Bobby “DJ Cuzzin B” Carter can’t help but laugh when I mention SZA’s name.
“We’ve been talking about SZA all year when [SOS] was an album that technically didn’t even drop this year. Nowadays, that’s really different.”
As a senior producer for NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series, Carter said he gets asked when SZA will join the ranks of performers like Usher, Adele, Jazmine Sullivan, Babyface, Juvenile, and Scarface, who’ve appeared on the show since it debuted in 2008.
“Countless, bruh. Countless,” Carter, who has been with NPR for nearly 25 years and with the Tiny Desk team since 2014, said. “I know [Top Dawg Entertainment] is sick of me … because I reach out to them quarterly at this point. It didn’t happen, but I’m holding out. I have faith.”
SZA’s case for being the flagship artist — or MVP — of 2023 isn’t confined to a genre or specific Billboard chart. In a year full of pop star domination, and year-long celebrations and critiques of hip-hop’s 50th anniversary, SZA’s presence, singular.
She’s not just a singer who nearly became a Tiny Desk alum a half-decade ago (she was scheduled to perform in 2018 but had to pull out due to vocal cord issues), but she’s also a supernova: a legend in the making. 2023 was the year SZA graduated to a different level of fame, an extra level of notoriety. And in a world as divisive and fickle as ours — a different sort of near-universal appeal.
In the past year, Taylor Swift’s ubiquitous pop stardom has only grown larger (she even has the NFL eating out of her hand). Beyoncé remains the most enigmatic famous person in the world. And Usher’s second prime has led him to the Super Bowl halftime show, a forthcoming new album, and a world tour.
Nevertheless, it’s SZA who took the most significant leap. And she did so with a sensibility that’s as charismatic as its quirkiness that’s all-too-relatable. She’s not just a star who rose to power in 2023.
SZA is the star.
SZA’s story wasn’t destined from birth to shift the very core of the music industry. Her first job was selling sneakers. She also worked at Sephora. And to no surprise, she was a master saleswoman — always understanding that the customer didn’t just want to purchase whatever she was selling. They had to think that she believed in what she was saying. It’s not lying as it is understanding supply and demand. She had the supply. All she had to do was tap into their demand by understanding the basic human need of being seen.
It’s similar to how SZA’s music has injected itself into society’s cultural consciousness. It sounds egregious, especially given its success, but SZA almost pushed her latest album, SOS, to January of this year. It’s one thing to record music and create an album. It’s another to put it out into the world. The release can feel freeing yet crippling. SZA understood that once her album hit streaming services at midnight in December 2022, how it spread across the globe was beyond her control.
To put SOS in perspective means diving into a fascinating case study of just how much changes in a year. The project has landed on nearly every publication’s Best of 2023 list, from Rolling Stone and The Los Angeles Times, to Pitchfork and TIME. According to Inside Radio, SZA finished the year as one of the top three most-listened-to artists, behind only Swift and the controversial country star Morgan Wallen. Variety called SZA the Hitmaker of the Year and dubbed “Kill Bill” and “Snooze” two of their top 10 songs of 2023.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) made her a headliner in their Class of 2023 list after she earned a whopping 15 certifications. And with stops in North America and Europe, Billboard named SZA’s SOS tour one of the best of the year; it grossed nearly $100 million and sold about 700,000 tickets.
“The quality of the record and the word of mouth really led SZA to level up this year,” said Eric Frankenberg, Billboard’s senior charts/data analyst. “Based on the most recent leg in North America, those shows earned 55 times the revenue of the shows she did for Ctrl from before the pandemic. SOS was a step up in terms of streaming, singles success, touring … everything.”
SZA earned her first No. 1 hit on Billboard’s Hot 100 this year with “Kill Bill.” SOS spent ten non-consecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 charts and has remained in the top 10 for over a year. Putting that in context, since 2010, SOS joined a rare class of seven other albums to accomplish such a feat (SZA was the first woman to do so since Adele’s 25 in 2015 and 2016).
“Her follow up single, ‘Snooze,’ is actually the only song that’s been on the Hot 100 every week of 2023,” Frankenberg noted.
SZA garnered nine Grammy nominations this year for SOS, including her second for Song, Record, and Album of the Year. If she takes home the top prize, SZA will become just the fourth Black woman in history to win Album of the Year, following Natalie Cole in 1992 (Unforgettable … With Love), Whitney Houston in 1994 (The Bodyguard) and Lauryn Hill in 1999 (The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill).
“There’s always been an uphill climb for Black art at the Grammys. So from a historical standpoint, it would be great and do wonders for the culture,” Carter said of SZA’s potential Album of the Year win. “But whether she wins or not, her fan base is locked in. SZA don’t need none of that. She’s cemented with her core audience and the culture at large.”
Kyle Gustafson / For The Washington Post via Getty Images
Every MVP has incredible stats, though. Like Patrick Mahomes in the NFL, A’ja Wilson in the WNBA or Shohei Ohtani in MLB, SZA’s numbers jump off the page as an entry point to her dominance. But the experience of watching an artist define their generation in real-time cements such a distinction. There’s no comparison to the feeling in your chest when you hear “Snooze” for the first time or singing “I Hate U” and “Nobody Gets Me” at the top of your lungs. Or even the brilliant audacity of “Them hoe accusations weak/ Them b— accusations true” from the wonderfully flagrant “Smokin’ on My Ex Pack.”
“What I really, really love [from SZA] was the growth. The swag was different. Her voice was stronger,” said Carter. “Between Ctrl and SOS, she went from 1,200 to 20,000-cap room with a world tour. The recipe of who she is and just how human she is when it comes to her songwriting — the human nature of what she does is still there — but it’s just grander now.”
In 2023, being able to make an album that breaks the mold and stands out from a crowded field isn’t just a gift; it’s the highest form of art. SOS cemented SZA as a leader in her generation — even if she’s still finding herself. The secret to life is knowing that no one ever figures it out, no matter how long we live. We gravitate from stage to stage, chapter to chapter, in a constant battle of understanding who we are and how we’ll never be the same life force we are at that moment. The only hope is that we learn along the way. And on SOS, lessons come a la carte.
SZA loathes the confines of a genre. Over SOS’s 23 sprawling tracks, she taps into several musical stylings from traditional R&B, hip-hop (her stage name is an homage to Wu-Tang’s RZA), pop, and more. The album never seeps into a lull because it doesn’t follow a GPS. Instead, it barrels along aimlessly, feeling its own way rather than following directions.
Nonetheless, the most haunting moment on the album comes on “Good Days.” Originally teased during the height of the pandemic as the world stewed under civil and political unrest, the song was one of the first glimpses into SOS and served as a precursor to where SZA’s musical identity was heading.
“Half of us layin’ waste to our youth, it’s in the present … Half of us chasin’ fountains of youth, and it’s in the present now,” she croons in the song. Jacob Collier follows up with the hair-on-your-arms-raising refrain, “Always in my mind…”
With SZA, I can’t shake her music’s Marvin Gaye and Amy Winehouse-like quality. She’s not as self-destructive as they were, but there’s a charm to being one’s own worst enemy at times and not being afraid to live with that truth. Most of us can relate. With SZA, we invest in the journey far more than the destination. In a year when it felt like so much music was trying to achieve staying power but didn’t, SZA zigged when so much of the competition zagged. Her music feels like DMs left in drafts. Or texts that we probably should have sent — and definitely ones that we shouldn’t.
SOS is an album that finds itself just as much as it takes an honest inventory of what’s been lost. In listening, we were reminded that just as much as we want to be heroes in our stories, we’re often our worst enemies, too.
Who are you? What version of yourself do you think you need to be? Or the version that’s far more comfortable living in chaos because the peace we want might be too labyrinthine to embark on a lifelong quest for? This is the dichotomy of SOS. It’s a body of work bursting at the seams with questions that can only be answered by knowing what agony feels like. The suffering that can only be healed with the understanding that, as Tupac Shakur once said, “Imperfection is inherited; therefore, we all sin.”
Agony, as SZA showed, is the gateway to growth.
“When I was at the show here in D.C., she sold out Capital One Arena. I’m looking around and [the age range] was 16 to 60 in there. All ages, all walks of life,” Carter said. “The way she writes is just so relatable to the average woman. We all have contradictions in the way we feel about ourselves, and she’s never been afraid to talk about the duality of her emotions, her self-esteem or lack thereof. For me, as a man, I like to see SZA pop her s–t.”
He continues: “But also, the vulnerability of her songs, while she is a woman, I don’t think it’s limited to gender because men feel like that, too. She’s an artist we can all relate to. It’s just a human experience.”
In February, SZA sat down with The New York Times Magazine. In it, she spoke of someone asking if she was nervous about the “sophomore jinx” before SOS dropped.
“I never heard that before. I was like, What?!” she said.
Those fears quickly dissipated as SZA released SOS into the world and praised it on Instagram for “ACTIVELY CHANGING MY LIFE.” It may seem like a given now, but the pressure on SZA’s shoulders to follow up her debut album, Ctrl, was massive. It’s sat on the Billboard 200 for 341 weeks and counting, changing the music industry. R&B hasn’t seen a pair of back-to-back behemoths like SZA’s Ctrl and SOS since Usher’s 8701 and Confessions. Now, the pressure is gone.
“She absolutely leveled up in 2023 and has been one of the defining faces and voices of the year,” said Frankenberg. “This is the year SZA cemented her status as one of the biggest stars of this decade … and a leader in the music industry.”
With 2023 in the rearview, Carter hopes to get SZA on the Tiny Desk stage soon.
“Yeah, I already have the set list in mind, what she could do, how she could present it, how we could dress the space,” he admitted. “That would take her over the top. I’m really excited to hear she’s got a new project about to drop.”
Timing operates on its own schedule, and Carter has long learned patience, especially in an industry defined by the uncertainty of itineraries.
“The more time we spend waiting on it, the more we can build up anticipation and build up the catalog,” Carter said. “So, c’mon, SZA. Let’s get it.”
At this point, what’s left for her to do?
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