On Friday, Sept. 15, WRMC and Middlebury College Activities Board hosted Middlebury’s annual S.O.S. (“Start of School”) Fest on the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts front lawn. The free concert featured Middlebury singer-songwriter Rubby ’18 and Chicago-based poet-rapper Noname.
Opening act Rubby’s cheekbones loomed over the crowd. His features seemed hand-crafted for the stage — beneath the lights, they looked suprahuman. Consequently, he pulled off a cool delivery without seeming aloof. He, unlike many performers, did not need to forge a stage presence via gimmickry or superfluous movement. The crowd knew Rubby was the frontman before he stepped toward the mic. Once front and center, he commanded attention even while remaining still.
Backed by a full band of other Middlebury musicians, Rubby sang his two singles (“Confiesa” and “Know Me”) in a smooth, vibrato-laden croon. Audience members shouted along to “Confiesa” in drunken, mostly inaccurate Spanish. But the noise did not bother Rubby, whose intonation remained as steady as if he were performing in a reverb-heavy cathedral. If at any moment the stage intimidated him, it did not show.
“There were so many people,” Rubby said after the concert. “The lights were amazing, and Noname’s stage was incredible. It’s definitely my favorite performance so far at Middlebury.”
The turn-out was remarkable — over a thousand people — and remarkably animated, especially for a student opener. Even more people filtered in as the stage was prepped for Noname.
Just minutes later, Noname strode out dressed in sneakers and a jean jacket, an outfit reminiscent of the ’90s fashion she described nostalgically in her first song, “Diddy Bop.” A bit jarringly, no one in her band sung the hook — instead, she invited the crowd to sing it, a less-than-fitting substitute for Cam O’bi, the recorded track’s featured artist. But when the crowd shouted the lyric “Ooh, you about to get your ass beat!” with her, she smiled, and in that moment, the song landed perfectly and its playful mood hit home.
But some of the audience commandeered this mood, driving it in a more juvenile, masculine direction — or, to be less generous but likely more accurate, they construed Noname’s genre as an excuse to act out. Some yelled at her, others pushed through the crowd provokingly. Soon Noname had to pause and address a young man who drunkenly tried to take the stage.
“I said, ‘Sing along,’ not ‘Climb up onto the stage,’” she said. The audience laughed, though Noname was sincerely — and rightly — annoyed.
Noname addressed the crowd again before “Casket Pretty,” the thematic centerpiece of her album Telefone. (The refrain: “I hope that you make it home, / I hope to God that my tele’ don’t ring.”) The track concerns police brutality, and its deceptively cheerful beat emphasizes the irony of a “happy city” corrupted by violence. Hence, she asked the audience to quiet down and recall their privilege. She asked, justly, for the opportunity to share both an imperative political message and a story of personal trauma. However, white crowd members in the back continued to shout and, even more disappointingly, twerk. When she finished the song, she expressed her frustration, but thanked those in the front for being respectful.
For the rest of the show, she directed her energy toward the front of the crowd. At one point, she even rapped an entire verse with a man in the second row who knew all the words. This cheered her, and her performance stayed even and self-assured through the closer, “Yesterday.”
Overall, she gave a brilliant set. Her delivery was as compelling as it was consistent, and her final song — Telefone’s first track — made clear her objective of reminding us that we can find resilience in the childlike sensibility that memory revives. Though certain disruptive crowd members were (ironically) too immature to feel her message’s weight, others went home spiritually invigorated and perhaps abler to face our dismal political climate in the morning.
Stay tuned for an open letter from the WRMC executive board regarding S.O.S. Fest.
