Before we start, yes, Jay Electronica’s verse here is full of abhorrent anti-semitism. Nothing I say after this is in any way an agreement with anything Jay says on here, but this is a full Noname album full of much more than one verse, no matter what everyone online says. I actually wrote an entire piece about Jay’s verse and the online response to it, but I’m not sure if it’ll ever see the light of day. I wasn’t adding anything to the conversation that was already there, and it’s already been talked to death online anyway. Ok, let’s get into it.
It may have taken five years and multiple retirement announcements, but we finally got a new project from Chicago’s own Noname! There were many controversies that ranged from Noname expressing disappointment at having a majority white fanbase to having a slight beef with J. Cole in 2020. Even I thought she would never release another album again, especially since she seemed all in on her book club and the activism that is associated with it. Thankfully, she’s back with another full length album, and there’s still plenty of great things on here!
Sundial is probably her best display of technical rapping so far! It’s not necessarily her best album, but the flows on here are crazy! “Namesake” shows Noname at her most aggressive flow wise, but also lyrically as she goes at multiple musicians that have played the Super Bowl halftime show. She also includes herself because she herself played Coachella this year after saying she would never perform for them again. Noname needed money, and it seems like the Coachella money out-weighed her morals at the time. She’s not above putting herself in the line of fire when it comes to her ideals.
Noname also decided to go at her own fans on the second verse of the track, “balloons”. She had previously done this in 2019 after being unhappy with her predominately white audience, many of which would be saying the N-word while in the audience of her shows. This verse in “balloons” explains what she meant by that, just a few years later. As any good piece of persuasive writing, the thesis statement is in the first few lines, “Casual white fans, who invented the voyeur? Fascinated with mourning, they hope the trauma destroy her.” She is worried that many of the white fans are only interested in the trauma that comes with being Black in this country. Especially when looking at what most hip-hop music is about and who generally enjoys the music, she is worried that her music falls in line with those. Even if we just look at the city of Chicago, there are artists like King Von and Lil Durk, both of whom had their lives riddled by gun violence and talked about it consistently in their music. Besides looking at the systemic reasons why they were in this circumstance in the first place, many of their fans are suburban white teenagers who cannot imagine the horrors they are hearing rapped about.
There’s a whole Reddit page called r/chiraqology that has almost a quarter of a million people all talking about Chicago gang life from the safety of their own houses. There's a housing project in Chicago that is nicknamed O Block is even somewhat of a tourist destination to these people. If you go on Youtube and search O Block, there are videos of white creators going into this environment to see what it’s like. And sure, some of them are probably taking a critical look at what it’s like while having good intentions, but many others are just using these people as entertainment and not as actual people. They are being dehumanized for being born into these horrific circumstances. Noname doesn’t want this version of white fans, and she was having trouble figuring out which is which. This idea comes later in the verse with the line, “Front row, center, still gratitude, she love 'em. But she can't tell if it's genuine or just consumption”. She clearly doesn’t have any problem with genuine fans, but for people using her for consumption in the same way of people using King Von and Lil Durk for a look into this lifestyle, she wants them gone.
Even when looking at this verse contrasted against the anti-semitic Jay Electronica verse directly after, Noname herself addressed this in an interview with The Tribe before her Chicago Sundial Block Party a week after the album came out, “You can take me rapping about all these people dying, but this other side of Blackness, this more unpalatable side, y’all can’t take it.” While I don’t completely agree because I don’t see how that excuses including anti-semitism in your album, I do understand more about where she is coming from. That is the main feeling that I got from this project as well. Noname is just another person trying to figure out life. No matter how much she is passionate about her ideas online, she is still figuring out the logistics and reasoning behind things in her life. Even in the aforementioned interview, she contradicted herself a few times, but she also then acknowledged the contradictions as they happened. She’s made mistakes before, and likely will continue to. Noname is showing all sides of her on Sundial.
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