SZA Blasts White House for Using Her ‘SNL’ Song About Cuffing Season in Pro-ICE Post: ‘Evil and Boring’

SZA has become the latest musician to publicly challenge a political campaign for using her work without permission. The controversy began when a White House social media post promoting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) featured her song "Big Boy." The video showed ICE agents detaining immigrants and was captioned, "We heard it’s cuffing szn"—a direct nod to the track's lyrics—alongside the statement, "Bad news for criminal illegal aliens. Great news for America." The song, which first reached a broader audience through a December 2022 *Saturday Night Live* sketch, was thus deployed in a context starkly at odds with the artist's likely intent.

The artist, whose real name is Solána Imani Rowe, responded forcefully on X, calling the post "PEAK DARK ..inhumanity +shock and aw tactics. Evil n Boring." Her manager, Punch—the co-founder of the influential Top Dawg Entertainment label, which launched the careers of Kendrick Lamar and Schoolboy Q—also denounced the tactic as "nasty business," accusing the administration of trying to bait artists into spreading propaganda. This incident is part of a long-standing pattern in political messaging, where campaigns leverage the cultural resonance of popular music to frame contentious issues, often without seeking approval. As media analyst Dr. Lena Shaw notes, "These moves are strategic attempts to fuse pop culture with policy, generating viral engagement that typically overshadows the creator's own voice and message."

SZA, a Grammy winner known for her genre-blending R&B, solidified her superstar status with the 2022 album *SOS*, which spent ten non-consecutive weeks atop the Billboard 200 chart. Her protest echoes a similar objection raised just last week by pop singer Sabrina Carpenter. A video from the Trump campaign used Carpenter's hit "Espresso" as a soundtrack to a montage of ICE raids, prompting the artist to label it "evil and disgusting" and demand her music not be used to advance an "inhumane agenda."

In a telling escalation, after removing the initial post featuring Carpenter's song, the White House account then shared another edited clip. This version used audio from an *SNL* skit to manipulate Carpenter's dialogue, making it seem she called a cast member "illegal" instead of "hot." This follow-up action suggests a calculated strategy where political operatives repurpose not only the music itself but also the ensuing artist backlash to fuel further engagement and controversy. This approach stretches the limits of fair use doctrine and risks eroding trust in political communication, as artistic expression is routinely weaponized for partisan gain, divorcing it entirely from the creator's perspective.