In a new interview, the 'Kiss Me More' hitmaker, who recently released her latest album 'S.O.S.', shares that she's 'so tired of being pegged as an RnB artist.'
- Dec 13, 2022
AceShowbiz - SZA isn't too happy with being titled an R&B singer. The "S.O.S." artist feels the label is "super disrespectful" and she reveals her reasoning in her cover story for Consequence.
"I'm so tired of being pegged as [an] R&B artist," SZA shares. "I feel like that's super disrespectful, because people are just like, 'Oh, 'cause you're black, this is what you have to be' - like, put in a box."
The "Kiss Me More" singer goes on to note, "And I hate that. With songs on this album, it's supposed to help round out the picture and the story."
"It's very lazy to just throw me in the box of R&B. I love making Black music, period. Something that is just full of energy. Black music doesn't have to just be R&B. We started rock 'n' roll. Why can't we just be expansive and not reductive?" she continues.
SZA isn't the only artist who complains about being categorized as an RnB singer. Prior to this, Lizzo called the existence of genres as being "racist inherently."
"Genre's racist inherently," she told Entertainment Weekly. "I think if people did any research they would see that there was race music and then there was pop music. And race music was their way of segregating black artists from being mainstream, because they didn't want their kids listening to music created by black and brown people because they said it was demonic and yada, yada, yada."
She continued, "So then there were these genres created almost like code words: R&B, and then of course eventually hip-hop and rap was born from that. I think when you think about pop, you think about MTV in the '80s talking about 'We can't play rap music' or 'We can't put this person on our platform because we're thinking about what people in the middle of America think' - and we all know what that's code for."
