ACL Live Review: Noname

Going the bulk of her career hiding in plain sight, 27-year-old Chicago rapper Fatimah Nyeema Warner continues to undergo the slow process of revealing who she actually is – on her terms, of course. Her 2:45pm date Friday at the HomeAway stage further exposed a natural conversationalist with perhaps generational talent.

“Y’all really thought a bitch couldn’t rap, huh?” she asked on opener “Self” despite the fact that talent hasn’t been an issue since her glowing turn on Chance the Rapper’s 2013 mixtape Acid Rap.

From the start at Zilker Park, her tunes came off even jazzier and more steeped in Chicago funk than her recordings, flowering behind an instrumental fourpiece and two capable backup singers for support. She speed-rapped with nuance about systematic racism and faulty perception on “Blaxploitation.”

“Write a think piece in the rap song, the new age covenant.
If you really think I’m cooking crackin’, pass me the oven mitts.”

Seeking connection with the diverse crowd, during joyous “Freedom” she goaded them into call-and-response repeats of the lyric “dance with me.” Warner continued this experimental motif throughout, live-solving the Rubik’s Cube of maintaining a crowd’s attention even if every other word she sang undoubtedly got lost to the grounds’ open air.

She squeezed in some of her notable features, including a wavy Mick Jenkins track, “Comfortable.” The darkly compelling “Shadow Man” dug into her morbid side:

“Moses wrote my name in gold, and Kanye did the eulogy.
Remember all the bashfulness, understand the truancy.”

Uncertainty abounded on the timing of the end of her set, which she nearly shut down short of the allotted hour. Fatimah Warner does what she can to avoid labels, so there was zero guesswork about Noname’s increasingly name-brand sound.