SZA’S Grammy perception

my life,” she said, asked what she’ll do if she ends up winning a Grammy. A compliment, for her, has become a kind of crisis, too.

“Because then the dysmorphia would really be hitting a peak.”

In an industry where the youngest stars radiate the most heat, SZA was a relatively late bloomer. She self-released her first EP at 22 and came to music as a refuge from jobs as a bartender and a sales assistant on the floor at Sephora.

She was born to a Catholic communications executive mother and a Muslim TV producer father in St Louis. The family moved to suburban Maplewood, New Jersey, when she was 10.

As a child, her life was circumscribed by gymnastics practise and Islamic prep school, realms where discipline and accountability were sacrosanct. Music was freeing, low pressure.

“I was just kind of stumbling through it, very novice,” she said of the first songs she wrote at the urging of her brother, a rapper.

“It was music made in a closet with beats stolen off the internet.”

In 2011, SZA was working part time for a street-wear company in New York when she met the president of Top

Dawg Entertainment, Terrence Henderson, known as Punch.

He was in town for a concert headlined by the label’s star artist, Kendrick Lamar, which happened to be sponsored by her employer. Henderson heard SZA’S music – a friend took the initiative and played it for him, to the singer’s horror – and didn’t bite at first.

But he kept in touch and ended up signing her three years later.

The two EPS SZA released on her own in the interim – SEE.SZA. Run (2012) and S (2013) – were early salvos in a revolution in R&B. They shared as much DNA with hip hop, Björk and left-ofcentre electronic music of artists like Toro y Moi and Purity Ring, as they did with Brandy or Jill Scott, inspiring comparisons to contemporary iconoclasts like the Weeknd and Frank Ocean.

Her lyrics at the time were a world away from the open diary of Ctrl. Songs like Time Travel Undone and Aftermath were saturated in oblique imagery and abstract symbolism. And, as if to complete the obfuscation, her vocals were submerged in reverb and atmospherics, giving them a disembodied quality.

When critics accused her of mistaking style for substance, she took it to heart.

“People would say [expletive] like ‘I don’t know who she is, I don’t know what she’s talking about, this is boring’,” SZA said. “And I realised that I was bored with myself. I was just feeling and emoting with no structure and no intent.”

On Ctrl, her objectives were transparency and humanity. She wanted to exhibit a red-blooded mind and body at work, to give voice to everything that she had once concealed.

On Supermodel, the album’s opening track, she jabs an absent beau with spiteful taunts (“You was a temporary lover”) before turning the knife on herself

(“Why am I so easy to forget?”). On the single Drew Barrymore,a confession of putative sins (“I’m sorry I’m not more ladylike, I’m sorry I don’t shave my legs at night”) becomes a defiant rallying cry.

The writer and producer Issa Rae, who used multiple songs from Ctrl in Season 2 of her HBO series Insecure, said it was SZA’S sharp turn toward candour that made her take notice.

“She’s tapping into raw emotions and personal stories in an unapologetic way,” Rae said. “Her earlier stuff was more of like a vibe to me, but now I feel like she’s a whole person who I recognise as someone I might know.”

Like Insecure – and the surprise blockbuster of last year, the movie Girls Trip – the specificity of

Ctrl gave it particular resonance among a generation of young black women who have been underserved by mainstream entertainment.

“It felt like ours,” Rae said of the album. “She was talking about experiences that I could relate to, and that the women that I know can relate to, and that was just such a pleasant surprise.”

SZA said Ctrl was inspired in part by stereotypes about overbold black women and her desire to reclaim them in her personal life.

It’s a theme she had previewed before, in songs that ended up on projects by Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé (Feeling Myself, 2014) and Rihanna (Consideration, 2016).

“I don’t feel ashamed to be loud, which is an argument I’ve had with lots of men, who thought I was too sassy and unladylike.

“A lot of black women get that rap, ‘you’re loud, and unsavory, or crass or abrasive’. But I feel like that [expletive] is beautiful as hell.”

The album’s unblinking, valueneutral depictions of sex and lust fed into a wider thread of visible female musicians asserting their sexual agency in their art.

Like recent work by Cardi B, Tove Lo and Rihanna, it disavowed ingrained scripts in popular music, in which promiscuous men play and virtuous women get played. In her videos for Supermodel and The Weekend, she seduces the camera without being objectified by it.

“I think a lot of sexuality was only taboo before because women weren’t allowed to talk about it – but women aren’t waiting for permission right now,” SZA said.

Though she forgot to vote for herself at the Grammys (“I’m a mess,” she said) and all but expects the best new artist award to go to one of her competitors – she’s up against the rapper Lil Uzi Vert and the singers Julia Michaels, Alessia Cara and Khalid – SZA said she was encouraged that the Recording Academy had recognised so many artists of different racial backgrounds.

“I think music is honest and will make you do honest things,” she said.

Her nominations have inspired her to rededicate herself to making more ambitious music, including a planned collaboration with the producer Mark Ronson (Uptown Funk) and Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, with whom she said she had recorded three songs.

Since Ctrl was released, her concerts and meet-and-greets have become a kind a group therapy.

Fans tell her about their love lives, deepest fears and private traumas. “I thought these were just my lonely thoughts and that I was going to put them out to pasture,” SZA said.

“But they weren’t out to pasture. Other people said, ‘hey, I have lonely thoughts, too’.”

Henderson said that SZA’S most passionate admirers are often the most vulnerable.

“A lot of what she says is what people think but can’t articulate,” he said. The outpouring has shifted the artist’s estimation of her work. If “dysmorphia” is a distortion of perspective, the treatment may simply be recognising that the distortion is there, and surrounding yourself with reliable witnesses. – The New York Times

Channel O, 7pm, Monday, January 29.