Lizzo, the 31-year-old songstress and rapper, has a message for her critics.
“If you really don’t like my ass,” she says, “you can kiss it.”
Lizzo turned more than a few heads earlier this week when she showed up to a Minnesota Timberwolves game in a flowy black dress with a large cut out in the back — enough to reveal her entire backside and black thong.
She responded to the buzz about what many critics called an inappropriate outfit on her Instagram, saying in a video, “I just want to spread that love, and also spread these cheeks.”
No matter what critics say, she maintains, “Criticism has no effect on me.”
This has become something of a mantra for Lizzo, “the fun-loving, body-positive pop princess we’ve been waiting for,” according to Essence. This spring, the magazine gushed that Lizzo “embodies the unapologetic ethos of her generation.” For better or for worse, it’s right.
This week, Time magazine named Lizzo its entertainer of the year. Lizzo has been touring as a solo artist for six years, and her fiery track “Truth Hurts,” which this year broke the Billboard record for lingering atop the Hot 100 longer than any song by a solo female rapper, actually came out two years ago.
Just last month, she was nominated for eight Grammys, more than any other artist. Why was 2019 the year she finally had her moment?
“I’ve been doing positive music for a long-ass time,” she told Time. “Then the culture changed. There were a lot of things that weren’t popular but existed, like body positivity, which at first was a form of protest for fat bodies and black women and has now become a trendy, commercialized thing. Now I’ve seen it reach the mainstream. Suddenly I’m mainstream!”
The media’s reaction to Lizzo’s brand of body positivity and unapologetic self-love has been almost universally effusive. Parade proclaimed, “Lizzo is singing the self-care message we all need to hear in 2019.” In response to the bare-bottom basketball game controversy, Glamour gushed, “Lizzo twerking in a thong at the Lakers game Is a damn delight.” Stylist added, “Lizzo’s response to those criticising her ‘inappropriate’ outfit is a masterclass in self-love.”
To every judgment that critics lodge at her, Lizzo proclaims that she’s just expressing self-love. In a way, it’s an act of altruism — she’s encouraging others to follow her lead.
“Who I am and the essence of me and the things that I choose to do as a grown-ass woman can inspire you to do the same,” she says in her Instagram video defending the Great Derriere Scandal of 2019. “You don’t have to be like me. You need to be like you. And never ever let somebody stop you or shame you from being yourself.”
But despite the way the media eats this narrative up, not everyone is buying it. “There’s a certain lack of humility on her,” one Instagram user commented, and “it ain’t fat shaming” to say “she’s too much.” Another comment, with more than 25,000 likes, said, “That’s what’s wrong with people nowadays. They think anything they do is acceptable.”
So, perhaps the empress has no clothes. And if you scroll through Lizzo’s Instagram account, she literally doesn’t. While the Ariana Grandes and the Katy Perrys of the music world present a skinny, white, sexed-up form of stardom, Lizzo pushes back against the look of the conventional entertainer. Yet, instead of battling the trope of the racy pop star, she embraces it in her own way.
And while Ariana Grande is singing, God is a woman, Lizzo hints that she’s right — and that that woman might just be her.
When the Time writer likens a Lizzo concert to “the church of self-love,” it’s an image that Lizzo has crafted herself. In the music video for Scuse Me, she’s sitting in a church, singing the song of herself: “I don’t need a crown to know that I’m a queen.”
“Worship me/On your knees,” she sings in Worship. “Patiently, quietly, faithfully, worship me.”
While much of Lizzo’s popularity comes from her over-the-top demeanor, many of her fans appreciate her simple message of encouragement. The recently released music video for “Good as Hell” embodies everything that’s great about feel-good confidence boosters, as Lizzo leads a pack of college students to perform in the marching band, and everyone has a good time. Her song “Juice” offers another dose of communal empowerment — “If I’m shinin’, everybody gonna shine” — with some classic self-congratulation thrown in: “Yeah, I’m goals.”
Lizzo’s millions of fans are hooked by her trademark style, which is all about self-love. It’s hard to blame them. (I have more than one Lizzo song saved in my library.) You can see her charisma in her Tiny Desk Concert at NPR when she gets the audience to laugh at her irreverence. “N—–s ain’t shit sometimes,” she intones between songs. “Bitches ain’t shit sometimes too. And all the nonconforming genders in between, you can all be ain’t shit too.” As she sings in “Boys,” she doesn’t discriminate.
But despite Lizzo’s eternal sunshine, she admits that she doesn’t always feel the unapologetic confidence she presents.
“From March to … now!” she told Time, “I was experiencing a little bit of unhappiness. I was not happy with the way I felt to my body. I didn’t feel sexy, and I didn’t know when it was going to end. There were times when I would go onstage and be like, ‘Y’all, I’m not going to lie. I’m not feeling myself.’ Sometimes I’d break down and cry. Sometimes the audience would just cheer to make me feel better. I was getting sick a lot. I was like, What the f— is going on? I need to fall back in love with my body.”
This is a rare moment of transparency for Lizzo’s self-love philosophy. If we all must be “in love with” our bodies to be happy, most of us will be stuck reading self-help books for some time.
But then, even loving your own body may mean something different from what Lizzo thinks. A proper, non-materialistic understanding of the physical self might not confuse nakedness for confidence, or sex appeal for value. That goes for all the skinny, white pop stars too.
You don’t have to twerk — or show your rear end at a basketball game — to be a strong, inspiring woman. If you admit that, you’ll get pushback from Lizzo’s fans, and even from Lizzo herself, who has been known to spar with critics on Twitter. But there’s a critical distinction between self-respect and obliviousness to others. We desperately need to rediscover that distinction, but today’s pop stars and most of the media will be of little help.
