Lizzo loves you like she loves herself,
Your favourite viral singer/flautist/ rapper/twerker is here to change music forever with her power-packed new album, Cuz I Love You >>
Even if you haven’t actively listened to one of her songs, you’ve probably heard one of the American artist’s collaborations with Big Freedia or Speedy Ortiz or Missy Elliott. Or you’ve seen one of her many widely shared Twitter videos in which she’s effervescently hitting back at her haters for thinking she can’t play the flute, or saging her apartment. Or you’ve seen her on latenight TV. Or you’ve heard her in a Weight Watchers advert. On a recent trip to India, I heard the opening twinkle of “Good as Hell” umpteen times a day, as it was the soundtrack to a Bumble ad campaign starring Priyanka Chopra. She’s flippin’ everywhere.
And why would you want to ignore her? There’s a reason she’s become so popular, and that’s because she’s uninhibited – no-hangups-about-it awesome. Her hits are catchy. She’s an incredible performer. She flows with charm. She’s unabashedly horny. There’s nothing not to love, and in many ways, her fame seems inevitable. Lizzo is here.
But with that presence comes a lot of expectations, especially as her brand crystalises into one of girl power, fun and body positivity. ‘I’m realising very quickly that every single one of these people wants that goodenergy Lizzo moment,’ she says. ‘And that’s just not human.’ She’s at the precipice of true fame with her new album, Cuz I
Love You, and her natural energy and extroversion (she is perhaps a textbook extrovert, saying,
‘Walking into the room I might’ve been tired, but as soon as I get to sit down with you, I get energy from the fact that you actually care and you’re a human being’) might mean fans expect her to be ‘on’ 24/7. But don’t worry: if anything,
Lizzo is a professional.
It’s easy to see how her persona developed. Firstly, Lizzo just wants this, to the point that even when she tried doing other things, they just turned into performance. ‘I was the fucking Statue of Liberty lady for Liberty Taxes’ she recalls, ‘but I looked so good that the owners were like, “You can’t just stand out here and spin. You have to be our ambassador.”’ Lizzo, born Melissa Jefferson, began rapping as a teenager in Texas before moving to Minneapolis, forming the rap group The Chalice and later releasing her first solo album, Lizzobangers. ‘I guess you could call it ambition, but you know, I definitely have to do music.’
Secondly, Lizzo knows that her particular brand of body/black/girl power positivity is something that is deeply needed. In an interview with The New York Times, she says that she ‘made a commitment to feel-good music’, largely because it was the music she needed to hear. Hits like “Good as Hell” and “Truth Hurts” position her as a fairy godmother of chutzpah, infusing listeners with the confidence to ditch their shitty boyfriends, love their bodies, and do what they want (and in that particular way that black
‘I was the fucking statue of liberty lady for liberty taxes’
women become avatars of confidence and feminism to non-black women). Look at her Twitter (@lizzo), and under every post, there’s a torrent of ‘yass queens’ and gifs of women flipping their hair and prayer-hands emojis. Her DMS, she says, are from people pouring their hearts out to her about their problems and the way her songs have helped them find their own confidence. She’s a saviour.
But if you listen to more than just the slick beats and the hooky choruses, Lizzo’s music tells a deeper story. She raps and sings about anxiety, about heartbreak, about her father’s death. In her song “1 Deep”, she talks about her rocky relationship with her mother: ‘I stopped talking to my mama for three months / No eye contact during lunch / Wasn’t nothing else around us but mountains and trees / And my guilty worthless screams, “What was wrong with me?”’ She is not always a bombastic, positive person, and even when she is on songs like “Good as Hell”, there’s a layer of sadness to it, the difference between telling your friend she’s beautiful and deserves better and telling it to yourself in the mirror.
Confidence is still her strong suit; Lizzo says she has a strong foundation of self-worth, regardless of outside validation. But on Cuz I Love You, she’s also trying to empower her own vulnerability. It’s born out of the latest cycle of her life: dealing with the beginnings of fame and shifting relationships. ‘I think this chapter is brave, braver and more vulnerable for me. And it’s exciting to explore vulnerability because
I’m known as being this, like, uber-confident, body-positive woman, almost like a bombastic, braggadocious bitch,’ she says. ‘And I’m still that, but I’m also exploring and showing a side of myself that people don’t really get to see.’
Hence crying is a theme on the record. She’s crying because she loves you, and later she cries like a girl. She’s as defiant as ever, rapping about self-love and her beautiful body, but the sad times are as obvious a part of her narrative as the good ones. On “Heaven Help Me”, she sings, ‘If love ain’t dead Imma kill it, ’cause it’s killin’ me.’ On the particularly heartbreaking “Jerome”, she sings about coming to terms with him not being right for her, even though there’s so much about him to love. ‘The fact is I’m leaving, so just let me have this,’ she wails. She’s saying a lot of goodbyes and letting herself feel everything that comes with that, with the knowledge that it’s all for the best. It’s what Audre Lorde meant by self-care all along: a radical act of self-preservation in a society that doesn’t support black women.
Lizzo doesn’t love to be negative, but some of the vulnerability of her new album was born out of a crisis. ‘I had a really bad mental episode,’ says Lizzo, one that hit as she was about to go on tour. She was about to go onstage, but minutes before, she found herself a mess in the toilets. So she took stock of her relationships – how they had changed now that so many of her friends had become her employees. She took a look at how her mother and sister moving with her to Los Angeles changed their family dynamic. She asked herself why she didn’t feel comfortable opening up to the people she loved. She went to therapy. ‘I think I started scooping out a lot of my defence mechanisms, and I started exposing myself and being more vulnerable and honest,’ she said.
‘I’m really learning about how to be vulnerable, but also not defenceless.’
Lizzo is fighting to stay real, and to not fake any of those feel-good Lizzo moments, which she knows is the only way for her life to stay sustainable. But she also jokes about the future. In five years, she envisions herself on Lizzo Island. It’s full of fresh coconuts, compostbased waste systems and aloe vera baths. ‘All of the men have very large penises, and all of the women are bad bitches,’ she says.
If anyone can build it, she can.
‘I’m known as being a bombastic, braggadocious bitch’