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ASKREY
.48 | Rolling Stone | February 2020
IZZO KNOWS THAT security guard was check-
ing her out. It’s a crisp November evening in
downtown Los Angeles, and she just breezed
through a Sam Ash music store to see if they had
a flute-studies book by Danish composer-flutist
Karl Joachim Andersen; she wants to get back
to practicing the instrument she started playing
in fifth grade. The door has bare-
ly closed behind her when Lizzo
makes note of the guard’s not-so-
subtle glance.
“He wanted to make sure he saw
that thang twice!” she says, strut-
ting down Sunset Boulevard in
faux-snakeskin boots and a short,
pinkish coral dress, and running
her rhinestone-studded talons
through her slick, wavy black hair.
How could he not do a double
take when he saw Lizzo? After a
dec ade of hustling, 2019 was her
year. Five days earlier, she was run-
ning to catch a flight in Copenha-
gen, having just wrapped the Euro-
pean leg of a tour. After making it
on board, she FaceTimed her man-
ager, who was holding his phone
up to a TV blasting the Grammy
nominations broadcast. She found
out she had earned the most nom-
inations of any artist: eight total, including one
in each of the Big Four categories. She was elat-
ed. “Then I had to sit on a plane for 10 hours,”
she says.
It’s been that kind of year — surreal, gratify-
ing, kind of exhausting. Last night, Lizzo played
the American Music Awards, donning a fluffy
purple gown and belting the slow, aching ballad
“Jerome” to a sea of swaying phone lights. “I was
worried the whole time that I would forget the
words,” Lizzo says. Singing “Jerome” is one of the
few points in her live show when she’s not twerk-
ing, fluting, or running end-to-end onstage. Her
thoughts tend to drift. “I be sitting on the stool
and my mind’ll be like, ‘So, what you gon’ eat
after this?’ ” In possibly Toronto — the cities have
blurred together — she had an anxiety attack mid-
song, but just kept singing. “I just start processing
and thinking about other shit, and my mouth is
just moving and the words are coming out.”
She has become, at 31, a new kind of superstar:
a plus-size black singer and rapper dominating
the largely white and skinny pop space, all while
being relentlessly uplifting and openly sexual on
her own terms. Her story is just as remarkable
and radical as her stardom: years of self-doubt
and struggle, followed by an unorthodox but swift
ascent jump-started by “Truth Hurts,” a two-year-
old song that wasn’t even on her new album.
Last April, she released Cuz I Love You, her
major-label debut. She started writing the album
a year earlier, around the time her first real ro-
mance was ending; the mysterious Gemini she’d
been seeing would inspire practically every song.
Faced with an increasingly demanding schedule
and feeling disconnected from friends and loved
ones, she had an emotional breakdown while on
tour in the spring of 2018, a move that lead her
to start therapy. “That was really scary,” she told
me just prior to the album’s release. “But being
vulnerable with someone I didn’t
know, then learning how to be vul-
nerable with people that I do know,
gave me the courage to be vulnera-
ble as a vocalist.”
Cuz I Love You has its moments of
heartbreak and self-reflection, but
ultimately, it’s a celebration: Lizzo
wants you — yes, you! — to love
yourself the way Lizzo has learned
to love Lizzo. In recent years, pop
turned moody, in part to reflect the
consistently grim state of the world.
Cuz I Love You sliced right through
all that. She made the type of songs
she wanted to hear at the end of a
rough day, songs that want you to
feel beautiful, successful, booked
and busy, because Lizzo feels all
those things.
Now, all eyes are on Lizzo, includ-
ing some of her heroes’. Rihanna
gave Lizzo’s flute solo during a BET
Awards performance a standing ovation. Beyoncé
bopped along side-stage during her Made in
America Festival set. In December, Lizzo made
her Saturday Night Live debut, as musical guest for
the episode hosted by Eddie Murphy. During his
monologue, he noted his kids are huge Lizzo fans.
Along with greater opportunity, however, has
come greater scrutiny. Lizzo came under fire for
a testy Twitter response to a middling Pitchfork
review she received; she said, “People who re-
view albums and don’t make music themselves
should be unemployed.” Months later, more ill-
advised tweets led to a libel lawsuit after she
falsely accused a Postmates driver of stealing herorder, sharing the driver’s name and likeness with
her million-plus followers.
As a dark-skinned black woman doing the un-
cool (but very lucrative) thing of making uplifting
pop music, insults tend to be harsh and personal.
She’s been called corny and an “industry plant.”
In a since-retracted headline, cheeky gossip site
Bossip called her a “Kidz Bop Kween,” suggest-
ing that her music is watered-down imitations of
more authentic pop. The most consistent, painful
insult, though, is that she makes music for white
people, that she’s merely shuckin’ and jivin’ for
an audience of yas kween-era white feminists.
“Yeah, there’s hella white people at my shows,”
she asserts, with a smirk. “What am I gonna do,
turn them away? My music is for everybody.”
Ironically, seeing majority black women in her
audiences while playing shows with SZA in 2015
was a major inspiration for the songs that are fi-
nally climbing up the charts. “Coconut Oil,” in
particular, was meant to be a self-care anthem
for black women. “As a black woman, I make
music for people, from an experience that is from
a black woman,” the singer says. “I’m making
music that hopefully makes other people feel
good and helps me discover self-love. That mes-
sage I want to go directly to black women, big
black women, black trans women. Period.”
She’s learning to check herself, living in the
“real world” offline and not responding to the
haters. “That was the end of that era for me,” she
says of her Twitter snafus. “I was fuckin’ wrong.
I’m big enough to admit that shit.” In early Jan-
uary, she decided to quit the site, at least for a
while, because of both the trolls and more gener-
al “negativity” toward everybody.
To some degree, she understands the critiques.
“Look, I’m new,” she offers. “You put two plates
of food in front of people, [and] one is some fried
chicken. If you like fried chicken that’s great. And
the other is, like, fried ostrich pussy. You not
gonna want to fuck with that.”
She may be “fried ostrich pussy” for some lis-
teners, but she’s not going anywhere — not after
all it took to get here. “We eventually get used to
everything,” she says. “So people just gon’ have to
get used to my ass.”O
N DECEMBER 31ST, 2018, Lizzo
decided she didn’t need to
make any resolutions for 2019:
She had accomplished every-
thing she wanted. She was re-
cording songs she loved, and
her shows were sold out. “I grossed a million dol-
lars on my tour. I was able to put my friends on
my payroll,” she says. “I was Gucci.” She was also
about to experience one of pop’s craziest suc-
cess stories.
Lizzo always figured she would write a mas-
sive pop hit. Best friend and longtime collabora-
tor Sophia Eris remembers how fast Lizzo would
write songs for their pop-rap trio the Chalice,
which they formed in 2011 in Minneapolis. After
Lizzo was signed to Atlantic in 2015, Eris saw her
friend fully comprehend her own creative power.“YEAH, THERE’S
HELLA WHITE
PEOPLE AT
MY SHOWS,”
LIZZO SAYS
WITH A SMIRK.
“WHAT AM I
GONNA DO,
TURN THEM
AWAY? MY
MUSIC IS FOR
EVERYBODY.”Senior writer BRITTANY SPANOS profiled Carly
Rae Jepsen in May 2019.