SZA Says She Did “So Much Begging” to Get a Posthumous Ol’ Dirty Bastard Feature on ‘SOS’
“I expected them to tell me no,” SZA admitted in a recent interview.
Sure, the most surprising thing about SZA’s recent appearance on the wing-eating YouTube series, Hot Ones, was undeniably her being dressed up as a bug. But the artist made some notable revelations during the interview — including how she got a posthumous Ol’ Dirty Bastard feature on “Forgiveless,” a track off of SOS.
“What are the mechanics of securing a posthumous verse from an artist like Ol’ Dirty Bastard?” host Sean Evans asked SZA.
“So much begging. I could say — I expected them to tell me no, actually,” she said. “So all I could do was beg, profess my love and chill. And I didn’t expect it all, like, they blessed me so crazy.”
The feature is actually the sum of a couple of parts: a snippet from “The Stomp,” a track from ODB’s 1995 solo album Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version, and a freestyle originally taken from footage Darkchild — who produced “Forgiveless” — had of the late rapper when he stopped by the producer’s studio in 1998.
“ODB is just freestyling, doing this in the studio, just vibing, and I’m just like, ‘Wow, this sounds so crazy,’” SZA said. “For a second I didn’t know. I didn’t know if we were cooked — and it was OK if we were — and I praise God that we’re not, and I thank ODB from beyond for his graciousness.”
Darkchild previously talked about how ODB ended up on the track, telling Rolling Stone last year: “I was actually just digitizing a bunch of my footage from my documentary that I’m working on, and I came across this VHS tape from 1998 that had ODB. He was in my studio and I didn’t have a session with him! He just was passing through and he just started rapping about a hundred bars. And as I was listening to it, I was like, ‘I wonder if I could take his vocal off of this VHS tape and put it on top of this idea for SZA?'”
“I went back and played it for SZA and she was like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. Where did you get this from?’ And the rest was history,” he continued. “It’s funny, ‘cause after she finished it, she actually really stopped listening to it and didn’t want to play it for her label ‘cause she didn’t think it was gonna get cleared. And I told her, ‘I promise you, we will be able to get this cleared.’ And she was just like, ‘Why are you so certain?’ I was like, ‘Because it was too incredible the way that it happened for it not to go to the end. There’s nothing like a good musical story.'”
Elsewhere during her Hot Ones appearance, SZA briefly talked about her upcoming new album, Lana, and more.