Lyrical Escapism
Credit to Jacob Webster
“This time next year, I’ll be living so good,” sings Grammy award-winning R&B artist SZA toward the end of her song “Normal Girl,” a popular staple of her hit 2018 debut album CTRL. SZA seems to end “Normal Girl” on an optimistic note, concluding her song about her yearning to assimilate with conventional standards of femininity in order to gain love and acceptance with a hopeful look toward the distant future in spite of her struggles in the present.
“What are you saying now? Quit on the world ‘cause it ain’t going your way now Quit on yourself ‘cause you can’t figure your way out Normal girl, how do you be?”
In a moment of introspection, SZA finishes the song by asking herself how she could consider giving up on herself and the rest of the world just because she is having a hard time finding her place in it. She seems to chastise herself for her impulse to pull away from the challenge of figuring out her life, as if she's saying, “Give up? You can’t be serious.”
“Saturn”
Two weeks ago, SZA released her first single since she debuted her sophomore album SOS in late 2022. The song “Saturn” is about disillusionment with modern life, and the fleeting fantasy of escaping to a faraway place free from “losing love, repeating pain”—the disappointment and heartache that inevitably accompanies a life on Earth. In the midst of being “stuck in this paradigm” of hopelessly unbreakable negative patterns, SZA dreams of Saturn, idealizing it as “something worth saving.” The singer has seemingly already committed to her plan to run for higher ground, saying presumptuously, “I’ll be better on Saturn.”
The world, it seems, is a lost cause in the songwriter’s eyes.
SZA has never shied away from baring her complicated, hard-to-swallow feelings in her lyrics. She paints an image of Earth that is utterly devoid of salvageable, worthwhile attributes, a troubled worldview that we can assume she has adopted in lieu of her own difficult experiences. Despite the lush, bright instrumentation that underscores the singer’s gentle and other-worldly vocals, the undercurrent of existentialism and defeatism that permeates “Saturn’s” lyrics is enough to stop anyone who fathoms its meaning in their tracks.
What Changed?
Like “Normal Girl,” SZA leaves listeners of “Saturn” with a heartening prediction of better days to come. In this track, though, she now expresses a desire to better her life by realizing the very nihilistic and escapist notions that she swears off in the outro of “Normal Girl”. She sings to herself, almost as a personal reassurance, that “none of this matters,” a great departure from the philosophy she championed on CTRL. Unlike the sentiments she upheld six years ago, SZA now seems willing to “quit on the world” in order to find relief from her pain.
If SZA at one point overcame her instinct to flee this life, if she once harvested hope from her faith that things would be better one day, how are we to interpret this apparent evidence that she’s abandoned that hope, and she’s ready to run?
A Positive Spin
There is an optimistic interpretation of “Saturn’s” cynicism, one that recognizes SZA’s fantasy of escaping to Saturn as exactly that: a fantasy. The fantasy of life on Saturn itself is her way of temporarily escaping from dreary real life. A level of delusional escapism, of daydreaming of impossible or unlikely futures, might help the star to survive the seemingly neverending and spirit-crushing tribulations of meaningless loss and hurt.
SZA’s new track showcases the lengths the songwriter goes to in order to carry out the monumental mental task of maintaining her hope for the future in spite of her mounting disenchantment with her life. The hope she cultivated in “Normal Girl” is still present in “Saturn,” but this time, it’s dressed in the clothing of escapism. This time, she gives in to her fantasy of escape, and that fantasy affords her a sense of hope that allows her to persevere in her real life.
We might infer that SZA paradoxically holds two conflicting beliefs at once: happiness on Earth is achievable, and it’s impossible. Her belief in a brighter future fluctuates, takes on different, contrasting forms, but is ever-present, regardless of where she imagines that future taking place. In a world defined by senseless suffering, a world where deriving meaning seems less and less plausible by the day, SZA stands out as a harbinger of a better day in her ability to recognize the shortcomings of human existence, and then to synthesize bleak reality with inextinguishable optimism.
