Sza’s manager Terrence “Punch” Henderson, has been managing the R&B singer for years and recently he did an exclusive interview with The Hollywood Reporter and revealed why SZA didn’t perform during the VMAs.
Last month when the nominations were announced many fans were shocked to see that SZA didn’t make the list being that she has had such a successful year. Now her manager is giving some insight into what went down when they were having conversations with MTV about a possible performance. “Obviously, she had one of the best years, if not the best year, of any artist at this point. I don’t see why she wouldn’t be nominated for artist of the year. It just really didn’t make any sense to me. It’s disrespectful,” SZA’s manager, Terrence “Punch” Henderson, tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview.
Her manager continued to explain how when they were on a phone call he questioned them about the snub but he never received a clear answer. “they couldn’t give a clear answer as to why she wasn’t [nominated]. It was just, ‘Well, she’s nominated for all these other [awards].’” He added, “And they ended up saying, ‘OK, well we could do another call’ because there were people on [the call] about logistics for the show who didn’t have anything to do with [the nominations]. When we tried to set up the second call, they didn’t want to discuss artist of the year, which to me was really a slap in the face.”
He continued, “Why wouldn’t she be nominated for artist of the year? Even with the other artists that were nominated for artist of the year, some of them were even off-cycle. They didn’t have an album out. I mean, no disrespect to them or anybody else; everybody’s great and all of that, but still, you can’t discredit what SOS has done and is currently doing,” he said.
SZA did walk away with an award for Best R&B but her team feels like that wasn’t enough. “I figured, why go perform and do this if she’s not going to be respected to the highest level? So, it was my call to actually pull out of the performance,” he explains.
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SZA didn’t show up to the award show but her manager, Punch notes that the singer is “a very sweet person and she’s not for all of the nonsense and the politics and the back and forth and all of that. So, our feelings might be a little different.”
“But ultimately,” he adds, “I felt it was disrespectful and I was very stern on that and influencing that. If there’s any issues or backlash and all of that, I’m taking all of that.”