There are few people on planet Earth who can rap as fast as J Noa — and even fewer who actually have something to say. On her 2023 debut EP, Autodidactica, the 18-year-old MC from the 5 de Abril barrio in San Cristóbal, Dominican Republic, showcased one of the most nimble flows in rap of any language, along with a penchant for strings-laden throwback beats and a modern perspective. Beyond merely precocious, her voice carries the weight of one who’s seen some things and lived to tell about them.
The frenetic, reggaeton-adjacent stylings of dembow have climbed out of the underground in the Dominican Republic and into the mainstream. But while dembow stars like El Alfa get the dancefloor hyped with artful repetition and rhythmic rapping, J Noa’s lightning-fast lyrics are more likely to stop you cold in your tracks. Her tongue is light but her words heavy, telling stories with real emotional heft about the disenfranchised members of her community and the dangers of the street. On her debut single, “Betty,” she weaves a cautionary tale of teen pregnancy, where a young girl gets taken advantage of and abandoned with her baby, only to leave her own mother with the responsibility of raising the child. The video features J Noa driving a privileged white family around on a golf cart, forcing them to engage with the realities of the barrio that they would rather ignore.
J Noa has been turning heads with her rapid-fire flow since before her age had double digits, but it was a jaw-dropping session on DJ Scuff’s “Frente a Frente” that caught the eye of a Sony Music Latin A&R and led to her record deal. Embracing the moniker of “La Hija del Rap,” she carries the hip-hop torch from her forebears, the Dominican rappers and radio co-hosts Lápiz Conciente (“El Papá del Rap”) and Melymel (“La Mamá del Rap”). And her style evokes old-school MCs like Control Machete or los Violadores del Verso, even if she’s wholly unaware of them. ”I didn’t have a lot of experience with música urbana,” she admits. “I taught myself how to rap first. As a child I only listened to my mom’s music; salsa, bachata, Juan Gabriel.”
Before traveling to Washington, D.C. for NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series last year — a stunning debut that that served as an introduction for legions of new fans — she’d never performed outside of her neighborhood. But she speaks to issues experienced by kids in every barrio. On the track “Era de Cristal,” she explores the epidemic of depression in young people between boom-bap drums and record scratches, describing the infinite-scrolling downward spiral of social media in vivid detail. On “No Me Pueden Parar,” she acknowledges the give and take of the streets: “La calle te enseña y también te engaña por eso aquí no roncamos” (“The streets teach but they also deceive, which is why we don’t sleep”).
In an era where bombastic flexes and capitalist braggadocio are the norm, J Noa offers a glimpse at a hip-hop future that looks a lot like its distant past, driven by the ethos that you can’t talk it if you ain’t lived it. Her knack for reality raps builds on a long tradition of giving voice to the voiceless, delivered with the passion of the unheard finally given a megaphone. “I grew up in the barrio, and it wasn’t the best place, but it wasn’t the worst,” she says. “The street can teach you good things, but also bad things. I feel a responsibility to defend my barrio. My people are counting on it! I need to represent them.”
Jack White Responds After Uproar Over Taylor Swift Songwriting Comment
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Jack White posted a statement on Instagram Monday evening after numerous publications took his comments in an interview with The Guardian out of context. When discussing poetry and songwriting, White mentioned fellow musician Taylor Swift‘s style of songwriting, and explored his own approach to storytelling when creating music. Unfortunately, online outlets framed his words as a critique of the Tortured Poets star, especially when it came to headlines that quickly circulated on the internet.
“Putting this up for a day and then taking down to just put this to bed,” wrote White in the since-deleted post. “I didn’t say that I think Taylor Swift’s music was ‘boring’ or whatever click bait the net is trying to scrape together. What I was trying to say in an interview I did about poetry and lyric writing, was that I don’t find it interesting at all for ME to write about MYSELF in my own lyric writing and poetry because I think that it could be repetitive for ME to always write about and It could be uninteresting for people who listen to my music to delve into, and that imaginary characters are more attractive to me as a writer.”
White went on to acknowledge the “tremendous success” of Swift and other songwriters who have their own process, while stating that just “because I say I have a way of doing things doesn’t mean that I think that EVERYONE should do it the same way.” He added, “They should do what works for them, And they do, and it is obviously appealing to many people, and I’m glad to hear that.”
When asked by The Guardian in the article published Sunday, if any of any of his songs were entirely autobiographical, White replied, “Not too much. Now it’s become very popular in the Taylor Swift way of pop singers writing about all of their publicly aired break-ups, which I don’t find interesting at all. I think it’s a little bit boring for me to write about myself.”
White further explained, “Even if I’ve had a really interesting day, I feel like I’ve already lived that, I don’t need to go through it every time I sing this song. If it’s something really painful, I’m not going to put this important, painful thing that I went through out there for some idiot on the internet to stomp all over. So I put a percentage of that into what I do and then morph it into somebody else’s character. I can’t really learn about myself until I put it into somebody else’s shoes.”
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In his Monday statement, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee said that at times he has been “made less and less interested in doing interviews” amid the “age of this massive demand for click bait and content.” Any “scrape of anything interesting” can be used as drama and “spit out as bait,” he continued, leading White to “not want to answer questions with any sort of romance or passion or reflection as I’m too busy having to worry about accidentally triggering nonsense like this from so called ‘journalists’ and ‘editors.'”
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He ended his response to the wave of backlash following his interview by saying, “This has always been a problem as it encourages artists to give ‘safe’ answers to any question and stifles artistic vision and imagination and pushes all of us to not share anything interesting, which was one of the points I made about keeping private things private in that same interview. But yeah, content.”
ADVERTISEMENTWhite recently released Jack White: Collected Lyrics & Selected Writing Volume 1, a collection of lyrics from the artist’s solo recordings including No Name, The Raconteurs, and more, plus selected poems and writings by White, and essays by poet Adrian Matejka.