Drowning yourself is ruthless rhyme. Dance deliberately with darkness, but don’t dawdle or you’ll thrash about. You’ll gasp, and suck air into your mouth and out of the room: those fitful puffs, involuntary sure, but they shoot from you like a flare gun bursting the goddamn bubble. Someone’s going to come running, someone’s going to pull you out of the water.

SZA gets that. I feel like she’s the kind of woman I could drown with right there on the couch, puddles of emotion spilling from our heads in silence. And when she decided to de-submerge sopping wet in thought, she’d lay down a track like ‘Babylon’. ‘Babylon’ bathes in breaks in logic, never trying to gather disparate thoughts for the sake of safety; and instead lets the dichotomies dangle, resolution be fucked.

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It sees drowning in yourself as stillness in the sound, as not shouting at the world to be saved so that all the thoughts feel safe enough to swim towards you. That isn’t clarity—as SZA says, “Clarity is a state of mind”, like freedom’ “it ain’t real”. It’s knowing how to sink and let enemy thoughts settle in your ears, believing you’re still warrior princess of your own universe and you can smack them away as you wish. It’s knowing the players in your mind, whereas friends would mark them all as enemies.

I get that this is how SZA processes the world. Her survival mode is solo mode and there’s a lot of strength in that. Still, what takes this track next level is SZA’s willingness to dop what few of us would and view all that as flaw, seeing shutting others out—“ I can’t recall the last time I took advice from anyone”—as leaving everything in her life on shaky grounds., stubbornness maybe ‘the death of her’.

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