Anybody who hasn't yet heard of SZA, will soon enough. Born Solana Rowe in New Jersey, many may or may not know SZA as a carefree black girl with hair almost as big as her future. She, however, describes herself as the girl next door, and her lyrics agree with herself. If her music could be described as an inanimate object, I would call it the diary of every 20-something-year-old woman searching for love in a world that sometimes feels devoid of it. Her music speaks the words that all of us young women have ever been too uncomfortable or too scared or too timid to say out loud.
Her two mixtapes were breathtakingly personal, filled with airy beats and lyrics that punch you in the gut and make you wonder if she reached into your mind to write them. Her EP "Z" was personal as well, but the production turned some long time fans off, many finding her to be trying too hard to be different. But finally, on Friday her debut album "CTRL" was released, and she seems to have found a perfect medium between being different and being herself, all the while keeping the intimacy and rawness that makes her, her. Chock-full of snippets from conversations between her and her mother/grandmother, this might be SZA's most personal work yet. She pulls no stops and her tongue is not held. And it was beautiful.
The album opens with "Supermodel," a very intimate and very personal ode to an ex who left her on Valentine's Day. For those who are first listening to SZA, this is a perfect example of how personal she gets, while still relating to almost every young girl who has gone through a break up. With lines like "you know I need too much attention," and "wish I was comfortable just with myself," she opens the album with a perfect display of her insecurities and already paints herself as the girl next door, maybe the girl that you occasionally smile at in the laundry room. She's not a celebrity singing about her super exclusive and untouchable celebrity relationship, and maybe that's what draws people to the album.
She then leads us into the second song on the album, a Travis Scott assisted track titled "Love Galore." Highly anticipated, this was the second single off the album, where SZA sings about wanting an ex-lover or friend. She opens the song with airy melodies on love, and then finally opens with the surprising line that we've all heard or said at least once: "Done with these niggas." After "Love Galore" comes "Doves In The Wind," in which her label-mate Kendrick Lamar assists her in singing about how far people go for sex when some people have so much more to offer. Then comes her lead single, "Drew Barrymore," in which a way less confident part of SZA pours over her insecurities about being good enough. She sings the thoughts we've all had, apologizes for not being attractive enough, and realizes that when she's lonely she forgets her worth. Next is the fifth track on her album, "Prom," an upbeat song about growing up and broken promises, a song that we all might have needed at 17.
Track 6 has perhaps been the most controversial in the days following the albums release, but coincidentally has also been the most acclaimed. Titled "The Weekend," it's a song with a production reminiscent of '90s r&b, slow and sultry. Her soft vocals glide on the track so smoothly that for a second you don't realize the subject matter of the song. But if you listen closely, you realize "The Weekend" is not-so-secretly a song about sleeping with another girl's man, but only 'on the weekend.' In a world where rappers constantly talk about taking their friends' girls, SZA flips the script and takes CTRL (pun intended) by reversing the roles. Though homewrecking is terrible, SZA sure does make it sound real damn beautiful.
She then returns to being relatable with a song titled "Go Gina," obviously titled after the beloved sitcom, "Martin." She talks about what words mean for her and belonging to nobody. On "Garden (Say It Like Dat)," she sings to a boy who will never love her, but tells her he does, and she doesn't mind. On "Broken Clocks," she talks about working and all the time she doesn't have, a concept that almost everyone can relate to. With "Anything," which includes a Donna Summer sample, she questions her livelihood. She then hits us with a James Fauntleroy assisted interlude titled "Wavy," a beautiful song that doesn't really seem to have much of a meaning but is beautiful nonetheless. Getting close to the conclusion of the album, in "Normal Girl" she sings about never being normal enough, and not even knowing what being a normal girl consists of. In "Pretty Little Birds," she describes a pretty little bird, eager to fly with her fellow label-mate Isaiah Rashad.
SZA ends the album with "20 Something," perhaps the most relatable song on the album. A guitar-assisted personal ode to being, well, 20 something, she sings about an unexpectedly failed relationship, losing her friends, and being independent while at the same time not being independent. The line that hits the hardest? "Praying the 20 somethings don't kill me." Somehow she closes the album with a song that captures a part of life that everyone goes through, being lost, confused, and scared.
In its totality, SZA's "CTRL" shows that she has found herself as an artist, despite how lost she may be as a person. SZA bares her soul to us through this album, showing her loss of control and her many attempts to take it back. She doesn't try to be perfect, she doesn't try to be fake; she's real and it's beautiful.
If you didn't know who SZA was before "CTRL," you certainly will after listening to her album. But there's one thing she didn't tell you, and maybe because she doesn't yet know it herself:
She's here to stay.
