SZA Profile for NY Times Magazine
Over the last six years, SZA has become a dominant figure in American pop. Her second album, “SOS,” has been atop the Billboard 200 for seven consecutive weeks. But she resists some of the terms and conditions of being a superstar. https://t.co/M6U29dqYiT pic.twitter.com/L9PdvpTMT0
- The New York Times (@nytimes) February 8, 2023
SZA profile where she discusses her upbringing, being raised interfaith (her mom is Christian, her dad is Muslim), how she got started in the industry, how she's dealing with her success, and SOS.
Her mom on not being initially supportive: “It’s so hard to follow your own dreams,” Rowe said. “So many of us abandon it very young, especially if the people that we respect and love and trust think we could or should be doing something different. I’m so glad that she didn’t listen to me.”
On being a black woman in the industry: "The edge can feel safe when in the roiling mainstream, a movie like “Glass Onion” comes out and tech bros can’t quite believe that the master detective Benoit Blanc would care so much about a Black female character’s pain. When the columnist Jeremy Clarkson wishes in writing that people would throw excrement on Meghan Markle. When the social media that SZA speaks so natively, that lifts her songs to vaunted viral status, is also the apparatus that rises so virulently to shame and attack her that her mother addresses it daily. “I get up, immediately go to my knees on the side of the bed, say my prayers,” Audrey Rowe told me. “Then go on social media to see what Solána’s feeling and saying, to see what other people are feeling and saying. Her candor is a big part of her charm, but it also makes her very vulnerable, because there are things that people know about her that could be used to her detriment. I often will think, Oh, God, why did she say that? I’ve gotten used to the fact that she’s going to say what she feels.” SZA says what she feels in a world where the Grammy-winning Megan Thee Stallion’s ex-friend yelled, “Dance, bitch,” Megan testified, before he shot her - a dancer - in her feet. This is not offhanded. This is a message of resentment, in skywriting, for SZA and women like her to back-flip forever, trying to prove their humanity to those who keep them too weary to dream, too exhausted to plan, too scared to tell their own stories and too unsure of their own worthiness to truly live."
On success: "No shots, no shade - no disrespect - but there’s something so satisfying about the way SZA has emerged from the T.D.E. boys’ club as its new flagship. It’s like how Lil’ Kim became the best-selling rapper to come out of the Notorious B.I.G.’s Junior M.A.F.I.A. crew, when the conventional money was on Lil’ Cease to succeed Biggie. Or like in the early 1980s when Howard Hewitt was chosen by management as the breakout solo star of the R.&B. trio Shalamar, but Jody Watley surfaced as the one holding up a Best New Artist Grammy. Lauryn Hill - over Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel of the Fugees - will go down in history as one of the best to ever sing or rap a song. The woman artist, so often brought in as much as trinket as talent, has been right there, a diamond in the sexist musical rough all along."
The whole thing is worth the read! Highly recommend.
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