Try to keep up with Noname’s voice: The 27-year-old rapper, born Fatimah Warner, can make it do vocal gymnastics. She can tighten it to a conspiratorial whisper, bend it into singsong irony, soften it until it’s a cushion. For her newest album, Room 25, she stretches it into a rhetorical taunt (“And y’all still thought a bitch couldn’t rap, huh?”), then snaps it back to attention (“Maybe this your answer for that”) in the same breath. All this is held at the same volume, a controlled stage murmur—as though you’d caught her talking to herself, just under her breath.
This agility—one twitch of her voice, and she’s gone from a verbal eye-roll to a dreamy, far-off stare—points to Noname’s background as a slam poet. (At 18, she placed third in…
