Review: In a SZA song, the catharsis is in the word count. The platinum-selling singer’s music stands in the conjoined traditions of rap and R&B, allowing her to fill every verse and hook with a surplus of melodized syllables, vulnerable and verbose.
,” she lets her lyrics fly fast and furious, only half-apologizing for being “raunchy like Bob Saget” before outlining how toxic romances erode self-worth. “It’s so embarrassing,” she sings during the refrain, slowing down to linger on the feeling, but just barely.
Would this degree of oversharing even be possible if she weren’t standing at the intersection of singing and rapping? And was it ever an intersection in the first place? For years, the widespread success of SZA’s many peers and forebears has asked us to ponder the difference between singers who rap and rappers who sing — a tidy little binary that’s proved to be largely, if not entirely, superficial. The human voice is a powerful thing. It bends musical traditions.
Which is all to say that SZA isn’t hybridizing two separate styles so much as maximizing their cumulative expressive potential — something you can hear best on “SOS” during “,” where she tries to quantify her grief through intricate internal rhymes. “My sanity’s at a 6.7,” she declares, chasing a melody up and down the length of her voice. “Handing out poinsettias to my dead homies’ mothers, praying they feel better.
Yet for all her dazzling wordiness, there is a sluggish midtempo feel that permeates this album’s 23-song track list. Could it be a purposeful evocation of the emotional fatigue that SZA so often sings about? That might explain why the cuts on “SOS” that feel the slowest feel the best, especially “ ,” a song with a humid, sumptuous beat over which SZA discourages herself — and her generation — from “chasing fountains of youth,” focusing instead on living “in the present, now.” Words to live by.
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