What becomes a legend most? On a brisk day last week in downtown Newark, the answer was a floor-length plaid wool coat; a pair of Uggs with half-dollar-size Swarovski crystal buttons; big glasses with violet lenses; what appeared to be a hand-tooled leather fanny pack; and a tan baseball cap. It was a look that said, “I’m older, I like comfort, but don’t you dare picture me in a tracksuit.”
The legend was Dionne Warwick, a month shy of her eighty-first birthday and still possessed of cheekbones that could slice open a thumb. The occasion was an art exhibition partly inspired by her six decades as an award-winning entertainer, but fully in thrall to her late-blossoming Twitter account, which in the past year has added a new and sometimes crotchety dimension to her public profile. As a singer, she is known for the light, soulful touch with which she navigated tricky Burt Bacharach melodies in such hits as “Walk On By” and “I Say a Little Prayer”—performances celebrated for their precision. Millennials may have first encountered her in the nineteen-nineties, as the genial star-next-door host of infomercials for the Psychic Friends Network, always hitting her marks but sometimes allowing a hint of aggrieved incredulity to flicker across her face. On Twitter, she just lets fly, dispensing straight talk, blunt advice, wit, and non sequiturs in roughly equal measure.
Although she’d had a quiet, backwater account for years, she went unexpectedly viral last December 5th, after tweeting at Chance the Rapper, “If you are very obviously a rapper why did you put it in your stage name? I cannot stop thinking about this.” A half hour later, she took aim at the Weeknd: “Why? It’s not even spelled correctly?”
She now has more than half a million followers and has been the subject of a “Saturday Night Live” impersonation by Ego Nwodim. Her online voice is so well established that, like Jack Benny, she can get a laugh with the Twitter equivalent of a raised eyebrow. A simple but piercing “What?” was her riposte to some recent gobbledygook from @Meta about the coming wonders of “the metaverse.” She added, in a jab at the company’s pretensions and also at her own Golden Girl persona, “I still call it ‘Book Face.’ ”
Today was her first chance to see the art exhibit, titled “Dionne Warwick: Queen of Twitter.” Dignitaries greeted her, including the mayor, Ras Baraka. Warwick, who grew up nearby, in East Orange, and now lives in South Orange, allowed that she felt “not only blessed but overwhelmed.”
Strolling through the gallery, she smiled as several of the artists explained their works, occasionally at some length. A large installation by Dianne Smith featured a proscenium made from braided butcher paper, surrounding a screen playing a video that intercut current and historic clips of Warwick with scenes from the civil-rights struggles of the nineteen-sixties and today. The work was inspired in part by Warwick’s tweet about the killing of Daunte Wright by police, last April, in Minnesota: “Before I go I would like to ask when will this madness stop!” On a lighter and more Instagrammable note was a neon sign spelling out “Auntie.” This was the artist Pamela Council’s response to Warwick’s 2021 New Year’s Day proclamation: “I am everyone’s Auntie.”
On the whole, Warwick seemed both delighted by the fuss and a little amused. “It’s amazing what these artists have been able to accomplish,” she said. “And off of tweets? Come on, please.” She betrayed a maybe understandable ambivalence toward her new platform. (After all, she still sings and tours!) “I don’t do it every day,” she insisted. “I don’t get up in the morning and say, ‘Oh, I gotta tweet, I gotta tweet.’ ”
All the same, she said she enjoys being Twitter’s “grownup,” throwing mostly cheerful shade as an antidote to the usual toxicity—the “bashing” she disliked when her nieces and nephews first introduced her to the medium. Although one of those nieces handles her other social-media accounts, she said that her tweets are all hers. “I have no filter when it comes to being honest,” she added. She credited her grandfather, a minister in whose church she sang as a girl. “He told me ages ago, and I didn’t forget it, ‘Why tell a lie when the truth is available?’ ”
Was she always so unfiltered? Before she could answer, her cousin Diane Whitt, seated next to her, nodded yes with comic forcefulness. “Oh, yeah, my foot has been in my mouth several times,” Warwick said, laughing. “I never find any reason not to be straight up. I have no reason not to be me.” Cousin Diane nodded again.
source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/29/never-tweet-unless-youre-dionne-warwick
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