IT’S MUPPET TIME

In the back seat of an eight-person passenger van speeding on 1-90 between Boston and a haunted rock club in Ithaca, New York, Nnamdi Ogbonnaya (who records under the solo moniker NNAMDI) is tooling around on his laptop. I’m seated to his left. He tilts the screen so I can make out his project: On Photoshop, he’s deforming his own face, total body-horror-style, but, like, fun. Before him there are three horrifying NNAMDI illustrations— disembodied heads—and he’s pulling his own eyes wide and his mouth big, exaggerating his features to enhance the cartoonish image. It’s 2017, and I’ve known this guy for two days. (Our first meeting was at a falafel joint called Pita Pockets, so clean you could eat off the ground, in the indie rock haven of Northampton, Massachusetts. I note its sterility because within a few seconds of getting his dinner, he promptly dropped his sando and chowed down regardless.) I couldn’t help but think this dude is absolutely off his rocker, I’m a fucking square, and this tour is about to be a blast.

“I used to do that all the time!” he says, laughing at the Photoshop memory when I bring it up five years later. "But at some point I was like, I guess people need to know what I look like.’” Now that he’s grown in popularity, they absolutely do.

e were on the road with Vagabon, the music moniker of Laetitia Tamko. I was tour managing for the first and last time; it turns out my tolerance for unsolicited advice from mouth-breathy sound guys is zilch. NNAMDI was drumming for her—we traversed the Northeast from New York, eventually landing in Chicago for a music festival. At the time, I knew of NNAMDI, but I wasn’t yet familiar with his solo music. I knew he was one of Chicago’s most beloved DIY musicians, a prolific guy who had no interest in genre loyalty: By the time I met him, he had been in 15 bands in eight years, playing in basements across Mexico and Europe in his hardcore band Itto, opening for Tortoise in his jazz-fusion project Monobody, and releasing a series of outsider post-punk hip-hop EPs, much of which possessed lyricism touching on his lived experience as a Black, Jewish, first-generation Nigerian-American. (Oh, and at some point in that time, he also went to school for electrical engineering, a plan B he knew he’d never use. To paraphrase Tunde Adebimpe, another first-generation Nigerian-American musician and the mastermind behind TV on the Radio, who gets the best quote in the ’00s indie rock documentary Meet Me in the Bathroom: Telling your immigrant parents you want to be an artist is like coming home in clown shoes. I’d add that courage can often look a lot like insanity.) NNAMDI’s 2020s solo music is the intersection of all those influences and identities, which makes it a total pain in the ass to describe. "Art-pop is what my friend calls it,” NNAMDI says, either fully unaware or unbothered by the fact that it is also the title of a 2013 Lady Gaga album. “It sounds bougie as fuck, but I don’t know how to describe it. I don’t say ‘weird’ anymore. It was to give people a way out—if they don’t know what to say, they can be like,” and he adopts a nerdy, nasal voice for the rest of the quote, ‘“Yeah! His stuff is weird!’”

“It’s...unique?” he says, offering a generous but ultimately useless alternative. “If you say ‘experimental,’ everyone expects every song to have underwater saxophone in it or some shit.”

In a phrase: NNAMDI was, and remains, eclectic as hell—the kind of innovative musician recognized as your favorite band’s favorite band before the general public gets on board. (“Musicians and comedians fuck with my shit,” he says with a laugh. “Everyone else will find it when they find it.”) His music is so future-seeking in its prescience, but also hella goofy, it’s hard to appreciate if you’re the kind of listener who only really enjoys genre epithets. Not that I’m biased or anything. But listen, gender is a construct, sexuality is fluid, music is agnostic, punk is an ethos, and the best things in life are hard to define. So call his shit whatever you want. Just don’t call it math rock. “It makes me want to vomit,” he says of the term. “But I did it to myself.” He rolls his eyes, no doubt referring to the asymmetrical time signatures he likes to noodle around in on guitar.

In the half decade since I used to chug precisely two IPAs and talk over Siri’s iPhone navigation at 4 a.m. while NNAMDI took the night-shift drive so he didn't fall asleep and we didn’t die on the road, producing some lackluster obits, he became low-key “indie” famous. The pandemic was a catalyst, oddly enough. In 2020, he dropped two LPs: the alt-rap indie pop BRAT, which was critically acclaimed, celebrated for its stylistic ambivalence and simultaneous penchant for hooks, and KRAZY KARL, a Looney Tunes-esque big-band bedroompop composition beloved by dogs (the animal) and dawgs (cool guys) everywhere. Then came two EPs: the energetic experimentalist Are You Happy, and the Black Lives Matterinspired Black Plight, written and released following the murder of George Floyd.

Then, a horrible accident.

NNAMDI was riding a scooter when he was forced to swerve

to avoid an ongoing vehicle. In doing so, he hit a pothole, went flying, and fractured his wrist. And it was the first day of the biggest tour of his life: He was opening for Wilco and Sleater-Kinney at amphitheaters across the U.S.

“I can move my fingers now,” he says, “which I didn’t think I was going to be able to do.... With the way my occupational therapy was going, I had just come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t going to get full functionality.” He’s calm when describing what could’ve been the end of his music career. “Drumming—doing ghost notes and things—has been challenging, but it doesn’t feel impossible anymore.”

He ended up doing the entire tour (see that whole section about being in 15 bands while going to engineering school; I can barely get out of bed in the morning). “I only missed one show, because I was getting surgery,” he notes.

An accident like that is enough to derail a career, but if his October 2022 album, Please Have a Seat, is any indication, it’s only lit a fire under the workaholic. (And before you ask: The incident does make an appearance in a cut from that LP, on the dystopic Daft Punkian freak-out “Anxious Eater,” but so do Kool-Aid, crash test dummies, and trash-talking.) It’s the most expansive release of his career—and that’s saying something, for a musician who is always pushing the envelope—so left-of-center it inspired interest from Saturday Night Live’s gnarliest cast member, Sarah Sherman, who stars alongside NNAMDI in the music video for his spazzy banger “Touchdown.” “She used to live in Chicago—it’s where she cut her...comedy... tooth...is that a saying?” NNAMDI says, laughing. She used to throw a comedy variety show called HELLTRAP NIGHTMARE at the Hideout in Chi-town, which NNAMDI performed at a few times. “She made Aaahh!!! Real Monsters-style paper-mache art,” he recalls.

Clearly, they share a visual language: In the music video for “Anti,” the pop-soul-trap track that deals directly with generational and childhood trauma, NNAMDI wears a fucked-up Cookie Monster suit loosely inspired by a viral video of a kid’s birthday party, where a guy in a decrepit Elmo costume breaks it down. “I am obsessed with that and wanted to re-create the experience,” he explains. “It’s a Sonic [the Hedgehog] suit from Bangladesh. It’s the most uncomfortable thing; it cuts into your ribs every four inches, the pants are too tight. Also, all the buttons are up the back, so you can’t put it on or take it off by yourself. I never saw the original mask, but I heard it looked nothing like Sonic, so [the costume designer] matched the blue to make one that looked more like Cookie Monster. It’s unsettling. I took it on the last tour. I’m just gonna keep wearing it.”

At a time when so much independent guitar music is self-serious to the point of turning potential rockers comatose, I welcome the fucked-up Cookie Monsters of the world. The Muppet freaks whose music defies classification without being pretentious about it. The multiinstrumentalist rappers who will drop a song like Please Have a Seat’s “I Don’t Want to Be Famous,” a tongue-in-cheek treatise on the implications of notoriety, to say something smart and confuse people at the same time.

“Success in the music industry doesn’t equal success, and I think a lot of younger people think, ‘If I just work hard, it’ll work out.’” His voice rises into a squeal as he describes the song: “Nooooooo? I mean, it might, it’s more likely, but so much is out of your control. ”

When I bring up that there might be some implicit cheekiness to the idea of an outsider-y artist making weirdo art-pop discussing not wanting to be famous—but kind of definitely wanting the privileges that fame provides—or some irony to the track not being Max Martin/ABBA/Beatles worship, whatever group you find to be the catchiest of all time, he laughs. “[Please Have a Seat] is pop to me! The things that I like may have more quirkiness and intricacies to me, and obviously I want to do the things I like, but it’s pop!” He puts on a funny grandma voice, mocking the observation: “‘If he doesn’t want to be famous, why doesn’t he get a job at Applebee’s?!”’

If he did, he’d probably find a way to make some dope art out of the experience. Oh, and for what it’s worth? The cover of Please Have a Seat is an illustration of NNAMDI, his face distorted: big eyes, big ears, big mouth, the same eccentric who ate vegan shit off the floor all those years ago. But this time, people know what he looks like.