I Hate SZA's Album Because SZA's Album is Me

 I'd timed my first listen of CTRL just right. It was four in the morning and I was being driven to Denpasar Airport to catch an early morning flight to Singapore. The Bali streets were dark and empty but enchanting in their foreign nature - a perfect backdrop for the contemplative mood SZA's newest offering was about to spin me into. 

SZA has never been an artist who spoke to me as someone worth really paying attention to but like most people, I resentfully allow Twitter to dictate my tastes nowadays so I thought I'd give it a chance. Honestly I hated it but this should be viewed as a compliment. While listening to this album I felt like I was being dragged within an inch of my life and the last time I felt this way was when I heard Amy Winehouse’s Frank for the first time. What Amy and SZA's music have in common is an incredibly self-aware messiness which reflects back at the every twenty-something woman in shocking technicolour. 

‘Why you bother me when you know you don't want me?’ 

How many times have we wanted to scream this at a lukewarm lover? How many times have we wanted someone in their entirety but accepted them in bits and pieces because that's all they would give us? The beauty of CTRL is how well it speaks to the parts of us we're still trying to iron out as we limp reluctantly into adulthood while still picking at the plasters covering the scrapes that post-adolescence left behind. Songs like Drew Barrymore and Supermodel touch on that raw sensitivity just below the surface of sexuality and its basic origins of the desire to be desired. This is a sensitivity that leads so many of us down the road SZA sings about in The Weekend where she plays the reluctant side-chick - a narrative we really don't hear all too often. So much of the infidelities outlined in female artists' music out there lean towards either the 'I'll steal your man' brand of things or 'my man is up to no good.' Rarely do we hear things from the 'side-chick' point of view and it's even less common to see a perspective where actually she could be his second girlfriend because that's exactly how the guy is treating her. We can all pretty much agree that it's wrong to sleep with another woman's partner but actually it's through gritted teeth and hushed tones that a lot of us can admit to having been there anyway. Again, reluctantly. 

It's easy to get caught up in the brand of feminism that advocates superhuman ambition and the strength of character to show men where to go and pick yourself up when the going gets tough. The Beyonces, Nickis and Rihannas are forces to be reckoned with and aspirational for most young women, and this is great. When artists like SZA come along however, they remind us that some of us still have a long way to go and that's alright. For all the angst and bad decisions there's still a place for us and once we've encountered and confronted some uncomfortable truths, those seats will be there waiting.