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Lizzo is not the kind of pop star who usually faces criticism from the Left. Her upbeat songs and message of radical self-love (often to the detriment of propriety, but who cares about that anymore!) have made her a millennial icon. But even liberal darlings can’t keep up with all of the new demands.
After she released her song “Grrrls,” Lizzo got in trouble for lyrics containing an “ableist slur,” a phrase eagerly repeated by countless news outlets. The word in question: “spaz.”
“Hold my bag, b**** / Hold my bag / Do you see this s***? / I’m a spaz,” she sings in the intro.
Personally, I had no idea that “spaz” was considered a pejorative by some until the Lizzo controversy. It appears that this might partially be a cultural difference between the United States and United Kingdom, where the word is considered more offensive.
This isn’t the first time the word has caused controversy as part of a song lyric, though. “Kanye West was criticized for using the word in a 2015 song ‘FourFiveSeconds,’ a collaboration with Paul McCartney and Rihanna,” the New York Times notes. “And in 2014, Weird Al Yankovic said he was ‘deeply sorry’ for including a related word in his song ‘Word Crimes,’ saying he didn’t know it was considered offensive.”
Merriam-Webster does categorize the word as “slang, often offensive.” (And yes, that was its description before the Lizzo controversy, though you’d be forgiven for wondering if the dictionary had stealth-edited the definition to fit its own political agenda.)
The drama began on Saturday, when Hannah Diviney, a disability advocate who hails from Australia, tweeted at Lizzo, “My disability Cerebral Palsy is literally classified as Spastic Diplegia (where spasticity refers to unending painful tightness in my legs) your new song makes me pretty angry + sad. ‘Spaz’ doesn’t mean freaked out or crazy. It’s an ableist slur. It’s 2022. Do better.”
And Lizzo, doubtless terrified of bad press, changed the lyric. “Let me make one thing clear: I never want to promote derogatory language,” she said in a statement just two days later. “As a fat black woman in America, I’ve had many hurtful words used against me so I [understand] the power words can have (whether intentionally or in my case, unintentionally).”
The new lyrics, which you can already hear when you stream the song, are: “Hold my bag, b**** / Hold my bag / Do you see this s***? Hold me back.”
While I can’t say this scintillating lyricism has particularly suffered from the change, I do think the speed with which Lizzo effusively apologized and changed her song at the eruption of a little internet outrage is part of a worrisome trend, one that might arise at the use of much more benign words than “spaz.”
Just days after criticizing Lizzo and suggesting “crazy” or “freaked out” as alternatives to “spaz,” Diviney received her own education. In response to a commenter saying those words are ableist slurs, Diviney conceded, “Quite a few people have rightfully pointed this out and I’m so grateful to everyone for doing so! … I will be removing both of these words from my vocabulary.”
“Crazy” and “freaked out” are offensive? Notify everyone from Aerosmith to Beyonce. And those aren’t the only seemingly innocuous phrases off the list. A Harvard Business Review article cautions readers, “If you [say] ‘stupid,’ ‘insane,’ ‘crazy,’ ‘lame,’ or ‘dumb,’ you have (unknowingly or not) participated in spreading ableist language.”
This kind of language policing isn’t just dangerous. It’s downright insane.
