying to be socialist while trapped in the suffocating duties of capitalism is always going to turn you into a maddening twirl of contradictions. They give a quick shout out to show they’re a supporter of the trans community (“Gender is dimension one/We live in dimension four”). They’re “cute and compassionate/Flakey as a bitch, the witch inside the broom/Motion sick, driftin’ in and out of consciousness like the rappers do”.

Before, finally, last line in the song: “She a rapper too”.

So that’s the first song…

‘Sundial’ is a spectacular album. Noname had never been able to get all the way over with me in the past, with their immense talent as a writer and poet never really translated into astonishing music, or even lyrics that ever stayed with me. Hey, Fatimah, really glad that you’ve had a sexual awakening, good for you, but don’t ask me to be pleased for you across a full album of libby self-love, ‘personal is political’ bullshit. They may have had similar struggles themselves, which would account for the huge gap between albums: how can they reconcile the community and socialism of her politics with the neoliberal and self-serving exercise of telling people about yourself across eleven music tracks??

Yeah, you’re forced to be a contradiction, a contrarian. So why not talk about that contradiction?? To quote The National*, who annoyingly put it better than I could, on ‘Sundial’ Noname is “an agitator and stylist committed to interrogating her beliefs as intensely as she espouses them“. Noname knows that their politics and their actions are occasionally sketchy, because they’re human, because they’re an artist first and a political leader, like, fourth or fifth. So they highlight the grossest elements of capitalism and accuses those who drop their morals in order to just be allowed to play along (and make that all important hundred and third million), but also highlights how under capitalism we’re all at least a little culpable. So on namesake – while calling out the military industrial complex that saw the same bullets shot at unarmed black protesters in the US was also used to police the apartheid in Israel – chides Jay-Z, Rihanna, Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar for taking the money to perform at the Superbowl despite the event acting as a mass recruitment exercise for the armed forces:

I ain’t fucking with the NFL or Jay-Z
Propaganda for the military complex
The same gun that shot Lil Terry
Out west the same gun that shot some Samir in the West Bank
We all think the Super Bowl’s the best thing

Go, Rihanna, go
Watch the fighter jet fly high
War machine gets glamorized
We play the game to pass the time
Go, Beyoncé, go
Watch the fighter jet fly high
War machine gets glamorized
We play the game to pass the time

Go, Kendrick, go
Watch the fighter jet fly high
War machine gets glamorized
We play the game to pass the time

(*the paper, not the band. The band, as far as I know, have remained silent. Neoliberals? Fascists? Racists? Without any evidence to the contrary, we have to assume that they are all three of these things)

…but then they follows that with “Go, Noname, go/Coachella stage got sanitized/I said I wouldn’t perform for them/And somehow I still fell in line”, which isn’t just an admission of messy politics and compromises for money, but the politics they’re wishing to exude are in themselves messy! Why was performing Coachella a compromise? Well, Noname tweeted (and later delated) that they were “not going to keep performing for predominantly white crowds“, while later playing Coachella, which is whiter than the first five seasons of Friends. To say that compares to ignoring military imperialism is dumb, but then the whole idea that performing to white crowds in a majority white country is some great betrayal of their values shows exactly what those values are: they’re a liberal identity politician first and foremost, and any real socialism needs to work around that. They betray this once again in their “Support the Black business, no compromise” stance in beauty supply, where capitalism is suddenly fine as long as the owners of industry, the petit bourgeois, have a slightly darker skin tone. Does Fatimah carry a colour chart to judge which capitalism is OK to support? Or is it more of a genealogy thing? Should business owners have to display their 23andMe results at all time? And what of Jay Electronica’s antisemitism on balloons?? I’m not even going to touch that!

But I fucking love these debates! I love a record that at least dares to take on these questions! Noname never once declares that their understanding of socialism is concrete, and never claims to be a Marxist (yeah, let’s change that), and these internal clashes, these dumb contradictions, have produced an outstandingly interesting album. I just hope the next record doesn’t take five years and isn’t just about playing with your fanny again.

2018 (no.69, dude), 2016 (No.94)

Three albums now, is it? All on Necessary Evil you say?

Metacritic: 87

Legit Bosses: 1