Link to our Facebook
Link to our Instagram
Link to our TikTok

Live Review: LISTEN: SZA ft. Chance The Rapper 'Childs Play'

31 March 2014 | 9:41 pm | Gavin Butler

At less than 25 years of age, self-proclaimed ‘glitter' hip hop artist SZA (Solana Rowe to her mother) has already earned a pretty slick track record.

At less than 25 years of age, self-proclaimed ‘glitter' hip hop artist SZA (Solana Rowe to her mother) has already earned a pretty slick collaborative track record.

In the past few years alone she’s ridden shotgun with the likes of KENDRICK LAMAR, SCHOOLBOY Q and AB-SOUL (three quarters of the ‘Black Hippy’ rap collective)—and, with her own latest single ‘Childs Play’, gets to play ball with CHANCE THE RAPPER and Floridian electronic artist XXYYXX.

With the latter taking over the track’s production duties, you'd be forgiven for initially identifying ‘Childs Play’ as XXYYXX’s own single ‘About You’; instrumentally, this is less a sampling job than it is a cut-and-paste of that song’s spacy trap loop. The original featured the warbled, over-produced vocals of a BEYONCÉ sample—and as SZA flexes her muscles and her pipes over what is essentially the same backing track, the inevitable comparison between the two songstresses seems less and less circumstantial.

That is to say, SZA can run with the best of them. Her competence as an R&B artist is evidenced not only in the sound of her very choice voice—sounding something like a female answer to THE WEEKND—but also the unpredictable originality of her lyrical content: headless Barbie dolls and Nintendo controllers as romantic objects; Street Fighter and Shakespeare referenced almost within one fragile breath. It’s a fitting kind of wordplay for a song at once childish and dark, at turns innocent and sinister.

Plug into the latest music with our FREE weekly newsletter

Almost exactly halfway through the track CHANCE THE RAPPER tags in at full tilt with a stream-of-consciousness verse that could easily have come from the mouth of KENDRICK or ANDRÉ 3000 (see ‘Sing About Me, I’m Dying Of Thirst’ or ‘A Life In the Day of Benjamin André’). He sharpens into a FRANK OCEAN-esque croon—thus channeling a double-threat that unsurprisingly ends up sounding more than a little like OCEAN’s collaboration with 3000 on his own track ‘Pink Matter’.

‘Childs Play’ is a song of similarly downplayed production and wistful songwriting, and CHANCE’s killer rap slips into a final duet with SZA, repeating the nostalgic and self-referential lyrics of “memories [that] keep playing back… just wondering how we used to was, how we used to was”.

‘Childs Play’ is the second single off SZA’s forthcoming debut album ‘Z’, due out April 8th.

Words by Gavin Butler

SEE ALSO: