Najma Sharif

Vinson Fraley‘s enviable digital footprint mostly consists of videos and photos of his dancing. He moves in a way that can be best described as technological; he was programmed to be a dancer. Most creatives treat their social media like portfolios, so that’s no surprise, but otherwise, he doesn’t seem to share much of himself or his life online. I eventually realized that he was probably a Virgo (he is).
The 25-year-old dancer and singer has an infectious, earnest presence and a stellar resu...

If there’s any rapper who has been consistent with their references to Islam it’s Jay Electronica. On his debut album, A Written Testimony, his spirituality is at the center. We take a close examination of all the Islamic references featured on his debut.
After a decade-long wait, was resurrected with his debut album, . For 40 days and 40 nights, he worked on an album that weaved motifs from Sunni Islam, Nation of Islam, and the Nation of the Gods and Earths’ teachings (more commonly known as...

A week prior to Suga’s release, Megan Thee Stallion took to Instagram to reveal why she hasn’t been able to release new music. After getting new management with Roc Nation, she became privy to the details of her contract with her record label, 1501 Certified Entertainment, and she wanted to renegotiate. “I was young, I think I was 20. And I didn’t know everything that was in that contract,” she said on Instagram Live this past weekend. The Houston Rapper alleged that her record label didn’t w...

On January 18, Beyoncé dropped Ivy Park’s first collaboration with Adidas. Though the streetwear (a style with impossible-to-ignore roots in Black culture) almost immediately sold out, Beyoncé’s take on the trend—featuring an oxblood, white, and orange color scheme—didn’t exactly land as her team intended because of the race and class consciousness now prevalent among her fans and followers. A week before the capsule collection officially launched, gigantic orange boxes worth about $3,070 (be...

Interview

Not a person on this planet will deny that Kanye West has a God complex. His middle name, Omari, translates to “Most High” in Swahili. It could be said that he was born with this God complex. His relationship with religion has been interesting to witness since he dropped “Jesus Walks.” From G.O.O.D Fridays (a play on Good Friday) to his now livestreamed gospel performances called Sunday Service, the spectacle surrounding his work is steadily linked to his faith, both in himself and in God. Th...

This decade, Black women shifted and altered how we as a society listen to music. We asked three cultural critics to gather the 10 bodies of work by Black women that defined the 2010s.
It’s easy to look at ten years of music and make assumptions. But it’s difficult perhaps to look at a decade of Black cultural work that reflects the cultural qualms that persist. In a decade of hip-hop and R&B, Black women shifted and altered how we, as a society, listen to music. Black women in this time did ...

In her 1995 essay, “Literature and Public Life,” Toni Morrison examined how pop culture affects our relationship to other people. In it, she says, “We live in the age of spectacle...spectacle that promises to be safe, clean and cheap, but turned out to be dangerous, dirty, and expensive.”
24 years later, that assessment holds true in a number of instances on social media. One of the most recent — and disturbing — examples is the fallout of EmoBblackThot, who, up until last week, convinced 170...

The Curious Case of Rapsody’s ‘Eve’ & Hip-Hop’s Contradictory Pedestal for Women

This article focuses on contemporary fashion experiences in the USA to explore how the larger, fat, or “plus size” figure is catered to—or not—in the Muslim market and how she is represented in the modest fashion media. In a context where black American Muslim cultures may be considered less authentic than migrant Muslim cultures, I argue that modest fashion media have provided a forum for the discussion and visibilization of diversely racialized Muslim bodies, inserting alternative modes of ...

Urban Dictionary defines a thirst trap as: A sexy photograph or flirty message posted on social media for the intent of causing others to publicly profess their attraction. In the age of Instagram, thirst traps have entered the cultural lexicon and become an inevitable part of the way millennials form interpersonal relationships online. Thirst trap culture is highly specific to visually driven platforms like IG and Snapchat while being seen as uncouth on Facebook (too many family members) and...

Halima Aden recommends two staples for women who practice modest fashion: a nude-toned hijab and a turtleneck. "You know how you need a good nude shoe? You need a good nude hijab," the model says. She's animated, offering up a ready laugh. We're chatting in a restaurant in a Minneapolis suburb about 20 minutes away from the city center, equidistant to where we both grew up. I arrived late but thankfully Halima was later. "You know, Somali time," she said as she walked in, instantly recognizin...

4.5/5.0
Black female rappers are placed in the supermarket of the binary, where they’re not only fighting for the fleeting, singular moment of the it-girl status, but also fighting against stereotypes, from the woke, girl-next-door lyricist to the femme fatale, sexual siren. Each act, both conventional and unconventional, is seen as an act of transgression or rebellion. This has placed Black female artists in a position to reproduce their identities again and again through the alter-egos they...

The views and opinions expressed in this piece are those solely of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Highsnobiety as a whole.
“When Kanye makes an ill-informed statement, he’s just saying what your least favorite uncle blurts across the dinner table,” Momtaza Mehri writes. In her essay on deifying and expecting our faves to be radical thought leaders, Mehri establishes an argument that speaks to the social conditions these artists are imbued in; the many ways in which ...

The first thing Cherrie says to me when I call her is “Wait, are you Somali?” Last October, the video for “163 För Evigt” had Somali Twitter claiming the “IKEA diaspora” is unrivaled. In the first shot where we hear and see Cherrie in the visual, she dons a monochromatic, millennial light pink fit with trendy glasses as confetti triumphantly spirals around her. She is singing “jag mkom direkt från ill Mogadishu bror” which translates to “I came up straight from a place called Little Mogadishu...