SZA’s ‘SOS:’ A Soundtrack for the Low Life

On the sleeper track "Low," from SZA's 2022 release SOS, the singer proudly proclaims that she prefers to:

From “Low” | SZA (Top Dawg/RCA, 2022):

Keep it on the lowski, I'm the lowest of the lowest

This lyric kind of sums up SZA's whole deal. As a singer, songwriter and celebrity, she's never shied away from controversy, never tried to play the good girl, and always seemed to embrace many of the seemingly contradictory aspects of being human, particularly for millennial women navigating the later stages of young adulthood, like her. 

And she's done this to great success, following in the footsteps of genre-blending bad girls like Janet Jackson and Lil Kim while charting a unique path and giving much-appreciated voice to the sluttier, needier, more chaotic aspects of some women's psyches.

I am fascinated with SZA and how she deftly incorporates so many emotions, experiences and desires into her songs, which themselves often mix genres or move freely between musical styles to create tracks that just sound and feel like our lives. She's cocky and confident one minute; depressed and demoralized the next; all while randomly referencing 90s kids icons like Pepper Ann, Gina from Martin and Drew Barrymore. 

This video will explore some of the specific themes that SZA employs to produce this relatable and multi-dimensional effect plus the pop culture that seems to both inspire and dialogue with her work. Though SZA's had a distinct singing and writing style since her mixtape days, her particular brand of self-conscious, self-aware emo-pop fully crystallized on her LPs, CTRL and SOS, so we'll mainly talk about those albums.

From “Drew Barrymore” | SZA (Top Dawg/RCA, 2017):

I'm sorry I'm not more attractive

I'm sorry I'm not more ladylike

I'm sorry I don't shave my legs at night

I'm sorry I'm not your baby mama

I'm sorry you got karma comin' to you

Collect your soul, get it right

All "Parts" Welcome

When SZA released her debut album, 2017's CTRL, one song in particular seemed to galvanize her target audience of twenty to thirty-somethings: "The Weekend."

As if songs detailing sexual infidelity don't compose the inner core of R&B, rap, and most modern pop, social media commentators either loudly howled their extreme distaste for the side chick anthem or sneakily co-signed the song's message by repurposing the most salacious lines as Instagram captions.

While odes to being the other woman or man are nothing new, something about SZA's self-awareness about her position in the triad felt fresh and different. 

From “The Weekend” | SZA (Top Dawg/RCA, 2017):

My man is my man, is your man

Heard it's her man too

My man is my man, is your man

Heard that's her man

And it wasn't just this song. Much of CTRL's appeal was due to the unfiltered look at the singer's perceived flaws, insecurities, bad ideas and regrettable mistakes. She wasn't the ultra-confident R&B diva some have come to expect from Black women singers — that idea in itself a gross misreading of classic and modern R&B, but that's for another video. She made songs where she seemed to be just as pathetic as she was promising; just as much of a stoner loser as she was an ambitious hustler. And she seemed really comfortable expressing these poles of her life and personality. On CTRL, and later on SOS, she was giving voice to all of her "parts" — even the embarrassing ones. 

The idea that everyone is made up of multiple, sentient and often disordered and disagreeable "parts" is the nucleus of a psychotherapy model called Internal Family Systems, or IFS. IFS, which was created by American therapist Richard Schwartz, supposes that while we have a wise Self that makes us, us:

It is the nature of the mind to be subdivided into an indeterminate number of subpersonalities or parts.

Just like a human family, these parts interact with each other - sometimes harmoniously, but sometimes they disagree with each other and with our wise Self. 

The IFS model looks at all of our parts, including the most disruptive ones, with compassion, assuming that they are prompting us to think and act in sometimes destructive ways out of love for us, hoping they can keep us distracted or numb from painful memories or situations that they think we aren't prepared for. 

Intentionally or inadvertently, SZA's music, with its insistence on reflecting the less desirable aspects of personhood and womanhood alongside the triumph and confidence offers a lesson in one of IFS' core tenets: to welcome all parts - even the annoying ones. 

As Jay Earley, author of Self-Therapy: A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating Inner Wholeness and Healing Your Inner Child Using IFS, writes:

IFS takes the stance of welcoming all parts with acceptance and compassion, even our most dangerous and destructive ones. This is actually a spiritual practice - to open our hearts to every aspect of ourselves and discover that they want the best for us. This allows us to see that the basis of all inner activity is love.

And while SZA does judge these less appealing parts in her lyrics, she simultaneously gives them space to be heard and express their desires. This makes both of her full-length albums emotionally well-rounded as the singer seamlessly moves through heavy topics like low self-esteem, abusive relationships and grief over her dad's passing while also celebrating the joys of being young, desired and loved by family and friends.

From “Special” | SZA (Top Dawg/RCA, 2017):

I wish I was special

I gave all my special

Away to a loser

Now I'm just a loser

I used to be special

But you made me hate me

Regret that I changed me

I hate that you made

Just like you

One reason we get to hear so many different sides to SZA is because album-making, up to this point, has been a sort of spiritual purge for her. Here's a clip of an interview with Apple Music:

Zane Lowe: It was a purge.

SZA: For sure, everything changed me after that, something about releasing all of that, it was like five years of uncertainty, turmoil, chaos, wondering if i'm good enough.

SZA's multiplicity makes her a rarity on the pop charts, where her songs of sordid women cheating, murdering and generally causing mayhem share space with more standard pop fare. And it's not only the lyrics that defy easy labels.  

As The Guardian's Shaad D'Souza described:

SOS is captivatingly messy, not just in its sad, funny, sexually frank lyrics, but in its production, which makes room for a country-emo hybrid, 90s-indebted rap, and plugs samples of Björk and Ol’ Dirty Bastard into the same song.

Odes to "Difficult" Women

SZA's subject matter is often dark and vulnerable, but the protagonists in the stories she tells tend to be pure trash. Akin to television's ubiquitous anti-heroes, the women in CTRL and SOS are the worst kind: sexy, needy, violent, unscrupulous and generally unlikable. Music made by women has traditionally focused on softer, traditional women  — we're much more likely to get songs about women being the victim of infidelity, rather than the perpetrator, for example. 

And when the "other woman" or cheating woman's perspective is featured, she's usually full of regret, repentant or cheating out of spite to get back a cheating man. There are obvious exceptions to this (Whitney Houston's "Saving All My Love for You," for example), but, like the leading ladies of television and movies, women in music have, in the past, been flattened to fit the culture's current ideal of femininity. 

What strikes me about the characters in SZA's songs is that they're so often "difficult women."

A tendency that has drawn comparisons to other millennial dirtbags like Issa of "Insecure" and "Fleabag"'s eponymous heroine, which D'Souza also addressed and expanded on in The Guardian:

Much has been made of the way SZA fits into a millennial “messy woman” archetype – many of these songs are, after all, Fleabaggy admissions of returning to shitty exes.

The lyrics that stick out to me aren’t the deeply sad ones that seem to be the basis for a lot of 2 a.m. tweets and TikTok captions, but the ones that call bullshit on ideas that SZA should have to be respectable or “real”, or that crying over her exes precludes her from showing any kind of emotional strength.

Even the interludes from SZA, real name Solana,'s mother and grandmother, which serve as interwoven narration on CTRL and occasional sound bites on SOS, are about pushing back and not being an "easy" woman.

From “Love Galore” | SZA (Top Dawg/RCA, 2017):

[Norma Rowe]: But see, Solána, if you don't say somethin', speak up for yourself

They think you stupid, you know what I'm sayin'?

It's clear that SZA admires complicated women who don't fit society's narrow views of womanhood that emphasize heteronormativity, domesticity and sexual purity.

On each album, she names songs after polarizing women like SOS' Gone Girl, named for Gillian Flynn's novel or the film adaptation, and CTRL's Drew Barrymore, named for the former party girl addict turned cuddly talk show host. The murderous lead single of SOS was named for Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, which graphically shows a former assassin exacting revenge on her old co-workers. The cover image of SOS is inspired by another iconic and famously "difficult" woman: Princess Diana. SZA has also name-checked the quirky, "difficult" pre-teen of the late '90s, Pepper Ann, on at least two songs, including CTRL's "Go Gina," where she quotes part of the show's theme song:

From “Go Gina” | SZA (Top Dawg/RCA, 2017):

I've been droppin' out and

I've been hangin' out with my high friends

And we too stoned to pay attention now

(Much too cool for seventh grade)

These references coupled with SZA's brooding emo lyrics paint pictures of women who reject the pop wisdom of our generation. These aren't women who focus on "wellness" (They smoke. A lot.). These aren't women who are "doing the work" in therapy or "setting healthy boundaries."  Instead, they spend their time anesthetizing early adulthood growing pains with sex, drugs, and self-sabotage, hoping to briefly distract them from uncomfortable 20s angst.

From “Prom” | SZA (Top Dawg/RCA, 2017):

Fearin' not growin' up

Keepin' me up at night

Am I doin' enough?

Feel like I'm wastin' time

Promise to get a little

Better as I get older

Helping to give her songs a dreamy, dazed and almost ambient feel is the use of bird imagery and symbolism. Song titles like "Pretty Little Birds" and "Doves in the Wind" and lyrics about floating, flying and swimming give listeners the feeling that SZA is passively drifting through life, adding to the themes of young adult ennui. 

There's also a connection between SZA and another "difficult" woman: Singer Rihanna. Although she doesn't appear on CTRL, I always felt like the album was in direct conversation with Rihanna's ANTI, which was released in January 2016, about 18 months before CTRL. SZA even co-wrote and features on ANTI's first track, providing one of the more somber songs on the album with her signature flying imagery:

From “Consideration” | Rihanna f/SZA (Roc Nation, 2016)

I come flutterin' in from Neverland

Time could never stop me, no, no, no, no, I know you try to

The archetypal women featured in both albums represent opposing qualities — the down-to-earth, boy-crazy Ingenue of CTRL seemed to answer — and directly oppose — the cool, poised love-em-and-leave-em Vixen of ANTI. Together, the albums show much of the same, overconnected, disaffected modern world through different perspectives.

SZA's first two albums feel current and specific, but have proved to have cultural staying power and will likely join pop and emo cannon. Her dense, mesmerizing soundscapes mirror the unfulfilled, uninspiring young adulthood many millennials experienced — beset by tragedy, turmoil, cultural uprisings and uprootings, rapid-fire technological change, and, eventually burnout. The unsteady, insecure and ever-questioning women that SZA channels throughout CTRL and SOS are embodied symbols of the worlds that built them. 

Although CTRL and SOS are very much a part of and in conversation with the most popular great works by Black millennial women like "Insecure" and ANTI, their messages will no doubt be relevant to and repackaged for generations of women to come.

My name is Whitney and I write about pop culture topics that interest me — usually with a bit of gender studies and spirituality mixed in. If that interests you, please subscribe! If you liked this essay, be sure to check out the video and my YouTube playlist on Music I Heart.

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