Rapper Noname brought truth to San Antonio's Paper Tiger, no matter how uncomfortable

"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful," Brazilian educator Paulo Freire said.

Rapper and poet Fatimah Nyeema Warner — who performed a sold-out show at Paper Tiger Monday under her professional honorific Noname — doesn't care for the billionaire class. Though the venue has taken a badly needed shower since its days as The White Rabbit, the bass still reverberates and shakes the walls. Perfect for hip-hop. And, aside from her powerful rhymes, a live drummer and bassist were all the Chicago-based artist used to kill.

Mostly sticking to tracks from her 2023 self-released album Sundial, Noname's set included the sensation "Rainforest" early on. "How you get closer to love? How you lemonade all your sadness when you opening up? How you make excuses for billionaires you broke on the bus?" she asked during the song's opening.

Noname's off-the-cuff remarks and casual swagger are more cutting than most rappers' bullets.

"He really about to write about me when the world is in smokes ... when George was begging for his mother, saying he couldn't breathe?" she rapped in "Song 33," calling out errant tweets by hip-hop artist J. Cole. "You thought to write about me?" Clearly, Noname was making an explicit reference to George Floyd's murder by a Minneapolis cop, which provoked global protests against systemic racism and police brutality.

Others are content to play the dozens on social media while the pretense of a pluralistic civilization burns — not Noname.

"She can't tell if it's genuine or just consumption," the rapper confided in the hit single "Balloons."

San Antonio audiences pride themselves on knowing the lyrics, and every time Noname left pregnant pauses, we gladly filled in the gaps, showing her a packed and attentive house. An encore on a Monday ain't bad.

Lean into nervousness and skepticism, the bulk of the rapper's catalog intones, remain unafraid and angry. Sometimes it takes moral courage to not offer a solution: a timely message that does Freire justice.

In her lyrics, Noname ponders whether we're marketizing trauma, like a disaster porn, instead of dealing pensively and authentically with the corrupt weight of the world. Among the furtive cigarette smokers at the club and others devastated by currents events on the concourse, it felt like our nation’s complicity in the wanton slaughter of Palestinians draped the evening like a pall.

Although I don't share Noname's religious belief in an afterlife, I still hold two seemingly contradictory sentiments: that the 25-year-old airman who fatally set himself ablaze Feb. 25 in protest of the ongoing atrocity in Gaza didn't have to die, and that Aaron Bushnell will live forever.

Juxtaposed to him, we're all nameless.