Music

Noname’s Twitter Account Is The Most Glorious Thing On The Internet

It's a lesson in how the app should be used.

by Joseph Earp  31 January 2020
Noname twitter photo

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Rapper Noname — real name Fatimah Nyeema Warner — has spent the last four years changing the game, releasing an all-time great mixtape, Telefone, and an all-time great debut album, Room 25. Which is even more impressive when you consider that she’s also spent that time crafting the single greatest account on Twitter.

Most musicians don’t really get Twitter. Either they use it like a place to dump their B-sides, or like a lazy extension of their meet-and-greets; an opportunity for more self-promotion. Most pop stars log on every few months to retweet a couple of stans, or hit out at their critics.

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The rest of them just hire some intern to steal memes from Reddit and repost them under their own name. Musicians don’t tweet because they’re desperate to connect. They’re desperate to strengthen a brand.

Not so in the case of Noname. The musician doesn’t treat her Twitter account like a PR exercise, or even a diary. She uses it as an opportunity to hone and explore the things that she finds interesting in her art.

Not that you should operate under the misapprehension that Noname’s account is some weighty, serious tome. It’s not, and she is, first and foremost, extremely funny.

For instance:

Or:

Or:

Or:

But her account is also the place where she demonstrates ways of sustaining practical, achievable feats of activism. Just take her boycott of Amazon, an example of the all-important need for us to escape the trappings of ‘mere’, passive consumerism:

Or how about her establishment of Noname’s Book Club, a digital and real-life space that draws together readers and highlights “two books each month written by authors of colour”?

Staying active and attentive in a world custom-built to be exhausting is no easy task. But Noname and her Twitter account prove how important it can be.