Noname: Speaking Truth

Since releasing her uncompromising album Sundial in 2023, Noname has poured her energy into two grassroots projects that reflect the empowering spirit of her political views: Noname Book Club and Radical Hood Library. With these outlets for her values, Noname’s music is swapping theory for something more human

When Fatimah Nyeema Warner re-shelves books at her free library in south Los Angeles, she’ll notice local residents curiously peeking into the snug space. Since 2021, Warner has operated the Radical Hood Library in the city’s Jefferson Park neighbourhood. It’s simultaneously a multipurpose space for events, including book drives and teach-ins with an emphasis on political organising; a hub for her Noname Book Club, which selects a book each month by a Black author for its global chapters to read and discuss; and an initiative sending books to incarcerated people. 

Warner, who has unfurled bracingly thoughtful rap music under the moniker Noname for well over a decade now, only became a librarian four years ago. But visitors who wander into the library are usually completely unaware of her musical career. Instead, passersby tend to say something to the effect of: “‘Oh my gosh, what is this place? What, a free Black library?’” she explains over Zoom one bright morning in mid-July. Warner seems placid and well rested, having spent the last few hours puttering around, cleaning and walking her dog. A few books line the minimalist shelves in her home, located not far from the library. 

Occasionally, Noname diehards trickle into the Radical Hood Library, perhaps hoping to catch the rapper delivering unyielding bars about socialist politics and the corrosive nature of colonialism – alongside aching stories of that one ex who, in spite of now having a child, still stubbornly lingers in the periphery. Warner relishes her fans seeing her in this mode, bustling among library shelves separated by themes such as ‘Abolish Prisons’ and ‘Constructions of Race’. “It challenges their idea of what a celebrity is supposed to be, especially when they see me in there and I’m, like, musty because I’ve been moving boxes of books and shit,” she grins. “I’m just normal. Them accepting me that way, and also seeing me that way, adds a level of beauty to my experience being a rapper.”

Warner last released a studio album – the flinty and expansive Sundial – in 2023. Since then, she’s poured boundless energy into growing her Noname Book Club, which now boasts over 33 chapters spanning from Oakland, California, to Johannesburg, South Africa, while sustaining the Radical Hood Library. Yet Warner has perhaps never been more assiduous in pursuing her artistic ambitions and levelling up her skills as a rapper than she is at this precise moment. 

Warner experienced her first brush with rap fame in 2013 after contributing a verse to Lost from Chance the Rapper’s acclaimed Acid Rap mixtape. And when she dextrously melded warm harmonies with heady verses on her self-released 2016 debut Telefone, Warner was minted as an ascendant voice in hip-hop – a lefty rapper nimbly straddling poetic traditions in the internet age. Before that, Warner came up as a performer on Chicago’s poetry scene, and her ear for rhyme and metre is evident in songs like Diddy Bop, where she uses the poetic device of repetition to stirring effect. Yet Warner has a complex relationship with being perceived as a poet, as she often has been in the music press. Lately, she’s been reflecting on why that descriptor persists: “I think I’m still a poet to people because of the sonics and also my delivery,” Warner concludes. 

She aims to dispel that notion with the music she’s currently working on. While a handful of songs have begun to take shape, she’s still searching for their animating thread; her hope is that this collection will sound “a lot less jazzy, a lot less neo-soul” than previous albums, such as Sundial and 2018’s Room 25. Beyond plucking at different instrumentation and production styles, Warner “would like to rap more aggressively” on these new songs. “I definitely want to work on that, and just come back a little more spirited and lively,” she says. “I would like for people to listen to my music and very definitively say, ‘She’s a rapper.’” 

This pivot arrives during yet another transformative moment for Warner, as she makes plans to decamp from her longtime home of Los Angeles and relocate to Africa. She’s not yet sure where exactly she’d like to put down roots – currently she’s deciding between Nigeria and Kenya – and plans to spend much of 2026 travelling further across the continent to make a more informed decision about her future. She’s also hoping to work with musicians and producers there, where she says she “might try a couple different flows” with her rapping. 

Warner’s politics have long been endemic to her music – yet in the spirit of her ongoing sonic transformation, she’s reevaluating its role in her lyricism. In the urgent, barrelling flow of her 2023 song Namesake, she raps swiftly: “Dream about revolution, air pollution/ same solution, socialism.” On 2021’s samba-inflected Rainforest, she laments how the powers that be “turned a natural resource into a bundle of cash/ made the world anti-Black, then divided the class.” This time around, however, she is deliberately “stepping away from things that are so overtly anti-capitalist or pro-socialist” in her lyrics. “I’m trying to move away from theoretical texts embedding themselves into my art,” she says. “I just want to make emotional music, how I used to.” Her thinking about art-making, and its purpose at this polarising time, has morphed in recent years. “There’s so many different aspects of my humanity that I used to explore in my music, but then it got to a point where I felt like the only real purpose and function of art was to promote revolution,” she says. “I believe in the necessity of revolutionary art, but I don’t think that, as artists, it’s helpful or even really productive for us to exclusively make that type of art.” 

Despite gesturing back to a more instinctive, emotional approach to her music, political awareness – both personal and systemic – is not a tap Warner can simply turn off. It stems from her upbringing. In her early childhood, she lived with her grandparents in a “very mixed economic community” in early-90s Chicago. As a young woman, she remembers being cognisant of racism and “the importance of being pro-Black and having a positive view of my community and myself as a Black person”. She quickly adds that “obviously racism is incredibly political, but just being pro-Black doesn’t necessarily take it far enough where you are having a deeper understanding of structural economic systems, like capitalism. [My grandparents’] whole understanding of survival was entrepreneurship, work, respectability, a little bit ‘pull yourself up by the bootstraps’ kind of vibes.” Warner tagged along to the book signings and communal events her mother held at Afrocentric Bookstore, the bookshop she owned in Chicago. There, Warner saw influential figures including Maya Angelou and Cornel West – an environment of knowledge-sharing that shaped how she views and organises collective gatherings of her own today.

Despite running a physical library and a global book club in her mid-thirties, and having a background in poetry, it may surprise some to learn that Warner “hated” reading for much of her early life. But the works of Toni Morrison she encountered in a high school creative writing class – specifically The Bluest Eye – captivated her. It sparked an interest in writing, and she began honing her skills in youth poetry groups like the Chicago Public Library’s YOUmedia project, at open mics throughout the region, and by workshopping fellow poets’ rhymes. The latter familiarised her with the concept of a reading community built on constructive criticism, which she’s carried with her as she’s progressed in her career. Warner sees the Noname Book Club, which she began in 2019, and her music coexisting together as “praxis”. In that dynamic, “I guess my music would be the theory and the book club and the library would be the practice,” she explains. “I try as best I can to live the politics I espouse. I try the best I can to be ten toes down to the things I say. And I don’t always succeed – sometimes I fall short.”

In the early days of her career, Warner was omnipresent on Twitter. Leftist political theory shaped her worldview in real time, compelling her to share this “entirely new language to understand my conditions and the conditions of the people around me” through 140-character missives. Some of those late-2010s tweets – like when she wrote that “capitalism is a tool” – garnered backlash, prompting her to step back and read more about anti-capitalist theory, which in part led her to start the book club. For Warner, a self-identified perfectionist, the medium often enabled her worst impulses. “I mean, there was a point where I was looking at my name on Twitter, like, ‘What are people saying? What are their critiques of the album?’” she says ruefully. 

Warner eventually realised she craved the “ego boost off the fact people liked what I was saying”. That intoxicating feeling gnawed at her – like she had to tweet every waking thought. Worse still, “there were moments when I was quote-tweeting things and trying to dunk on people, which is not my personality at all,” she says. “And I just felt really nasty. I felt like I was becoming a mean person. I was like, ‘I gotta get off this platform, it’s literally ruining my personality.’” Since launching the book club six years ago, Warner has spent far less time online, in a bid “to stay in the real world a bit more”. 

“It’s one thing to live in a community and get immediate feedback from your insular environment. But it’s another thing when there’s people in different continents, who have never met you, with opinions about who you are and the things you produce and your worth,” she says. “It’s really difficult to synthesise all of that information and then come out the other end still loving yourself, caring about yourself and thinking you’re valuable.” She doesn’t regret what she learned from those experiences, but she doesn’t miss the social media discourse – or how it made her feel. “I was so angry about so many things – including the idea of my potential, and the fear I might not live up to it, and that people wouldn’t like me any more if I didn’t,” she says. “Now, I feel very free.” 

In the more intimate environment of her book club – which she sees as a form of “passive resistance”, if anything, within the constraints of a political administration clamping down on education – Warner has been able to continue learning and actively challenge her own beliefs. Book club discussions have the added benefit of participants looking each other point-blank in the eye, both giving and receiving criticism in a nuanced manner. The library itself, however, hasn’t been easy to sustain financially. Money for the Radical Hood Library, funded by Patreon supporters, “has been running dry”, she says solemnly. But when Warner announced earlier this year that it would close, the immediate community refused to let that happen. “People stepped up and were like, ‘OK, I could work a shift here. We’re down to work for free, as long as we can keep the space open.’” She’s awed by the response. “I literally owe them so, so much,” she says. “People have supported me by purchasing the music, but something like this, where it’s outside of myself? I mean, I made it. But it’s really for the community.” Warner hopes that several grant applications come through so she can employ staff in paid roles, and ideally aims to foster more spaces like it down the line.

As an artist making decidedly radical music Warner doesn’t feel the pressure to act a certain way in this divisive time, or feel compelled to feed the algorithm’s bottomless maw. Yet she does feel a sense of responsibility towards her listeners, given that she does have a visible platform. “Now that I have an audience, what am I saying to them?” she says. “What sort of information am I disseminating on  my platforms?” 

When she does post, Warner has frequently expressed her full-throated support for Palestinian resistance. When Central Park Summerstage cancelled her Juneteenth concert in New York City a few months ago, some saw it as an act of censorship – particularly since fellow pro-Palestine performer Kehlani also had her show cancelled, with the NY mayor’s office citing “security concerns”. For her part, Warner doesn’t know why her show was axed. Yet she continues to question artists who willingly participate in systems she views as destructive, such as the Super Bowl half-time show, which runs alongside ads for the US military. Warner herself isn’t exempt from her own criticism; she took herself to task on Namesake for playing Coachella.

Still, our conversation returns to the thrill Warner finds in revisiting emotional themes in her writing and music – something that has recently proven generative for her. “It’s been really fun!” she says. “I mean, who wants to sit and think about colonialism and slavery and Trump and all the genocides coexisting right now? It’s heavy,” she says. “And it’s a privilege not to have to think about it all the time, or to make my art all about that all the time. I do want to acknowledge that. But sometimes, when you’re going through something difficult, you don’t necessarily want to hear a rap version of your trauma. Maybe you want to hear a song that’s going to bring some levity and some light and some joy.” 

This impulse stems not only from a desire to move away from the “bitterness” she sees coursing through Sundial, but also from a yearning to create art that meets her own exacting standards. “My homie Saba just put out an album a few months ago, and I’m like, ‘Damn, that was fire! I gotta get back in a booth,’” she gushes. “Not to compete with him, but just because I want to be at that level, too.” 

Warner has made success in her own way, a path that doesn’t involve accumulating capital or status. Instead, she values consistently surprising herself while making decisions that uplift her community. Her ethos around ambition reflects her ever-evolving praxis, with the strength of her repartee complementing her intellectual growth in both her book club and library. “I’m ambitious. Like, ‘Can I write the best song I’ve ever written? Can I make an album that’s better than something I’ve already made?’” she says. “A lot of my ambition is just me trying to outdo something I’ve already done.”