IT’S MUPPET TIME
Chicago eclecticist NNAMDI’s “weirdo” artpop-jazz freakouts avert classification—and there’s nothing more rock ’n’ roll than confusing people.
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.
