Noname’s Book Club: Reflections on Artistry and Activism
You may have first heard her on Chance the Rapper’s 2013 mixtape Acid Rap, though Noname has carefully cultivated a style completely unique of Chance since her debut on the track Lost. Since then, Noname has released her acclaimed projects Telefone in 2016 and Room 25 in 2018. Telefone holds a special place in my heart after listening to it on repeat. It beckons a nostalgia that I strongly associate with contrast; the softness of her flow with the chaos of my senior year in high school.
The lull of the orchestral production of her tracks sharply contrast with the critical political undercurrents of almost every single track.
Song 32, for example, climaxes at a scathing criticism of the Obama administration’s controversial history of drone strikes in the Middle East: “I’m Obama pushing the button, in Libya, Pakistan / Humanly a hypocrite, the sinner and the civilian”
Though Noname has been heralded as one of the most talented artists of the notoriously poetic Chicago music scene, her trail extends far beyond the influential spheres of Telefone and Room 25. As an activist, Noname takes political thought outside of her carefully crafted musical work and into tangible practice.
Noname’s Book Club, self-described as “an online/irl community dedicated to uplifting POC voices,” launched in the late summer of 2019. Its conception spurred from an innocent twitter interaction: Noname had been finishing a book about worker cooperatives in Jackson, MI when someone responded, she claims in an interview: “someone tweeted me like ‘Yo, let’s be pen pals! I’m reading the same book!” And then I was like, ‘Oh my god. I should create a book club.’”
Noname’s goal is not only to expose members to literature close to her politics, but also to incentivize shopping at local, POC-owned bookstores positioned diametrically opposite to massive, multinational conglomerates like Amazon: “Yes, you can participate in the book club online, but we really encourage our readers to shop at these POC-owned bookstores that we have in our directory… It’s a little bit of a f*ck-you to Amazon and kind of a f*ck-you to the FBI,” she says in an interview with Trevor Noah, ruminating on the FBI-led operation COINTELPRO which intentionally targeted and destroyed Black-owned bookstores in the 60’s.
The club highlights two books each month written by authors of color. The first two picks of its conception were We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby and Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire. I had read Freire’s book the spring prior, and as soon as I saw it on the list I was immediately reeled in. The books for April were War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson Antonio Denis and Mean by Myriam Gurba. You can check out the reading list for updates on May’s books that should be coming soon.
