Noname’s Fearless Complexity | Pitchfork

Noname, whose name is Fatimah Nyeema Warner, is the reason everyone’s here together on a gorgeous Thursday in August. They’re celebrating her transformative new album, Sundial, lining up for free champagne and pre-rolls; dancing, laughing, eating; talking with people at tables full of literature for activist community organizations like Assata’s Daughters, the Black Alliance for Peace, and Mental Health Meets Hip-Hop. A bouncy castle undulates near a coloring station where small children draw pictures. “There’s a horse in the back!” effuses the block party’s emcee, J Bambii aka Oprah Gucci, from the stage, during one of the most surreal moments of the day. There are indeed two horses in the back, brought by the local cowboy collective Broken Arrow Riding Club, ready to be petted on their muzzles by fawning kids.

Further down the street, a tween girl spends the entire day learning to skateboard with the help of folks from the froSkate, a collective that centers women and queer shredders of color. The girl teeters on the deck, as the bleach-blonde Latina who’s teaching her offers her arm for balance. As I chat with Karlie Thornton, froSkate’s progenitor, the girl hugs the waist of her instructor protectively, like you might to a camp counselor-turned-temporary mom.

The sun gleams with late summer perfection on the beautiful crowd, mostly Black and Latine, and vastly diverse in age—including one elderly woman using a walker, who giggles as the security lady gestures at gently frisking her. Along with being a Noname concert, the event is the platonic ideal of a neighborhood block party: communal joy, reveling in the experience of simply being outside. There are no big-name brands or corporate sponsors on display, save for fellow Chicago-raised rapper Vic Mensa’s weed company 93 Boyz, which is providing the free herb.

Noname spends the day smiling and chatting in the crowd and backstage, surrounded by friends and fans, emitting the nervy ebullience of a party host who hopes her attendees are happy. The Sundial Block Party is the culmination of everything she’s been working towards for the past several years, something that fuses her artistic imprimatur with radical human engagement. “I want to do block parties in different cities as a way to just have free shows where I can bridge the two worlds that I’m really into—the community organizing and the music—especially since I’ve struggled to do only one or the other,” she tells me later. “Like, how do we apply political ideologies in the real world to actually move towards liberation?” As in her music, she is pensive and realistic, speaking carefully as she thinks herself towards pragmatic solutions. “I mean, a free show is not going to dismantle the state. It’s not a revolution. I am aware of its limitations. I’m definitely more of a musician than anything else.… But it’s my attempt to have, I guess they call it, like, praxis?”