SZA

One Liner: Alternative R&B gal

Wikipedia Genre: R&B

Home: New Jersey

Poster Position: Headliner!
Both Weekends.  Friday.

Thoughts:  Huh.  I thought for sure that she had already been to ACL in the past.  I wonder who I am thinking of?  Her top two songs on Spotify are not her own, just ones where she collaborated with Doja Cat or Kendrick Lamar.  But both of those have over a billion streams, so her presence is not to be ignored.

Her real name is Solana Imani Rowe, and she's originally from St. Louis.  Raised in New Jersey by an executive producer from CNN and an executive at AT&T, as a Muslim.  But after the 9/11 attacks, she stopped wearing her hijab to stop the bullying in 7th grade.  She went to a handful of colleges before dropping out of Delaware State University.  She began making music in the early 2010s, taking her stage name "from the Supreme Alphabet, taking influence from rapper RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan. The last two letters in her name stand for Zig-Zag and Allah, while the first letter S can mean either savior or sovereign."

I had not heard of the Supreme Alphabet.  Let's dig in.  Supreme Mathematics and the Supreme Alphabet are tenets of the Five-Percent Nation and were created by Allah the Father.  The Five-Percenters believe that ten percent of the people in the world are elites and their agents, who know the truth of existence and opt to keep eighty-five percent of the world in ignorance and under their controlling thumb; the remaining five percent are those who know the truth and are determined to enlighten the eighty-five percent.  The Nation was formed by a dude named Clarence 13X in New York in the mid-60's, who renamed himself Allah the Father after he left the Nation of Islam.  Most of the Wikipedia about this stuff sounds like insane people shit.  But here is the explanation for the Supreme Alphabet: "The Supreme Alphabet is a system of interpreting text and finding deeper meaning from the NOI Lessons by assigning actual meanings to the letters of the Latin script. For example, the first letter, A, stands for Allah; the 12th letter, L, stands for Love, Hell, or Right; and the 13th letter, M, stands for Master. The Supreme Alphabet was developed by Allah the Father and Justice. The method by which letters were associated with certain values is unknown."  Why in the hell would "L" stand for Love, Hell, or Right?  How does that work?  My name is hereby JUSTICE ALLAH SEE KING!

Anyway, what we are looking at here is R&B stuff.  I'm honestly surprised that my 11 year old daughter is so hot to see this, I don't get anything special from the handful of most popular songs I've heard now.  It is fine, but just more R&B stuff with a great voice.  Her top track of her own (not where she is just the feature) is from 2017's Ctrl, "Love Galore" with Travis Scott.  602 million streams.

Yeah, I mean, she has a powerful voice that sounds great.  But I'm not sure why the song is so popular, a very basic percussion beat from a Casio 2000 added to some woozy synth mashes.  The lyrics are good.  And R&B has never been my thing, but just nothing in here is all that exciting to me.  Right when she started making music, she signed to Top Dawg, the label of Kendrick, ScHoolboy Q, SiR, and others.  She released a bunch of EPs and singles there at first, before her big breakout with Ctrl in 2017 (which was partially a repurposed version of her EP called A).  Ctrl got lots of critical love, being named the album of the year by Time and scoring an 86 on Metacritic (which collects all of the main critical reviews).  She was nominated for four Grammys that year but did not win any of them.  She is supposedly working on a second album, but as of now it is not available on Spotify, and she has tweeted (and deleted) that the album is ready but the label isn't releasing it for some reason.

So, I'll give you the most recent single to see what the new album might sound like if it can come out.  "Good Days" came out in 2020.  581 million streams.

Dig the trippy video of her being a mushroom throwing spores.  Again, the track is fine.  Nothing terribly memorable in the music itself and her voice sounds great.  This just isn't aimed at me.

I feel bad dismissing her so quickly, but with only one album and a genre that really doesn't do it for me, there isn't much else to get in to.  I hope my kid loves the show!