SZA, Megan Thee Stallion & Normani Share How They Cope With Being Black Women in the Music Industry for ‘Rolling Stone’

The magazine’s “First Time” video series features SZA, Megan Thee Stallion and Normani thinking back to a moment where their grandmothers were proudest of the success they’d accumulated. The detailed clip also features each artist reflecting on how they deal with rough experiences as black women in the music industry.

Megan starts out by sharing, “The first time I feel like I ever made it was when my grandma saw me on TV.” She went on to say “She was telling all her friends, and then she called me. Now I got to come to the house. Now everybody’s at the house like, ‘We saw you on TV.’”

Normani discusses her own experience with stardom by mentioning that a highlight of her career was performing for her grandmother at a show in her hometown Houston. The Top Dawg Entertainment signee later detailed that her grandmother didn’t know she was a professional singer.

When speaking a bit more on the topic, SZA shared:

“I still don’t feel like I made it. I told my grandma I was in school for so long until she saw me on TV, and then I was like, ‘I don’t know’ … This is the precipice of our careers, of our life stories, of our journeys, so we’re making it currently, and every day it’s, like, growing exponentially. We’re just curating our lives.”

During another noteworthy moment of the video, SZA also touches on pushing back against the adversities they face as black women in the industry. “I feel like the first time is when we step into the door period as a diaspora as a gender. It’s kind of coming in and not being pigeonholed into one space,” she explains.

Adding to SZA’s previous thoughts on facing trials in the industry, Normani notes: “They try to push [a] perception on you. To put that cap on me [means to] restrict me from the fullest of my capacity. Not being able to explore that just doesn’t seem fair.”

Megan then adds “I feel like I realized that I wasn’t just doing music for one group of people. Everybody is a hottie, everybody is a fan of Normani, everybody is a fan of SZA. It’s overcoming being put in a box.”

Take a look at the entire video below.