Princess Nokia had her first solo New York Times interview Thursday, and it was just about as wild as you’d expect. In the past few years, Nokia has helped pave a lane for alternative female rappers, going from a New York underground icon to selling out international tours with her raw, evocative songs about growing up as a rebellious skater girl and the lyrical portraits she paints of Black and Latinx New York culture.
In her Times interview, Nokia made clear that her lyricism is no fluke, laying out her brand of feminism with a number of vivid stories and out-there comparisons—including likening the feeling of a sold-out tour to Matthew McConaughey’s behavior while on quaaludes.
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The only appropriate course of action upon reading this interview was to remix her most poetic moments into their own new masterpiece, which we’ve done below, in case you needed a little femme queen realness in your life today.
A Young Girl, 5-foot-3 / It Isn’t Feminine
Ain’t no heels, ain’t no choreography.
My movement comes from hardcore culture
Comes from rave
Punk
Was the most wonderful thing in the whole world
What I would assume ketamine feels like
It was Matthew McConaughey on a beach in a hammock on a quaalude
It’s that spitting into the air. It’s punching the air. It’s kicking. It’s not stopping.
It’s banging your head.
How does a young girl, 5-foot-3
exert her body with movement
I’m pretty gross
And that’s great
Hip hop lives in my soul in a very singular, isolated
personal way.
The original Puerto Rican men of Williamsburg
Turned the fire hydrant on for me
I remember being in this stupor of euphoria
Screaming
I’m going to do this for the rest of my life
All the club kids that I read about
Polaroids of all of the drag queens and clubgoers
in the bathroom.
Within a span of 10 hours everybody knew the words
a mecca, a sanctuary
everybody knew
every single word
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