ABSOLUTE POSITIVITY
Ahead of her appearances at FOMO Festival shows around Australia this month, singer Lizzo reveals how her über-confident stage presence was years in the making. By Zing Tsjeng.
Ahead of her appearances around Australia this month, singer Lizzo reveals how her überconfident stage presence was years in the making.
on Saturday at Glastonbury Festival in Somerset, England, and Lizzo is leading a sea of 30,000 people in a self-help affirmation. “I want you to know that if you can love me, you can love your goddamn self,” Lizzo says. “I want you to go home tonight and look in the mirror and say: ‘I love you, you are beautiful and you can do anything.” The crowd roars it back at her: “I love you! You are beautiful! You can do anything!”
It’s the kind of call-and-response that seems cheesy on paper – straight out of the modern pop-star handbook about how to endear yourself to audiences – but coming from Lizzo, it’s an almost spiritual experience. It is helped, of course, by the fact that she made her stage entrance posing the question: “Y’all ready to go to church?” If you could fuel a city on star power alone, the 31-year-old Houstonraised singer and classically trained flautist would light up New York, London and Berlin.
Technically, this wasn’t Lizzo’s Glastonbury debut. If you were at the festival back in 2014, you may have spotted the singer performing in what she later described on Instagram as a “large tent with 10 people in it”.
“I thought I was big shit!” she says with a laugh, when I remind her of her first appearance at Britain’s biggest music festival. “Beyoncé did it, I think in 2011 or something, and I was just like: ‘Damn.’”
By the time I meet Lizzo (real name Melissa Jefferson), who’s wearing a Moschino skater top, black bike shorts and white DrMartens, she’s been on tour for what feels “like a thousand years”; ever since Juice, the retro-funk lead single from her album Cuz I Love You, cracked the American charts in January. At the time of writing, the album had just been certified gold, and the single Truth Hurts had achieved record status by topping the Billboard Hot 100 for seven consecutive weeks, the longest ever for an unaccompanied female rap artist – testament to, as she puts it, “what hard work gives you”.
And there has been a lot of hard work. This year, she was on The Ellen DeGeneres Show pulling off an audacious flute solo (AKA her signature “flute and shoot”); twerking with Janelle Monáe on stage at Coachella; staging a Sister Act 2 tribute at the MTV Movie & TV Awards; partying on top of a gigantic wedding cake for the Bet Awards a few weeks later; singing in front of a gigantic blow-up bum at the MTV Video Music Awards; and performing at what seemed liked every music festival in the world. It felt as if you couldn’t move this year without hitting a newly converted Lizzo fan, celebrities included. Elton John FaceTimed her to tell her the album was a “complete triumph”; Missy Elliott couldn’t resist jumping on a Lizzo track (the resplendently dirty Tempo); and, in the biggest co-sign of all, Rihanna proclaimed herself a fan. “Gosh, I love Lizzo,” she declared on the Savage x Fenty red carpet at New York Fashion Week in September. “Lizzo is so badass.”
It’s all too easy to assume that this happened in an instant. “My crowds grew so gradually,” Lizzo says, smoothing her immaculately gelled baby hairs. “It wasn’t like an overnight success type of thing, it didn’t jump from 100 to 30,000 - it went from 100 to 1,000 to 4,000 to 10,000 to 20,000.”
What many don’t realise about her rise is the decade or so of grinding behind it. Now she lives in LA, but she was born in Detroit to a religious family and raised in Texas. She learned classical flute as a child, but started rapping in school and sang in rock bands. Her dreams back then looked very different: “Let me get in a band and see where it takes us,” she remembers hoping. “Sell merch, hit the road. Like, that was my dream – I wanted to be like Incubus, you know what I mean?”
When her band broke up, she moved to Minneapolis and released her first solo hip-hop album, 2013’s Lizzobangers, praised for its technical ability and supercharged indie rap. “I wanted to be a rapper for sure,” she says. “I was a bad singer.” That seems difficult to believe, I point out. Lizzo’s voice, especially when showcased on slower R&B tracks such as Jerome, has enough soul to make Isaac Hayes blush, and range to match.
“I became a good singer touring as a rapper,” she explains. “All of the things that I would rap would turn into melodies and they would get real soulful and real punchy.” Honing that voice took time, practice and plenty of Beyoncé vocal runs. “It was not a secret ace card in the pack, it was a tool that I was finely tuning and shaping.”
All Lizzo needed was a message to deliver to the people, and that came easily. The Lizzo gospel is best described as a blend of anthemic self-belief (“I just took a DNA test, turns out I’m 100 per cent that bitch’’) and female empowerment, with a dash of “dump him” wit sprinkled in for good measure. She showcases it effortlessly on songs such as Like a Girl (“Woke up feelin’ like I just might run for president/Even if there ain’t no precedent”) and Good As Hell (“If he don’t love you anymore/Just walk your fine ass out the door”). But this is hard-won confidence, nurtured from her childhood.
“I have a lot of memories of me,” she says, taking a deep breath, “feeling kind of different and bullied or teased. Kids can be really mean.” After gym class, her middle-school classmates would hide her clothes in the locker room. “I was like, why is it just my clothes?” Plus, all the other girls had already started shaving their legs and Lizzo hadn’t. “I was just this hairy-legged, stinky middle schooler, so they probably got a real good laugh out of that.” The most popular boy was also on a mission to make her daily bus ride miserable. “Every morning he’d be like: ‘What’s up, fat ass?’ Like, every morning for school. I was like: ‘Damn, you don’t got a better word?”’
As a child, she idolised Roald Dahl’s Matilda, the misfit who uses special powers to stand up to her bullies. Lizzo, too, found a way to deal with her tormentors: “I realised that they could have really hurt me if I allowed them to,” she says. “But I took it and it just meant nothing to me at a certain point. I was sad about it, and then I just turned those words into something else.” In high school, she even ended up being friends with the boy from the bus.
She’s far more caustic about the role of the mainstream media on her self-esteem. “I would watch things on television and I would look at magazines and I would not see myself,” she says. “When you don’t see yourself, you start to think something’s wrong with you. Then you want to look like those things and when
The Lizzo gospel is best described as a blend of anthemic self-belief and female empowerment, with a dash of wit sprinkled in for good measure
you realise it’s a physical impossibility, you start to think: ‘What the fuck is wrong with me?’ I think that took a greater toll on me, psychologically, growing up than what anyone could have said to me.”
In June last year, Lizzo opened up about her mental health, posting on Instagram: ‘’I’m depressed and there’s no-one I can talk to because there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Life hurts.” She added in the caption: “But this too shall pass.’’
“I do have anxiety and it’s an interesting part of my experience,” she says with uncharacteristic understatement. Her anxiety comes out in intimidating social situations or when she has to meet a lot of people. “My heart is racing and my brain is firing off and I’m just making all these jokes and then I’m, like, actually spiralling. The louder and funnier I am, you should probably ask me if I’m okay,” she says, laughing.
“When I get really, really anxious before a show, I just go harder and harder and harder when I’m performing and I just go crazy,” she says, talking rapidly now. “I don’t know why, but my anxiety sometimes fuels who I am as a performer and who I am as an artist – and I know that is not the case for everyone. I don’t know if my body just, like, out of a desperate need to find a place for my anxiety or find a use for it, takes it and puts it there.”
She ended up getting it under control with a mix of acupuncture, meditation and breathing exercises. “I think if I was 21 right now, I would not be able to maintain this lifestyle without having major anxiety and panic attacks. But thank god, my journey is all about self-care and finding that love for yourself and nurturing yourself. Because that’s what artists need more than anything.”
It was at 21 that things finally came to a head for Lizzo. Her father had passed away just before her birthday; her remaining family had moved to another city. She spent some nights sleeping in her car, or on friends’ floors. “I think that when you have nothing and you’re stripped down to nothing, you’re kind of stuck with yourself,” she says. “I think that was when I was kind of facing myself for the first time without anything to distract me.”
Lizzo’s social conscience and honesty have seen her crowned this generation’s queen of body-positive pop. You sense the label grates a little on her. After all, there should technically be nothing revolutionary about a woman over a size 14 singing about loving herself. And it’s the same reason so many women see themselves in Lizzo. In today’s image-obsessed age, she is a megawatt beacon of self-assurance – so utterly herself that it is impossible for it not to rub off on you. Those crowds grew from 100 to 30,000 for good reason.
“Anybody that uses body positivity to sell something is using it for their personal gain. That’s just it,” Lizzo says. “We weren’t selling anything in the beginning. We were just selling ourselves and selling ourselves on the idea – selling ourselves on ourselves, you know?” She may be smiling, but it’s clear that her final message is a serious one. “I’m not trying to sell you me,” she says. “I’m trying to sell you you.” Lizzo will perform at FOMO Festival and at her sold-out shows in Melbourne and Sydney this month. Her album Cuz I Love You is available now.
“When
I get really anxious before a show, I just go harder when I’m performing and I just go crazy”