Sundial

About

By now, the Chicago rapper needs no introduction, but to open her second album, she makes one anyway: “She’s a shadow walker, moon stalker, Black author, librarian, contrarian.” Or maybe it’s less of an introduction than a stab at defining her own complicated identity. Noname’s been frank about the ethical and existential concerns her own success inspires—specifically the ways in which Black art is regularly exploited by white platform. She’s working through these issues out loud on the long-awaited <i>Sundial</i>, which arrives five years after her acclaimed debut album, 2018’s <i>Room 25</i>, and in her mission toward total Black liberation, the former slam poet spares no one accountability. On “balloon,” she coolly examines the morbid voyeurism of white fans’ obsession with rappers’ tales of trauma. (“Why everybody love a good sad song, a dark album, like?/Tell me that your homie dead, your mama dead/Your brother bled along the street.”) She’s got bars for capitalists who disguise themselves as activist, superstar opportunist, and an unnamed peer who receives the album’s knockout blow: “You sound like cat piss on popcorn.” Then she turns the lens onto herself: “I said I wouldn't perform for them, and somehow I still fell in line,” she raps archly, referring to her Coachella set this spring, which ran counter to an earlier pledge not to perform for predominantly white crowd. She’s fallible, too. .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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