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.”
Jay-Z performing at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis in Paris.
Jay-Z Deserves the Super Bowl Halftime Gig
Where’s the love? Jay-Z asked that question 25 years ago, in the chorus of one of many songs in his catalog that still move audiences today. If he performs “Heart of the City” as part of his Super Bowl halftime show next February, those indignant bars are sure to be a highlight: “First the Fat Boys break up, now every day I wake up, somebody got a problem with Hov…” It would be an appropriate choice, too — because then as now, any time Jay-Z notches a new achievement, people find a way to complain.
The jokes and nonsense started almost as soon as the first rumors trickled out that Jay, whose company Roc Nation has executive-produced the Super Bowl halftime show since 2019, might be choosing himself to headline next year’s show. “Jay-Z just Dick Cheney’d himself for the Super Bowl,” Puck‘s Matthew Belloni quipped on X last week, alluding to the time that the late prince of darkness, who’d been asked to run the vice-presidential search committee for George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign, put himself on the ticket. (Super hip and current reference, and not at all apples-and-oranges.) Others pointed to TMZ reports that pop stars like Harry Styles and Justin Bieber had been asked first. “How are they the frontrunners, and he end up in the front?” Cam’Ron, who’s delighted in trolling Jay for many years, wondered aloud on his podcast. “Out of all the people on the roster, they couldn’t pick nobody else?” asked Cam’Ron‘s co-host, Ma$e.
These critiques miss the point, which is that Jay-Z is one of the best choices for a high-profile gig like this. He’s a superstar with a comparable level of name recognition to any other A-lister in music. He has a deep stack of classic songs going back decades. And he’s a highly skillful live performer who knows his way around a stadium stage, as he’s spent this year reminding people on his Jay-Z 30 tour. He tore down Yankee Stadium three nights in a row this summer; just last week, he rocked SoFi Stadium, which happens to be the same place where the 2027 Super Bowl is being held. He held the crowd’s attention with ease at all of those shows, and though there were plenty of glittery guests — that’s a given at a Jay show, and it will surely be true at the Super Bowl, too — he did it mostly through the force of his own magnetic energy. Let’s state the obvious here: Jay-Z is really, really good at rapping. We’re talking about one of the slickest, sharpest talkers in the history of words, someone who made it to the top through a sustained act of myth-making, then kept going. Are we seriously asking whether he can handle a 15-minute televised performance?
And yeah, there’s a touch of self-congratulation in the way he appointed himself. So what? Praising his own gifts is arguably Jay-Z’s greatest talent of all. He made a fine art out of self-applause. He told his story again and again, retracing the steps from Marcy Projects to the corner suite, and he made us believe. It would almost be insulting to the audience if he didn’t give himself the gig at some point.
Pop culture observers in recent years surely remember the backlash to Super Bowl headliners like Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny — all of it at least culturally conservative, and much of it frankly just racist. The blowback to Jay’s announcement is mostly coming from other quarters, at least for now (let’s just wait to see what the right-wing swamps make of this one). But it’s disappointing in a different way. Jay-Z has spent his career expounding hip-hop as a mainstream commercial force. He’s not a businessman, he’s a business, man. But he’s also an artist. He’s made huge amounts of money, and gotten himself into the rarefied rooms where he even has the ability to give himself a gig like this, by spinning his experiences into compelling narrative art, one verse at a time. Let’s not lose sight of how impressive his life’s work really is. Jay-Z is not some random C-suite bro, and he’s definitely not Dick Cheney. He’s one of the greatest rappers of all time, by any measure. He’s earned that Super Bowl spot.