Women In Music: Noname

Meet Fatimah Warner

Noname, the stage name of 25-year-old Chicago native Fatimah Warner, is widely recognized as a blossoming talent in rap and hip-hop. Her self-released debut mixtape, Telefone, made it onto NPR’s “Best 50 Albums of 2016”, Rolling Stone’s “40 Best Rap Albums of 2016”, Nerdist’s “15 Best Albums of 2016”, and USA Today’s “50 Best Albums of 2016”. Noname’s 2016 - 2017 Telefone tour sold out around the US. And as of October 2017–more than a year since her latest release–Noname gets 730,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and Telefone has more than one million plays on SoundCloud. However, Noname defies many conventions of a popular female rap artist, and I think her success carves out a new space for women in hip-hop.

Fatima Warner, picture from _Chicago Tribune_

Louder Than a Bomb: Spoken Word to Rap

Noname’s music and image are feminine and authentic, and her lyrics explore her experience growing up as a black girl in Chicago. As a teenager, she started doing spoken word poetry in a community group for young artists called YOUmedia.

After achieving recognition in Chicago’s spoken word community, Noname transitioned her talents to rap with help from friends at YOUmedia including Chance the Rapper, Mick Jenkins, and Saba. In an interview with Now Toronto, Noname described her move to rap: “The spaces for spoken word can be depressing, and poetry can be really serious. I wanted to inject light into my work, and rap is fun.” While fun and light-hearted melodies underly her songs, Noname carries the emotional power of spoken word into rap.

Breaking Expectations in Rap

Telefone works overtime to relay all the messages that are urgent and essential to her at age 24 – and those messages, about surviving girlhood, navigating womanhood, transcending poverty, finding love and escaping violence, are very much about seizing the reins of one’s own life. Here, the artist does it with astounding maturity and beauty (The Washington Post, 2016).

Much like a jazz instrumentalist, she recycles words from the hip-hop tradition and gives them new meaning (Play Too Much, 2017).

Before Noname took the stage, props were brought out: a lamp, end table, chair and a half-consumed bottle of Maker’s Mark. They’re items from her mother’s house — Noname wants the stage to feel like home….In front of 1,100 people, her performance is somehow intimate — she exudes warmth. Her show is a house party and jam session with her closest friends (Riverfront Times, 2017).

Her undeniable warmth and perceptiveness in conversation illuminate a truly independent artist in charge of her image and music (Chicago Tribune, 2017).

Noname initially garnered widespread attention from features in two of Chance the Rapper’s albums and a performance with Chance on Saturday Night Live. While people came to see Chance, I think many left wanting to hear more of Noname’s enchanting voice and poignant verse. (Noname starts at 2:15 in the video below of Chance’s SNL performance.)

Noname’s growing popularity comes as a surprise to her, she confesses in an interview with Chicago Tribune: “I know it sounds cheesy, but the ‘SNL’ thing kind of changed me. I never thought someone like me could be on TV, that someone like me could feel comfortable in this space and feel joy. It’s crazy” (Terry, 2017). Noname’s success through feminine and authentic rap is indicative of a new trend in hip-hop and a powerful moment for black women, and all women.

Roles in Hip-Hop

In order to understand Noname in the context of hip-hop culture, I want to consider the evolution of identities, both male and female, in rap.

Starting in the late 80s and continuing through the 90s, hip-hop blossomed into its most mainstream-recognizable incarnation: gangsta rap. Gangsta rap is where rap music finally hit its stride…For gangsta-era rappers, even when discussing devastating, deeply emotional circumstances, appearing “hard”—or in the very least, not appearing soft—was primary…. The reasons for gangsta rap’s bravado and toughness directly stem from the social conditions out of which the genre emerged (Denton, 2015).

As author Ta-Nehisi Coates explains, rappers’ expression of toughness and stoicism can be a necessary means to appear powerful and strong when surrounded by violence and uncertainty. Vulnerability can become a liability. Furthermore, because of rap’s origins as a “hard” genre, it is still considered a predominantly male genre that looks down upon gentleness and femininity.

Rap had long been dominated by men, and women in the industry had to fight sexist stereotypes only men could rap. These female MCs also had to contend with stereotypes about the fragility of women in a deeply masculine genre (Denton, 2015).

In order to make it in this cultural environment, female rappers adopted distinct ‘acceptable’ identities to garner acceptance, respect, and popularity. Similar to female experiences across the music industry, female rap artists face “overt sexism regarding their creative capabilities” (Keyes, 2000, p. 273). And they are often evaluated mostly on image, rather than creative and musical talents. Author Cheryl Keyes argues that these tropes are “spaces from which to deliver powerful messages from Black female and Black feminist perspectives” (2001, p. 265).

The “Queen Mother”

The first trope is the “queen mother”. She embodies “black female empowerment and spirituality” and her lyrics are “mature” but not motherly (Keyes, 2000, p. 266). She “demands respect for [herself] and all black women” (Keyes, 2000, p. 266). One prominent example of this identity is Queen Latifah.

The “Fly Girl”

The second trope, the “fly girl”, focuses more on the erotic as a source of power. She wears chic styles and her clothing highlights parts of the black female body often looked down upon: “full breasts and rounded buttocks and thighs” (Keyes, 2000, p. 269). Like Salt-N-Pepa and Missy Elliott, the “fly girl” is “an erotic subject rather than an objectified one” (Keyes, 2000, p. 269).

The “Sista with Attitude”

The third trope, the “sista with attitude”, “value[s] attitude as a means of empowerment and present themselves accordingly” (Keyes, 2000, p. 271). She does what the boys of hip-hop do: references sex and drugs, brags about her skills and party habits. Some reclaim the word “bitch” as a subversion of the patriarchy. For example, Nicki Minaj adopts a “bad bitch” persona.

The “Lesbian”

And the last trope is the “lesbian”. Independent of sexuality, the “lesbian” rapper adopts male postures and baggier clothes, in a sense obscuring her sexuality and gender identity.

An Emerging Rap Identity: Vulnerable

In an Impose Magazine article, writer Jack Denton explores a developing trend in rap and hip-hop: popular rap artists are starting to express vulnerability and insecurity in their lyrics. Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Kanye West, Kid Cudi, and Earl Sweatshirt, among many others, have told stories of insecurity in their popular songs. However, this trend has mostly been limited to male artists, while women in rap remain bound by gender stereotypes.

Though female hip-hop artists like Noname have combined supreme vulnerability with underground success, the labyrinth of gender stereotypes has continued to make it so that mainstream rap is still largely devoid of vulnerable female MCs (Denton, 2015).

Since the article’s publication in 2017, I believe Noname has carved out more space in rap for women to be both vulnerable and popular.

Intersectional Identity

Noname’s public persona is more than one narrow identity. She embraces her intersecting identities as a woman, a Chicagoan, a black person, and young adult, and presents herself openly and in whole through her music and performance.

In interviews, Noname denies intent to make a feminist statement; she says she’s just making music. But her music undeniably lends a voice to many women not previously represented in rap. For example, consider Noname’s song, “Bye Bye Baby”, that transforms abortion into a loving act.

Noname explains the song in an interview with The Fader:

It’s a personification of a mother who has had an abortion, and the baby. What I tried to do is make a love song for them. I feel like whenever I hear people talking about abortion, they typically take the love out of it, as if it can never be a loving act — as if it’s only done out of hate or desperation. I know women who have gone through that experience. And there hasn’t been like, a song for them, or a moment of catharsis and healing for them in music….That shit was just important to me as a woman, as someone who cares about these women.

While talking between songs on the set of NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert, Noname says “let’s heal the world with vulnerability”, and I think her music is making strides in that direction.

If there ever was a ‘Noname’ way of doing things, this is definitely her signature method. It’s in the way she’s able to muster a smile while performing a heartbreaking tale of abortion. It’s those sometimes bleak, melancholy lyrics over brilliant, colorful production (NPR, 2017).

While Noname has created a unique space for her vulnerable, feminine style, there is still some ways to go before women are truly represented in hip-hop. In an interview with Chicago Tribune this year, Noname says:

Whenever I outlive people calling me the female Chance the Rapper, that’ll be my testament to when I finally make it. It’s weird. No one calls Adele the female whatever, she just gets to be Adele!

Fatimah Warner, picture from _The Fader_

References

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Written by Reagan Cline on 26 October 2017