I've been listening to LANA SOS Deluxe whatever by SZA. 🎵
No complaints, but I am trying to parse out why these 15 new tracks are considered a deluxe release of an old album instead of just a new album of their own. Is it just part of the streaming game, to get people to listen to the old album along with the new stuff? (If so, it worked for me.) Is it because they didn’t feel like it had the singles to match SOS? (But the new tracks are all uniformly solid, just like SOS, there just aren’t as many features, maybe, and no gimmicky crossover pop moves like that crass countrypoppunk track on SOS which I generally skip.)
And supposedly there’s an expanded deluxe with 8 more tracks beyond this coming on Monday supposedly? 46 tracks? (Edit - as of 2025-01-26 that hasn’t happened.) And its not the 20th anniversary or anything, she’s not dead yet, this is how it is done now, and it seems to be working. It’s similar to what Taylor did with Tortured Poets and Midnights, all the versions of Brat, releasing double-sized deluxe versions sometimes almost simultaneously with the first release. I guess it is a way to have it all - the tighter brevity of a single album along with the sprawl of a double (not that the original SOS or Tortured Poets Society were tight or brief by any means), plus peoples' listening tendency to just keep streaming through all the tracks. It works, I guess. And I shouldn’t complain. I wish more artists would release more of their music, actually. I’d be absolutely thrilled if Fousheé released a deluxe edition of Pointy Heights with 10 more tracks, for example.
I love the music and production work, her voice and delivery are phenomenal, the lyrics are so clever, but, if I’m honest, all the explicit sex talk and yucky relationship drama in this and in lot of pop music still just makes me feel gross sometimes. Even after rejecting the church pressure and God guilt about this type of thing that I grew up with, perhaps after all I’m still maybe just a prude…It is useful when I get to this place to remind myself that I don’t know how much of that content is fantasy and hyperbole and fictional repetition/variation for dramatic and storytelling effect, versus actual confessional/autobiography, and that is not really my business. Thinking of my kids listening to this, though, and I’m just not sure about it…Will they take it as just how things are or should be with sex and relationships? Something to aspire to? Cautionary tales? I don’t know. And I don’t know how to guide them in these things in a healthy way myself, without the rigid “safety” of the church dictates that I used to believe in to point to…