Che Noir: It Takes A Village Explores Motherhood, Femininity and Identity
There's an African proverb that says it takes a village to raise a child. Che Noir took it, made it her own, and built on it the most personal album of her career: It Takes A Village.
The album came out on October 23, with twelve tracks and just over half an hour of listening, written the way you'd write a diary that, for once, you've decided to give a title and a cover.
And it has to be said right away, because it's the heart of everything: hip-hop. A musical genre that has never had just one voice, nor just one gender it belongs to. It was born as social protest, as a tool for those who had no other way to be heard, and in that urgency to tell stories, women have always been there, even when the mainstream narrative chose to tell only the men's.
Che Noir steps squarely into that legacy, taking it to ground that male rap has almost always ignored: motherhood. Told not around fatherly rhetoric or the figure of the man as provider, but around the body, the fear, the exhaustion of a woman who becomes a mother and, at the same time, keeps being an artist.
The album: a village made of scars and tenderness
It Takes A Village was born from one precise event: the birth of her first daughter, in April 2025. And you can feel in every track that what Che Noir tells isn't a concept planned at a desk, but lived life set over a beat, with a sincerity that doesn't ask permission to exist. The opener, Unity of Thought, even starts from a speech by activist Kwame Ture on collective organizing, as if to say from the very first minute: this record is about community, not just about me. And it's an important gesture, because it immediately shifts the center of gravity: motherhood here isn't a private matter to be romanticized, but an experience that needs a network, other women, a village indeed, to be sustained.
From there the story grows more and more intimate, and Che Noir bares herself without ever sliding into wallowing in pain. In My Village she retraces the emergency C-section of April 17, 2025 and the pain of not being able to hold her daughter for days. A physical, almost unbearable image, which nevertheless doesn't leave her stuck in suffering, because she promises her the emotional and financial stability that she herself lacked as a child. In that promise, Che Noir's redemption is already there. In Olive Branches she lowers her defenses even further and admits the crises in her marriage after the baby's birth, the struggle to forgive, setting the present against memories of the meager dinners of her childhood: here too, fragility isn't weakness, it's the honest price of choosing to tell the truth instead of the sugarcoated version.
In Fame & Fiction, with a heavyweight feature like Black Thought, she opens up about the weight of expectations and recounts a psychiatric journey that led to a diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder, stripping away all stigma from speaking about it out loud. And in A Caged Mockingbird she lays bare isolation, the narrowness of the circle of people you can truly trust in the darkest moments. An isolation that many new mothers know, but that rarely finds space in a genre built, for decades, on the image of strength without cracks.
It's precisely this balance that makes It Takes A Village a successful record: Che Noir doesn't ask for compassion and never raises her voice more than necessary to claim justice. Her fragilities remain fragilities, told with lucidity, but run through by a constant thread of strength and self-determination, without either ever canceling out the other.
Beyond the intimate level, the album also looks back: to the generational passing down of lessons received from her mother and grandmother, and to the bond with the working-class reality of Buffalo, her hometown. A thread that ties today's motherhood to the women who, before her, had to raise children with very little and a great deal of dignity. Musically it stays faithful to the underground hip-hop and boom bap soul that defines her, with a lineup of top-tier producers (Havoc, Conductor Williams, Nottz, Mathematics) and guests like Ransom and Bruiser Wolf (the latter on the track Magic) rounding out the picture.
Who is Che Noir, between past and future
Che Noir has been a discovery for us. Stage name of Marche Lashawn, a rapper and beatmaker born in Buffalo in 1994, with a story that starts from within, from the desk at home, not from a label that comes to find her. She started producing beats at 15 and writing rhymes at 16. Her sonic imagery looks straight at the nineties, at a raw, lyrical way of sitting on a beat that recalls Jay-Z, Foxy Brown, Notorious B.I.G., but with a voice that remains unmistakably her own, never borrowed.
After paying her dues alongside her mentor 38 Spesh and the Trust Gang collective, in 2020 she founded her independent label, Poetic Movement, choosing to stay in charge of her own artistic decisions instead of handing them to someone else: The Thrill of the Hunt (2019), Juno (2020), and above all As God Intended (2020), made entirely with producer Apollo Brown, which remains one of her most acclaimed works. In the following years came Food for Thought (2022), Noir or Never with Big Ghost LTD (2023), The Lotus Child (2024) and the The Color Chocolate series (2024-2025): a very dense discography, the kind made by someone who writes music the way others write in a diary, almost out of necessity.
And if you think that after a record as exposed as It Takes A Village she'll take a break, think again: in several interviews given between October and November she confirmed she has already finished a new album, due in the first months of 2027, which will feature three tracks produced by an absolute legend of hip-hop production, DJ Premier. The most interesting news, however, is another: for the first time Che Noir has chosen to leave the beats to others and focus exclusively on the rhymes, she who until now has always handled the production of her records too. A different way of putting herself on the line, after an album that, about herself and about what it means to be a woman, a mother and an artist all at once, has already shown more than ever.
Listen to the album here:
