SZA’s ‘Chill Baby’ hits way too close to home
The voicemails are never long, but they’re long enough. They’re just enough time to hear my grandmother’s voice and remind me there was a time when she was only ten digits away. Though she passed away in January, grief didn’t wait for death to arrive. It became a constant part of life far earlier.
Over the last several months, I’ve watched as my grandmother’s deterioration played a role in every facet of life, like a horror movie that followed me regardless of whether my eyes were open or closed. It’s a constant battle of acknowledgment but never residing in grief. It’s one I’ve lost far more than I’ve won. The never-ending battle between heart and mind can be crippling. Grief, in its most effective manner, is a community effort in the way it embraces those close to us in ways we never imagined or wanted.
There’s always the quest for an escape. Those moments that serve as a reminder on the other side of grief is a new form of peace. And those that serve as a reminder that life indeed does go on no matter how different it will forever be. No one gets through life — a life worth living, at least — without heartbreak. If grief is the cost of love, then memories are the eternal currency we all covet.
For me, that escape came through music.
I hope we find a bit of peace right here, SZA croons on “Chill Baby.”
In grief, it’s all we pray for. We yearn for the confirmation that life won’t always feel this heavy and that we won’t be the puppet that grief gets to play with its own depressing strings. On the other side of grief is joy. Getting there is the hard part.
In the weeks leading to and after my grandmother’s death, SZA’s “Chill Baby,” has been part of the road map.
SZA’s rise to the present day supernova hasn’t been an overnight process. It is one, however, that’s played out constantly in the public eye. In 2016, she was featured on Rihanna’s magnum opus ANTI. A year later, her solo debut, Ctrl, solidified her as a force in music, inspired by the muses of love, lust, imposter syndrome and anxiety. Her 2022 project, SOS, catapulted her to a new level of fame, led by singles like “Kill Bill” and “Snooze.” Behind the lyrics stands a young woman clinging to whatever shred or semblance of innocence the world and the music industry haven’t taken from her.
Her insecurity is the most secure part of her music. SZA’s notoriety has skyrocketed in recent years, but she is still not totally comfortable living in the public eye. She sacrifices to work through her personal life publicly. And clocking in at 140 seconds, “Chill Baby” succeeds in not wasting a single moment.
“I been watching people die, literal and figurative/ I just want someone to stay around…”
The scent of death and displacement is never that far away. As of late, it’s been unavoidably overbearing. The nearly 40,000 orphans in Palestine as a result of the war with Israel are no different than the mother in Richmond, Virginia, who lost her daughter to a, perhaps targeted, vehicular homicide. Cries and tears are always within arm’s reach, whether through friends, family or myself. My kids are a reminder that heaven is but a mile away, and the only thing more beautiful than their coos or smiles are the pearly gates themselves.
“Chill Baby” has been a keepsake of that journey throughout the past month and change. “I want everybody free, know I gotta start with me,” SZA croons in the song. The hardest step to freedom is always the first because grief relies on its emotional shackles, barring progress from happening. One of grief’s greatest strengths is that it comes in many forms. While I watched SZA grace the stage at the Super Bowl it wasn’t lost on me that not too far away a terrorist attack took place in January that killed 14 people and injured 35 others when a driver intentionally sped down Bourbon Street. Debauchery included, Bourbon is a lifeline to the world for the community it invites. There’s an unspoken truth we tell ourselves about places like that: hardship doesn’t happen here because it’s everywhere else. So to see it happen in the heart of the Big Easy, where I’ve partied and walked hundreds of times, it’s natural to feel robbed of that innocence.
New Orleans’ resilience is what I hope to find in myself right now. My grandmother graduated from Xavier University, a historically Black college located in the heart of the city, in 1953. New Orleans was one of her favorite cities. She’s the reason my love affair with the city is permanent. It’s part of her, and I never want to lose any part of her. She’d often tell stories about her time in New Orleans. About racism, Jim Crow or police harassment back then. But all that be damned, she still had the time of her life and met lifelong friends that she stayed in contact with until they passed away. My grandma, Clementine, watched all of her college friends pass away over the years.
Justin Tinsley
“What don’t kill you make you strong/That’s a lie to keep you going/ Defying gravity to face my fears/ A reminder that’s on God, a reminder that I can’t stop s— / It’s all in motion, I’m so impatient…”
The right words stay with us forever, sort of like the vocabulary of angels. The conversation shortly after my uncle (my grandma’s son) died in 1999 from colon cancer stayed with me. At one point during the summer of 1998, we were all roommates in Uncle John’s D.C. apartment. She temporarily moved there to take him to his doctor’s appointments. I’d stay there and watch TV and feed his pet goldfish, Oscar. Months later, though, we were back in Virginia. We sat on her bed, and I asked how she was feeling. Not good, she admitted. The pain of losing a child was something she’d never come to terms with. That wouldn’t happen until they met again, whenever that would be.
I hugged her, and in return, she hugged me harder. For my grandmother, sort of like SZA would say decades later, trusting God was her only option. Peace would come in the morning. She just wasn’t sure which morning. That type of peace, she told me, wouldn’t come until she awoke in heaven beside her child. If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can still hear the next thing she said. I can still see the bed we sat on. I can still see The Young and the Restless on mute. I can still see her glossy eyes. I can feel mine even glossier.
“I still need you,” she said.
“I still need you, too,” I replied.
That conversation has remained with me over the last several months as I witnessed my grandmother move closer and closer to heaven. Our discussion that day ran parallel to “Chill Baby.” The transparency in the song felt akin to the love of the scrapbooks my grandmother would put together for every member of our family.
My grandmother’s funeral took place the day before my 39th birthday. The evening before, I sat in a funeral home with her by myself. We spoke, and in my head, I heard her responses. My entire life, I’d been scared of getting the call that my grandmother passed. Imagining living in a world without her was a pain I never wanted to experience, but knew was inevitable. Over the years, I watched friends and even my wife lose grandmothers knowing that at some point I, too, would experience that same pain.
There was a point in life when I wanted to go before her just to save myself — but I realized just how ridiculously selfish that would’ve been. She had already lost so much, including both of her siblings and a child. Speaking to her in that Petersburg, Virginia, funeral home was the closure I needed more than I realized. I told her days earlier that it was ok to move on. No matter how much I cried or my family cried, the agony her advanced dementia was forcing upon her wasn’t the way she deserved to live. She defined a life of independence and pride. She deserved to live an eternal afterlife of that, too.
Justin Tinsley
A week after turning 39 and her funeral, I found myself in New Orleans. Her city. As the world continues to spiral into new forms of chaos, “Chill Baby” is a life raft. One that may not prevent me from sinking some days, but it does provide clarity for the sinking. Life never bends to our wishes. If it was, some of my friends wouldn’t already have second dates on their tombstones. Maybe my mom wouldn’t have Alzheimer’s. Perhaps she wouldn’t have had to watch her mom succumb to dementia in her final months, being transported between rehab and memory care facilities and hospitals.
I’ve been in and out of town, tryna get out of survival mode/I’m tired of building walls, SZA admits.
The hardest part of my grandmother’s final months was just how quickly it seemed to happen. One of our last conversations came shortly after last November’s presidential election. What was dementia at the time? I didn’t realize. I chalked it up to her being 93, and these things happen at 93 — if you’re lucky enough to see 93. She was shocked that America decided to re-elect Donald Trump, but she wasn’t surprised. Two weeks later, she fell twice in the house. She was never the same person again. The conversations we’d been having about life the last quarter century were no more.
Unable to speak, eat or drink in her final days, this wasn’t her. SZA said everyone deserved to be free. My grandmother was one of those people. She deserved to have a world where her faculties would return and never abandon her again. She deserved to see those who preceded her into the afterlife — including my Uncle John. My grandmother died four days before the aviation tragedy at Washington’s National Airport. If I know my grandmother like I do, the lifelong teacher and daycare provider in her was there at the gates of heaven helping greet the children who lost their lives.
Fear of a life without her had to be let go. “Chill Baby” was a course correct in terms of understanding that on the other side of my fears was the eternity my grandmother deserved. She never watched The Wire but held one quote close to her. “Ain’t no shame in holding on to grief,” the character Bubbles said, “as long as you make room for other things too.” It was an encapsulation of how she overcame grief throughout her life and found purpose in spite of it. With “Chill Baby,” SZA reaffirmed the same commandment.
Much like my grandmother when she lost her son all those years ago, there’s still so much to live for. My wife and kids are at the pinnacle of that emotional mountain. In many ways, I haven’t been the husband or father they deserve in recent times because I’ve tried to juggle multiple households, finances and, most importantly, emotions at once. Being better than what I’ve been isn’t a desire. It’s critical if finding the peace I feel I deserve is the ultimate goal. SZA, in her own way, changed my life. “Chill Baby” is a bookmark for how light was found on the other side of trauma. Seeing her step on the stage in the Superdome at the Super Bowl was cathartic. I smiled because SZA — as eclectic a superstar as there has been since someone like Andre 3000 — is entering the prime of her career. I smiled because her music is the crutch my existence needed more than I could’ve ever imagined when I was introduced to her over a decade ago. And I smiled because the final lyrics from “Chill Baby” are my current prophecy.
“In the end, we all we got/ In the end, I hope love finds us…”
Love always lived in my grandmother. Because of her, it found me, and I found love in her. Death didn’t rob me of that love; it only intensified it. And now, it showed me exactly where my love has to be focused.