NNAMDÏ: Good Karma, Great Caramel
NNAMDÏ
NNAMDÏ’s Please Have A SeatMulti-instrumentalist, rapper, singer, songwriter, and all-around remarkable guy NNAMDÏ toured through Crystal Ballroom in Somerville, MA on Friday, 28 October 2022. The Chicagoan and his band were in the middle of a fall tour that started in the midwest, worked its way east, and will eventually land them in Paris, France before the first snowfall.
Chief on the agenda will be promoting their new album, the well-received full-length Please Have A Seat. Local Pink Navel and fellow Chicagoan and rap wzrd Joshua Virtue opened in support.
The venue was located up a flight of stairs above the Somerville Theater in the heart of Davis Square. During a little stage banter, Joshua Virtue remarked on the number of “squares” in Somerville and the surrounding areas.
NNAMDÏ and a weird muppet headIndeed! Out-of-towners are sometimes confused by the square-system in place all over Massachusetts. The squares are nothing remarkable or unique in themselves. They’re clusters of businesses, maybe ornamented with a modest plaza or statue, situated at intervals in the urban geography. Other towns, cities, and states across the country have squares, of course.
But what makes the squares in Massachusetts unique is not so much what they are as how they divide up the psychological identity and geographical territory for Massholes. At least two features of squares in the Bay State deserve mention.
First, squares in Massachusetts are used to decentralize rather than centralize the urban landscape. There’s no grandiose version of Times Square that serves as the focal point on the map. Squares in the Bay State are smaller, more spread out, and have no clear rank or place in a larger hierarchy. Residents will often feel greater loyalty to and share a greater sense of identity to their closest square than they feel for their town or city.
Second, squares in Massachusetts “de-neighborhood” the residential landscape by orienting the locals’ sense of belonging to a point on the map that they live near, rather than a closed border that they live within. In other words, however loyal residents feel to their square, they do not identify with it in the same sense as one might identify with a neighborhood, which has clear boundaries and determines its denizens simply by picking out those who live within its borders. The borders of a square, on the other hand, are inconsequential. What matters for the sake of geographical and psychological identity is how close you live to the square. Further, you might live close to two, three, four or more squares. Which square you identify with most is really up to you. And it’s entirely conceivable that the same residents, in the same dwelling, will have a shifting sense of place and belonging over time as the personality of the squares that surround them ebb and flow, mutate and evolve, grow and decay.
Pink NavelLocal opener Pink Navel is no stranger to squares or the Crystal Ballroom. The rapper and beat stylist starred as the only hip hop act in the largely indie rock jam that was Nice, A Fest this past July.
He used his time on stage to play old favorites, introduce new material from an upcoming video-game inspired album, and goof around with some souped-up samples culled from the pop junk drawer like the guitar lick from Sublime’s “What I Got” or the choral riff from Friendly’s Restaurant TV spots.
As always, Pink Navel flashed a deft touch with the buttons, knobs, and needles beneath his fingertips, wringing out live noise on the fly to accompany his rhymes.
If Pink Navel brought the comedy, then Joshua Virtue brought the tragedy. He spoke a little bit about an album he wrote during the pandemic, dedicated to his mother. The message seemed to be: in a time of great uncertainty and loss, thank god for family. The solo Chicago rapper weaves intense and literate lyrics over dense, yet spare backing tracks. There was a minimal amount of live knob twiddling as Virtue focuses more on transforming himself into a kind of psycho-spiritual lightning rod, sharing his energy around the room.
Joshua VirtueHeadliner NNAMDÏ spent most of his set working through material off his new album Please Have A Seat. The Chicago artist fronts a band of five players altogether: two guitarists, a bassist (six-stringed!), a drummer, besides himself on vocals and guitar. In other words, a fairly conventional rock n roll roster that delivers an unconventional sound.
NNAMDÏ If you listened to the new album, you might not have known what to expect from the live performance. There was evidence of stranger stage antics, given the jumbo-sized muppet head that sat prominently at the artist’s feet for the duration of the show. The muppet head never turned into anything more than an afterthought.
Music-wise, the studio material dips into a plethora of experimental textures, which pose a challenge to the artist trying to reproduce it in a live environment. Credit the band for conjuring up the magic with five instruments, plus vocal harmonies. Backing tracks were used here and there, but rarely dampened the spontaneity of the sound.
NNAMDÏ can go hard and loud, or play it soft and vulnerable. The artist got the crowd involved on a call-and-response version of “Dedication” before jumping into the pit to fire the room up. Extra points for returning a Whatchamacallit to its owner who had lost it in the playful scrum. That’s good karma, and decent caramel, on a Halloween weekend.
Thursday of Nice, A Fest 2024 in Davis Square.