NEWS
The wait for Noname’s third studio album, the highly anticipated follow-up to 2018’s Room 25, has been extended indefinitely as the Chicago rapper grapples with creative blocks and a lack of genuine connection with producers.
On a since-expired Instagram story post, Noname said: “Most days I’m not sure if I’ll ever make music again. The last time I was consistently making songs was four years ago. It’s been so hard to find producers to link up with and who I genuinely connect with sonically. I’m truly grateful for the art I was able to release but that might be it from me.”
A representative for Noname did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment.
“No lie, this shit actually makes me incredibly sad and I rarely leave the crib these days,” she continued on Instagram. “I don’t want to keep lying and saying there’s an album on the way when there’s not.”
Earlier this year, the rapper told Rolling Stone that her third studio album Factory Baby was in its early stages, but could be finished within two months with the right level of focus. She had been working on it with producer DJ Dahi (Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Big Sean) and creating what she referred to as “Noname music,” which made sense of the lived experiences she’s had between releases.
“I think I’m always just kind of living with it,” she had said. “I live, live, live for years and then I come back, and I vomit.” She’s released scattered singles since Room 25, including the candid “Rainforest” shared in February, but the only consistent stream of creative output has come from her book club. The Noname Book Club meets monthly for conversations around two texts by writers of color who reckon with inequity.
“I’m like, ‘If I made a fire album and I still kept doing the same thing where I’m not putting out personal merch and I’m driving all of my fans to go purchase book-club merch, we would just be able to raise more money and do more things,’” she said. The book club has formed 12 local chapters in Boston, Phoenix and London. Noname doesn’t seem to be done creating, or sparking radical and introspective conversations — it just might not be in the format expected of her.
NEWS
No matter what you thought of the Kendrick Lamar and Drake battle, there was only one undisputed winner by the end of it all: the reaction community in the worlds of streaming and YouTube. Your favorite content creators broke down the bars, reacted to all the most shocking moments, and helped this showdown become one of hip-hop's most culturally significant and resonant moments in a long time... For better or worse. See, the battle's technically not over yet, but only because the 6ix God's idea of victory is clearly quite different. In his federal defamation lawsuit against Universal Music Group – his label – for releasing K.Dot's "Not Like Us," he named various content creators who allegedly helped boost the track's widespread popularity and, as a result, its supposedly defamatory nature.
Furthermore, the specific allegation that Drake brings up in this highly controversial lawsuit is that UMG "whitelisted" copyright claims for YouTubers, streamers, etc. concerning "Not Like Us." This means that they would be able to monetize their content without facing a copyright claim from UMG over "Not Like Us," and this isn't really an allegation because various creators have backed this up. But a few important (alleged) caveats that people are talking about online need to be clear. First, "whitelisting" supposedly happens on behalf of a record label behind a song like the West Coast banger, and UMG is instead the distributor of that track. Secondly, as rapper and online personality ScruFaceJean brings up as seen in the post below, tracks like "Push Ups" were also "whitelisted" by its team.
Along with Jean, many other of your favorite content creators spoke out against this Drake lawsuit. Zias! and B.Lou, for example, spoke with their lawyer about the possibility of countersuing for emotional distress, as they found the Toronto superstar's accusations and his implication of them very disturbing and misguided. NoLifeShaq also dragged The Boy through the mud, calling him "soft" and positing that, whether "whitelisting" happened or not, they would react to "Not Like Us" accordingly as they did to his own tracks.
In addition, it's important to bring up that many others fans have pointed to how Drake excitedly used streamers to generate hype and reaction clips for his own diss tracks against Kendrick Lamar. The most direct example is with Kai Cenat, whom he texted to "stay on stream" before dropping "Family Matters." Ironically, the Twitch giant appears in this clowned-upon defamation lawsuit as an example of what the OVO mogul's accusations and implications are. And one more thing: there is no direct link between monetization and algorithmic boosting on sites like YouTube. With all this in mind, content creators seem to feel almost insulted at the idea that they only reacted to the two biggest rappers in the world beefing with each other because one of them would allow them to make money. If Drizzy knew the first thing about the reaction community, maybe he wouldn't have included this...
