Weekly Dance Break: Noname’s Tiny Desk Concert

Hi everyone! It’s been a minute but I wanted to drop in and leave this dance break for you all. A dear friend of mine recently introduced me to Noname, a fresh and brilliant rapper from Chicago. Here, in her NPR Tiny Desk concert, she performs a medley of her songs—which feature a blend of the sweet and the achingly painful.

From the NPR description of this performance: “These intriguing juxtapositions are what propelled Telefone to our top 50 albums of 2016. She prefaced her performance of “Reality Check” by saying: “I kind of talk in like, scramble-think, so hopefully you guys follow it.” “Scramble-think” refers to the clever metaphors she weaves in detailing the many ways she’s dodged destiny.”

But mostly, Noname speaks for herself. Take a listen:

Advertisement

Big Sound Saturdays: Tired Man, Vol. 1

Punchin’ cows sure don’t arouse me anymore

I’m getting’ tired of listenin’ to the coyotes snore

Oh, sleepin’ on the Rio Grande is makin’ him snore –

I’m a tired cowboy

Just a tired guy!

Welcome, pals, to the dustbin of history; the never-ending tale of the Tired Man! The story of men being “fed up with it” is just called “History:” “Make it new!” quoth irate facist Ezra Pound, and modernism gets an audience! Fuck capitalism!, quoth Marx, and the dancing table becomes commodity magic! I know it’s glib to refract a broad moral history through the single lens of male fatigue, but what I’m saying is that these songs of men feeling bored and agitated and sleepy—mostly, obviously, because of a woman—cast a broader, and deeper, line when they get all shuffled together.

Artist Spotlight: SMUT

B.C. talks to burgeoning band SMUT, fresh out of Cincinnati’s rich music scene.