via Wikimedia Commons
SZA at the 2015 Afropunk Festival.
If you follow local music, you know that St. Louis is on a tear. Young musicians from all over the country (and in the case of TJ Muller, the world) are moving here for the trad jazz scene. Acts like Sleepy Kitty and Beth Bombara are attracting national attention. And our R&B/neosoul/hip hop scene is sending young artists out into the world who are changing the world with their music. Check it out:
There's an extensive interactive New York Times Magazine feature that just went online titled "25 Songs That Tell Us Where Music is Going." Featured alongside Cardi B, Katy Perry, Lana Del Rey, Bruno Mars, Jason Isbell, and Taylor Swift are two St. Louis artists, SZA and Smino, who were included for their songs "Drew Barrymore" and "Anita" respectively.
Neosoul artist SZA (who was born in St. Louis but grew up in New Jersey) swung through her hometown in December, and quickly sold out two nights at The Ready Room. You are a lucky human if you at one or both shows—the next time she plays STL, you can bet it'll be a much larger venue, which will probably sell out even faster. Her latest, Ctrl, was that rare thing called a universally critically praised album with huge mainstream appeal. "Just six months after its release, SZA had unanimous praise, a video directed by Solange, a track with Kendrick Lamar for Black Panther. She even killed it on SNL. If the charts didn’t already prove SZA was a star, the five Grammy nominations—including Best New Artist—solidified it," GQ wrote. She was, as they continued, "shut out," that night, walking away without a single statue, with the whole internet furious on her behalf.
It's pretty well guaranteed she'll be back to sweep the Grammys at some point, though; she's still very young, and off to an incredible start. As the NYT notes in its "25 songs" piece, SZA was "the first woman signed to Top Dawg Entertainment, also home to Kendrick Lamar. She was seen as a kid sister to the tight-knit, supermasculine Top Dawg crew—and as her generation’s prime contender to carry the torch of R.&B. greats like Lauryn Hill, one of the most famous graduates of SZA’s own New Jersey high school. SZA’s music is unabashedly emotive; she writes with explicit candor about sex; with her cascading pile of hair and tendency to sing with her eyes closed and one hand outstretched, Streisand-style, she is the picture of the classic soul diva. But SZA was also born in 1990 and is a product of a post-internet culture, armed with the staggering diversity of reference points and influences that is the hallmark of the millennial mind. Like the music of Frank Ocean, her lone generational peer, her work feels deconstructed: imagistic, casual-seeming sketches that in their scattered imprecision convey the 24-7 slide-show feeling of modern life with breathtaking accuracy."
Her superpower, they continue, is her self-doubt, which pushes her to experiment and but has also instilled a perfectionist streak. "Drew Barrymore," seemed a predictive track to them because it captures both a timelessness and the zeitgeist: "Her obvious forebears may be girl groups like the Crystals and the Shangri-Las. But unlike those artists, who were made abject by their desire and imprisoned by the gender politics of their era, SZA’s insecurities are refracted through the ensuing decades of cultural and social progress — through waves of feminism and the civil rights movement, through Madonna and riot grrrl and Sasha Fierce. She wears her old-school insecurity with a decidedly modern bravery, expressing her own self-loathing with such clarity and conviction that it comes across as self-love."
Smino moved to Chicago to go to Columbia College after high school, and is pretty well based there now as part of the Zero Fatigue, but he still lists St. Louis as his hometown on Facebook, and mentioned the significance of his record blckswn being released last year on 3/14. He was in town recently playing The Ready Room as well—opening for SZA, as it turns out! Since the release of his record last year, he's been namechecked by Pitchfork, Fader, and Rolling Stone, who named blckswn as one of the best albums of 2017. "A young rapper with such obvious talent and starpower, Smino's idiosyncratic debut album boldly diverges from any current dominant aesthetics," it wrote. "Alongside the spare, clanking, found-sound funk of producer Monte Booker, the St. Louis rapper disguises clever lyrical turns in acrobatic chains of syllables, delivered with an unpredictable swing. The secret ingredient is R&B, built into the melodic DNA of Blkswn, as on the bouncy woo of "Netflix & Dusse" or the dreamlike he-said-she-said of "Glass Flows," featuring nimble Zero Fatigue crew member Ravyn Lenae."
The NYT chose "Anita," as its songs to highlight, party due to the brilliant wordplay of the lyrics (Anita = "I need her"). "At its core, it’s a song about yearning," the Times writes. "Smino’s entire first album, “blkswn,” is moony and goofy and comfortably youthful — another track starts, “I got a pizza on the way, bay-bay/I’m trying to lay, lay/little lady, aye” — but “Anita” is the standout. It’s faintly galactic, all video-gamey beeps and boops, with the overlay between Smino and Jean Deaux, the vocalist, representative of what can go right when two people are in perfect rhythm. It’s appealingly unobtrusive, warm and indistinct, able to melt into any background it finds itself in. And if — in the midst of a little action — you happen to catch that it’s playing, all you’ll think is: This is nice."
Read the whole article here.
