On Thursday, Noname released her new single, “Song 33.” It was widely speculated that Noname was responding to J. Cole’s song “Snow on Tha Bluff.” “He really ’bout to write about me while the world is in smokes,” she rapped on the new song. “When his people in trees, when George was begging for his mother saying he couldn’t breathe, you thought to write about me?” Today, she tweeted her regrets for responding in the song.
“i’ve been thinking a lot about it and i am not proud of myself for responding with song 33,” she wrote. “i tried to use it as a moment to draw attention back to the issues i care about but i didn’t have to respond. my ego got the best of me. i apologize for any further distraction this caused.” She said she plans to keep the song up but will be donating her share of the earnings to mutual aid funds.
J. Cole never expressly named Noname in his song (as she never expressly named Cole in her response). After Noname tweeted some of the lyrics to Cole’s song that supposedly referenced her, Cole shared a few tweets of his own. “She has done and is doing the reading and the listening and the learning on the path that she truly believes is the correct one for our people,” he wrote. “We may not agree with each other but we gotta be gentle with each other.” After her song was released, Cole tweeted a link to “Song 33.”