“I became a good singer
touring as a rapper.
It was not a secret ace
card in the pack, it was
a tool that I was finely
tuning and shaping.”
Opposite: silk-taffeta corset
dress with feather appliqué,
to order, 16 Arlington.
This page: silk-taffeta
dress with draped bodice,
to order, 16 Arlington.
White-gold and diamond
earrings, Messika,
at SelfridgesI
t is 30C on Saturday at Glastonbury Festival 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 Houston-raised
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 laughs, 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- in a swish west London hotel, wearing a Moschino skater
top, black bike shorts and white Dr Martens, 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 RIAA certified Gold,
and the single “Truth Hurts” had achieved record status by
topping the Billboard Hot 100 for six 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” >23712-19-WELL-Lizzo.indd 237 14/10/2019 12:24