I don't have a very complex history with Noname. I heard her verse on Chance the Rapper's Coloring Book (like I'm sure a lot of people did) and decided to see if she had work and, until a few days ago, she had a little album (mixtape?) called Telefone, which you could get for free from her Bandcamp. In short, it's a great little record. The production is unique and interesting, and the telephone-conversation concept makes it that much cooler. The writing is phenomenal. Totally, go check it out.

But this is about the new, shiny, album(?):

Room 25

_{If you could judge a book by it's cover, like, duh, I'd read that book.}

Noname hit us with this artwork exactly four days before she gave the album to the world. I can't say I was incredibly stoked, mostly because I'd just heard Telefone maybe a year ago; i wasn't pining after new work yet like I'm sure the rest of her fan base was. But I was elated still. It's nice to get new music, especially the unexpected kind (Like Alert312's new album, which I may just review next).

So I got me a copy.

Here's what I thought.

Track 1: Self

It starts with a pretty short track (like a lot of albums in the past twenty-ish years have), and it becomes clear that, while Telefone dealt with one side of two-sided, filtered conversations, this comes from the deeper, more abrasive parts of Noname's feminist and personal, um, self. She calls out the religions of probably most Chicagoans, maybe the rest of us too, "Really questioning every god, religion, Kanye, b*tches."

(Parenthetical: This is going to be censored because, ya know, image. Sure, Chance and Noname identify as "spirit-filled rappers" but their ease-affinity to curse in their music is not shared by me. All the love <3 -C )

A prominent line in this track is "And y'all still thought a b*tch couldn't rap, huh?" which reads as a direct, ironic affront to any misogynistic claim that her rap wouldn't stand against that of males before; Telefone proved she could rap and better than a lot of folks in the forefront of Hip-Hop now.

And then she comes off the hip with these lines about "My pssy teachin' ninth grade English/My pssy wrote a thesis on colonialism," backing it with the ending lines "I know nggas only talk about money and good pssy*" which reads as another statement against what is idolized about a woman, underscores the fact that, up until now, women have had to put their bodies on display in evermore controversial ways to make it in mainstream pop, whether by design or choice. She gives, in essence, her womanhood the real power it deserves, not just the value placed on it as an attainable goal for men.

She also talked about this in an interview which I reckon I'll just leave here for y'all. Any context you need is in Telefone, really:

“Telefone was a very PG record because I was very PG,” she says. “I just hadn’t had sex. I could’ve fabricated and made a record that was like, ‘Hell yeah I love d*ck,’ but I just don’t know how to do that.”

“My only reason for not having sex was purely insecurity, purely like, I’m too afraid to be naked in front of somebody. A lot of people feel like that but the horniness trumps it, the horniness is slightly more than the insecurity,” she says, using her arms to make a precise graph of the point at which horniness trumps insecurity. But the confidence that came with commanding theatre-sized audiences upped her self-esteem and begot an ill-advised relationship with someone on her tour. When the relationship ended, after four explosive months, Fatimah was devastated.

And so Room 25 weaves together the story of her nascent adulthood. “I say ‘pssy’ like a thousand times on the album. I just was like, OK, now that my pssy is like this character that’s in the book, how do I color [that story in]?”

Okay, so I went on a little much about Self, but honestly, it is the first thing I heard. The filter was gone, any shyness from, well, anything, was officially removed. This was a new Noname, a changed, if broken Noname, with confidence and a few new weapons. This sets the mood for the record.

Track 2: Blaxploitation

But then this track, bookended (and interluded) by audio-clips from Blaxploitation flicks from the 1970's, hits with a new pace and fervor. It's less subtle than the threat of death in Casket Pretty about the condition of Black America, the way African Americans are viewed in the current socio-political spotlight, and the "dance" of survival undertaken for the sake of the greats that are trying to cultivate in our era. There's an affirmation of greatness with an underlying theme of hurt, of ruin, a lyric pointing toward the ephemeral "Your" who's Mammy comes to clean Your house. As Noname says,

"She that naked b*tch in videos, that drunk club lady
Immortalized all '80s and then she real, real nasty
Keep the hot sauce in her purse and she be real, real blacky."

She was a lot of things, and despite the negative connotation attributed to Blaxploitation films, they were created by Black Americans and, better yet, they showed people of color as the main topics and characters and heroes, v.s. the white-washing still prominent in film. There's a jaded past, but there's also a breath of progression behind it.

Track 3: Prayer Song

I think I love the lyrics to this song best out of the album. It's a hard pill to swallow, the statement that American prides itself on freedom and God, while death and capitalism are what feeds Her. "Don't nobody got no holy, everybody got an iPhone," a statement about how "in God we trust," yeah, but our real god is the phone we stick our eyes to, or better yet, the contents there-in, like the rampant violence our media feeds off of. Like Noname says in the second verse, "Why, oh why my d*ck getting bigger, this violence turn me on, me on," we're addicted to it. She refers to a case where a police officer shot Philando Castille seven times, with his toddler watching in the backseat. It was his god sitting on the dash, not America's gun-god. America is broken in that way, but broken further that, yeah, we all see it and cry tragedy, but don't give the News the attention they want until they show us the video or give us another murder to gawk at.

Noname is kind of brilliant.

Adam Ness' chorus states it best, poetic and painful:

"I was lost but thinking I was truly free (amen, amen)
Darkness lingers in the wake of slavery (amen, amen)
Hold me close, don't let me fall into the deep (amen, amen)
The lost have risen, a new religion, hallelujah, amen, amen."

Track 4: Window

This song is explicitly about the man she had mentioned in the statement under Self, how she gave herself to him, how she still loves him, how he had mountains of desires and in-ground psychological issues that she just didn't line up with. It details the way their love life went, how heavy, how empty, how fresh and then painful when he ended it.

She describes the loss of her virginity and its correlation to her religion with a stark, relatable, and bitter line, calling their love a "...sacrifice for my wholesome, I'm bought the church for the steeple...," the steeple being... well, you know.

The most painful line to me, maybe because it just hits home in a thousand different ways is towards the very beginning of the track, where she says "Everything we ever was was empty/Empty f*cking, cussing." It's the emptiness, first, and then it's the cussing, like this frequent abandonment of self leads to profanity, in bed or otherwise.

The production here is orchestra and toy music box and a thumping bass beat, later accompanied by a swinging, brash snare and drum kit. Phoelix does well to preserve the vibe of Telefone but also take the music in a new direction.

Track 5: Don't Forget About Me

First thing, she references the previous track with "Your family looking like a prayer song," then continues into a subdued, meditation on death that, up until this point in that record, is unprecedented in its lack of explicit language, and talks about eternity, and God and family relationships and the way she is idealized v.s. the way she feels about herself.

According to someone's post on Genius (where I'm reading the lyrics as I go), they claim that the lyrics "Let's get down to the nitty gritty, changed my city/Titties 13k, the pretty costs these days/My doctor really love me, how I'm only half/awake/I just came from the funeral, my ugly passed away/Welcome to Beverly Hills" are a reference to a cosmetic surgery she had after Telefone took off, how they loved her post-op, how she lost her "ugly" in the pursuit of "pretty."

The chorus is lovely, and ties together the themes with "I know everyone goes some day/I know my body's fragile, know it's made from clay/But if I have to go, I pray my soul is still eternal."

Track 6: Regal

This short little track almost acts as interlude, with swelling synth layers over the almost iconic smack-smack snare beats and kits that a lot of Noname tracks share.

The lyrics are tight, almost impenetrable, in the one verse we get, islanded by the chorus/hook, spoken softly, saying "Make my wrong turn right, make my fists turn heaven/May the lord be with me, make me look like reverend/Make me look like regal, Southside abandon/I swear I look so regal, I swear I look so regal."

In the verse, she talks about how there are "No more apples or oranges, only pickles and pacifists," a reference to the social climate of me v.s you, not I'm different you're different. The double edged sword we all hold, and the one with a little bird engraved in it called "Twitter," "ranting for martyrdom unified as capitalists." The verse is almost a brief state of the union, not just the U.S., but her relationships and social relationships and how the larger system at work responds to the people.

Track 7: Montego Bae

A wordplay on Montego Bay, Rayvn Lenae and Noname both describe what their Montego Bae would look like, and their responses to them. But while Ravyn Lenae's verse is sweet, sung, dream-like, lyrics like "I had a dream across seas for you and me/Sun ray on my lap, I love it on my back/Oh sweet bae holy sun/Oh future husband, undress me under the moon/Sweet bae someday will come soon," Noname talks about the less-than-glorious somebody, the kind she is into, "smoking backwoods in the backwoods," who cooks spicy curry and eats her "like wifey." It makes me honestly wonder why she says this, like, okay, I know it seems like a usual Christian thing to believe that sex if the after-party to marriage, and yet she gets these privileges without a hint of remorse and it could either be based in her personal belief system or just a lackadaisical attitude about sex now quite prominent in this album.

Track 8: Ace

(I promise I'm not trying to blow through these reviews, I just have more or less to say about certain tracks.)

If Noname ever had a haughty I'm-the-shiz kind of track, this would be it. It's got groovy production, underscored by Smino(?) singing about hotel trysts or ones his girl is implying. Noname comes out of the gate on her verse with the simple statement "Smino Grigi, Noname, and Saba the best rappers," without feeling a need to justify that directly and, instead, points out how the other rappers sound like "they wearing adult diapers," specifically the ones getting radio time.

She references "[buying]... a better pen" which, later she points out, is a weed pen, then points out that if Smino "is rolling" she's out, I guess implying she can't handle the joints he rolls and is satisfied with her pen.

The haughtiness returns with the statement that, duh, "Room 25, the best album that's coming out."

Saba gives us a verse where he discusses becoming successful as an independent artist and travelling so much it pisses off his landlord. It's really understated and I think i appreciate his approach to the idea in this song, versus, well, everyone else. I've never really enjoyed egocentric tracks like this and, yeah, it's not the worst I've heard, but it's also a topic I don't really care to explore. We know you think you're Jesus. Next track.

Track 9: Part of Me

I like the bare bones drum kit and layers of swirling guitar runs that make up the backing track. Phoelix does a nice job with this record, giving a pretty consistent mood. Aside from a few tracks, like Telefone, the music is interesting but gets out of the way for Noname's lyricism.

This album goes over the life she and Benjamin Earl Turner (who I dig on this track) came from, trying to stay true to that while being so radically different. They can see the old life as a painting, a snapshot of what it was, but trying to belong to it anymore is harder than a camel going through the eye of a needle. Phoelix' line in the chorus says it best:

"Riddle my old life dead, riddle my new life dead
Riddle me, Lord, forgive me"

I really like this one. I like the vibe, the lyricism, the topic. I want more of this.

Track 10: With You

This track sticks out too, in a lovely way. The beat is almost sporadic, the guitars are beautifully, with light tremolos flowing over the sung backing vocals. Her story is spoken in a style a lot like Telefone, reminiscing on a relationship, probably a man, maybe God, the poetry smooth and biting too. Hands tied behind her breast. It speaks of wordless sorrow, of a longing for a future together. The Room 25 is mentioned in this track, along with a few others. I can't find anything on what they mean, but honest, I don't think I want to know.

Track 11: no name

I love this ending. It flows well with the last track, the music taking up the first half of the track, leading into Noname's verse, and then ending with orchestra and near-choir over piano. It's so somber and yet optimistic.

The song goes on about, somewhat, the meaning of Noname, how the labels tried to sign her and she said her name didn't exist. There's also no name for the world to sully.

She talks about transitions and how the room she died in was 25, assumedly a reference to how this year was a turning point in her life, how she became a new person, how the old life died, kind of like she said in Part of Me which lends this album lyrical cohesiveness, at least at the end.

The last lyric she speaks before giving way to the musical outro is "'Cause when we walk into heaven, nobody's name gon' exist/Just boundless movement for joy, nakedness radiates."

Noname.

The Whole Picture

Like the cover, the whole picture is almost everywhere. There's a beautiful gospel album, there's poetry on depression and fitting in, and then there are the tracks, explicitly detailing sex and stock full of the bad words ( :P ). It's a mixed bag for me, and maybe that's okay. None of us are perfect, despite the fact that we try to portray ourselves that way. We are insecure. If we had the money, we may spend 13K on titties too. We have nasty sex and sit around and cuss and cuss ourselves and hate our lives or flaunt our genitals and, yeah, with social media, we totally glorify ourselves. I just hope, like the end of this album, at the end of it all, there's a light, however small, pointing it to the One that starts all circles.

Rating

I suck at ratings. I think I was at a 3 out of 5 before the last three or four tracks, now I have no clue. I'm glad I listened to it. The art alone earns it a 3.5. Maybe that's what it'll get. Or a three. I don't know. I'm going off of my LTP rating now, so I'm fuzzy on the proportions.

Thanks everybody for reading! If you made it this far, pat yourself on the back. I won't ask you to subscribe to my stuff or whatever. If you can handle the language, peep this record, and then talk to me about it. DM me on Facebook or leave a comment or something. I don't care, it's your life.

God bless, and goodnight everyone <3

"Room 25" by Noname: An Album Review