SZA went off across the 23 tracks on S.O.S., her sophomore LP five years in the making that finally arrived on Friday, December 9. The St. Louis-bred artist’s lyricism cuts deep, but her sonic palate is vast. From the pop-punk “F2F,” to the Phoebe Bridgers-assisted “Ghost In The Machine” and tear-jerking ballad “Nobody Gets Me,” the project can’t be pigeonholed. And that’s exactly how SZA wants it.
“I’m so tired of being pegged as [an] R&B artist,” SZA told writer Jewel Wicker for a newly published Consequence cover story. “I feel like that’s super disrespectful, because people are just like, ‘Oh, ’cause you’re Black, this is what you have to be’ — like, put in a box. And I hate that. With songs on this album, it’s supposed to help round out the picture and the story.”
She added, “It’s very lazy to just throw me in the box of R&B. I love making Black music, period. Something that is just full of energy. Black music doesn’t have to just be R&B. We started rock ‘n’ roll. Why can’t we just be expansive and not reductive?”
COVER STORY: SZA WITHOUT LIMITS
Don’t put SZA in a box.
On SOS, her boldest project yet, SZA makes it clear she’s more than an R&B artist: “I love making Black music, period.” https://t.co/yk7eDW7h4j
: Daniel Sannwald pic.twitter.com/kQQcMYPu8W
— CONSEQUENCE (@consequence) December 12, 2022
Lizzo, SZA’s longtime friend, recently expressed a similar sentiment.
“Genre’s racist inherently,” she told Entertainment Weekly, in part. “I think if people did any research they would see that there was race music and then there was pop music. And race music was their way of segregating Black artists from being mainstream, because they didn’t want their kids listening to music created by Black and brown people because they said it was demonic and yada, yada, yada. So then there were these genres created almost like code words: R&B, and then of course eventually hip-hop and rap was born from that. I think when you think about pop, you think about MTV in the ’80s talking about ‘We can’t play rap music’ or ‘We can’t put this person on our platform because we’re thinking about what people in the middle of America think’ — and we all know what that’s code for.”
With Consequence, SZA also discussed her heightened anxiety attached to the demands of her album and the music industry in general, her wish to “disappear … for as long as I can,” and more.
Lizzo is a Warner Music Artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.