This ain’t no warning shot, in case all of you hoes forgot, they know we’ve been more than lost. Us punk-asses tried to replace them but the stakes were too high, we weren’t able to live off some SZA mini-me. In December 8th 2022 they dumped this album like a press squeeze, they were horny like “Suck these”, daring like “Touch me”. They just want what’s theirs, after spending more than five years watching countless people try and fail to replicate the magic of their debut album.
And it’s hard to be a SZA mini-me. Their incredible 2017 debut album felt like a true moment in the history of recorded music. It’s one of the handful of 21st century records – as our tastes become more and more individualised and the latest stage of capitalism involves eliminating community and creating more dividing lines along identity – that is near unanimously considered an all-time classic. It spent more than 300 weeks on the Billboard top 200, selling millions of copies. You gotta rip that off, right??
But how do you rip off SZA?? What is the classic SZA sound?? On ‘CTRL’, they played very loose with standard pop and R&B structures, sure, but to the extent that they were always musically hard to pin down. Can you describe what a SZA song sounds like?
Ah! Stop right there! You’re using words like ’emotional’ or ‘vulnerable’ or ‘intimate’ aren’t you? You’re spitting phrases like ‘Joni Mitchell’s teenage diary read by Nina Simone at their angriest’, or ‘Notorious B.I.G gets their butt hurt by a Brazilian Butt Lift’ or ‘Something you read initially believing to be a suicide not but at the end turns out to be the breakdown of how SZA brought the gun that they shoot you with when you look up from the page’, yeah? None of those descriptions – no matter how overwrought – actually describes how the music sounds! They all describe vibes, mate, you’re just describing vibes.
SZA is, essentially, a vibes based artist. The one thing that differentiates SZA from (and far above) their peers is the sheer ‘SZA Vibes‘ that they bring. SZA songs don’t sound like SZA because of any appreciable musical styles or motifs, they sound like SZA because they are fucking SZA. It’s why the belated release of ‘SOS’ felt like such a relief, felt like they really were back to ‘Save Our Souls’. Every rap/R&B artist is contractually obliged to release at least six dozen tracks explaining why their imitators could never, but that blistering, whirlwind two minute opening title track of ‘SOS‘ (“Comin’ back, she so candid!/Comin’ back snatched like bandit!/Comin’ back, this ain’t canned shit!”) is one of the first times ever it’s felt legitimate. Of course nobody else could fill that void left by SZA! Nobody else is SZA! And that cover, inspired by a photo of Diana taken a week before they died?? “I just loved how isolated she felt and that’s what I wanted to convey the most“. Mate, the vibes are off the charts!!
SZA doesn’t want to be Princess Diana though, fuck that. They might be able to relate to the hounding of Dead Di and the wider media obsession with their every move (the public dissection and morbid vulturing of a member of the royal family in 1997 is probably just below the level of an average woman on Instagram with less than 50k followers in 2023), but fuck that meek arse shit. SZA’s music – their vibe – has always been about allowing yourself at least fantasies of vengeance. On ‘SOS’, SZA speaks like billions of people if they were allowed to say the quiet bit out loud, streams of consciousness, emotional Tourette’s: “I be so sick of you niggas, y’all contradicting/I be so bored with myself, can you come and fuck me?/I feel so ordinary, sad when you around me/Treat me like corduroy, wear me out“. Shit, this sounds like the inner monologues of roughly half of the Earth’s population, so SZA may as well be giving voice to the things Diana was never allowed to say out loud. “I might kill my ex, not the best idea. His new girlfriend’s next, how’d I get here?…Rather be in jail than alone”? Diana felt that.
And having no easily definable ‘sound’ aside from just being SZA means that they can widen the scope of what they do from song to song without it ever sounding incohesive or jarring to the wider album. After only one previous album SZA has already reached that rarefied air of an auteur artist that they can basically do whatever the fuck they want and it always make sense. Stinging string-laden ballads? “Hey, my past can’t escape me/My pussy precedes me/My, my, how the times change/I’m still playin’ the victim/And you still playin’ the pick-me“? Yeah, no problem. Babyface produced early 90s R&B classics? “Mobbin’, schemin’, lootin’, hide your bodies/Long as you dreamin’ ’bout me, ain’t no problem”? Easy, give me another. An Indie ballad?? “You were balls-deep, now we beefin’/Had me butt-naked at the MGM/So wasted, screamin’, “Fuck that”/Blurry now, but I meant it then/Hurry now, baby, stick it in/’Fore the memories get to kickin’ in“? Stick it in before the memories get kicking in?? Tattoo it straight onto my veins!! But yeah, done, no problem. Freaking pop punk?? “Worried that you already done replaced me/Worried I done took it too far and you too hurt to hear me/Smokin’ on a Backwood ’cause I miss my ex/Now I’m ovulatin’ and I need rough sex/Knowin’ you gon’ block me tomorrow, can you still come and get me?“? Piece of piss, mate, no bother.
And they do this over 23 [TWENTY THREE] tracks. Thank God SZA gave everyone a full 12 months to digest this, as i can’t think of a more dense, more lyrically rich record. With all due respect, one SZA song has roughly the amount of detail, references, wit and ingenuity as your average Olivia Rodrigo or National album, and here are 23 [TWENTY THREE] of the fuckers. No instrumentals. No interludes. No filler. It’s an enormous achievement by an enormous talent that I can’t see anyone else even challenging. If you’re still of an age where you haven’t given up on art, you should feel lucky that your life coincides with the output of SZA.
Oh, and merry Christmas!
Yah, I know, it’s only the 21st and I have three more records to list before Christmas, but how cute is that cover???
Necessary Evil 
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