THIS LITTLE UNDERGROUND
Noname at the Beacham, Jan. 17
Chicago rapper Noname is rising fast. Though evident in the size of the Orlando crowd that received the budding artist, the surer testament to her heat was their clear intensity. And she met it with a big show.
A velvet union of hip-hop, jazz and R&B, Noname’s sound rolls like a sharpened Ladybug Mecca with more agility, more gears and the Midas lyrical touch of a poet. Though she’s got palpable buzz and currency right now, her music is an old-school kind of organic and not at all emblematic of our ADHD internet times.
Rather than the typical rap show, Noname’s jazzy penchant was consummated live with a lush four-player band. On record, she moves between rap and song as if they were natural extensions of each other, yin and yang.
Some of that up-close personality, versatility and virtuosity, however, was a little lost in the grandness and sprawl of her stage arrangement, which also included three backup singers who did the melodic heavy lifting. With corps and production that were better to look at than to actually hear, the performance would’ve benefited greatly from shifting the focus from the presentation back to the artist herself.
But no question, Noname’s got the goods, the ambition and the momentum. And at this rate, she’s on the fast track to making sweet irony of her self-effacing name.
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Email Bao: baolehuu@orlandoweekly.com
This article appears in Jan 16-22, 2019.
