ROOM25
Noname
2018

Fandom is hard in the online era, man. Noname is someone I so badly want to root for, who does so much cool shit, who also thinks J Cole is corny and who is vocal about injustice in America, whose raps are so funny and so thoughtful ninety percent of the time. Her Noname Book Club is a genuinely really cool project! That ten percent where she gives Jay Electronica a supremely antisemitic Black Isrealite verse on Sundial, though. Noname is a gaze into the mirror of being perpetually annoying online, and while I’m not sure I’d like her half as much if I didn’t follow her on Twitter before she deleted, I also know I wouldn’t sigh as hard at the fact that I love this album.

Room25 is the debut album, and it came from a place of transition into real adulthood. She’d moved from Chicago to L.A. – she’d started having sex – she needed to pay rent. That sense of obligation maybe helps birth its tossed-off introduction, a 1:35 song fragment that feels like it started halfway through. “Self” is maybe the best the album ever gets, though – the freeflow pleasure she has on “Mister money man, Mister every day he got me/Mister weather me down, Mister me love, Mister Miyagi,” is one of the greatest rap moments of the last decade. It has that same sticky teeth feeling of the best beats by The Neptunes, the best Big Willie Style hooks, the best playground songs.

But, then again, maybe the best moment is “Blaxploitation,” which combines jokes about bad feminism and exhaustion with trying to have good politics and darker outrage about the state of the world. In terms of the album’s mission statement, “Prayer Song” and “Montego Bae” are maybe the most representative combinations of sex and politics, some lines phenomenal (“If you wanna help me to put me inside the cuffs/Put the cigarette in my back/Keep the hospitals overrun-run-run-run, Chicken Little/How my city gonna run off shits and giggles?”) and others corny (“America the great, this grateful dead and life for me/Apple pie on Sunday morning, obesity and heart disease”.)

Not being able to put my finger down is kind of the appeal of Room25. At its best, it’s one of the absolute great rap albums of the 2010s and an all-time great rap debut. There’s nothing quite like it and I’m not sure you could regulate it on purpose. That 10%, though.

KEY TRACKS: “Self,” “Prayer Song,” “Montego Bae”
CATALOG CHOICE: Telefone, “Song 32,” “Song 33”
NEXT STOP: Everything’s Fine, Jean Grae and Quelle Chris
AFTER THAT: Ho, Why Is You Here?, Flo Milli