It’s hard to stay on top of everything on social media, but there’s one name that keeps popping up in my feed: Lizzo. Born Melissa Jefferson, the Detroit-born rapper and singer is making waves in the US music scene with her tongue-in-cheek female empowerment anthems. Here are five things to love about Lizzo.
Like Beyoncé, her songs will make you want to high five the nearest woman
Although the song was released two years earlier, Lizzo’s post break-up album ‘Good As Hell’ got the love it deserved in 2018, with over 34 million streams on Spotify. Her music exudes confidence and preaches self-love: “Mirror mirror on the wall, don’t say it ‘cos I know I’m cute,” is the first line of her January single ‘Juice’, and should be printed out and become everyone’s morning mantra.
She is a classically trained flautist
Lizzo, 30, has been playing the flute since she was 10 in her school’s marching band, and it’s a feature in many of her songs. According to one profile by New York magazine, she practises four hours per day when she has time. Flute-playing Lizzo even has her own persona ‘Sasha Flute’ (named after Beyoncé’s Sasha Fierce), and she has a separate Instagram account dedicated to her flute playing. This video of Lizzo playing the flute before launching into one of the fiercest dance routines to ever grace the internet has racked up over half a million views.
She’s unapologetically body positive
Appearing on the cover of Allure’s digital issue earlier this month, Lizzo was frank about the importance of inclusivity in an industry that upholds certain kinds of thin, white beauty standards. And while she’s aware that body positivity is a trendy topic, Lizzo is simply being who she is. “The body-positive movement is the body-positive movement, and we high five. We’re parallel,” she told Allure. “But my movement is my movement. When all the dust has settled on the groundbreaking-ness, I’m going to still be doing this. I’m not going to suddenly change. I’m going to still be telling my life story through music. And if that’s body positive to you, amen. That’s feminist to you, amen. If that’s pro-black to you, amen. Because ma’am, I’m all of those things.”
She is sex positive
Lizzo’s recent appearance in Playboy helped cement her meteoric stardom. In a feature in the magazine’s Spring Speech Issue called “Lizzo the Incomparable” (because yes, she is), she starred in a pin-up style boudoir shoot harking back to the 1970s. “Playboy did feature one type of woman for a long-ass time,” she said. “Big-ass titties ... and a flat stomach, and light skin. So, it’s kind of cool to be a big, brown girl in Playboy.”
She loves the LGBTIQ+ community
A modern-day gay icon, Lizzo is an advocate for the LGBTIQ+ community, and can be seen waving the rainbow flag outside government videos in her video for ‘Batches and Cookies’, released in 2013. More recently, she spoke to Playboy about the problem with gender politics. “The way we talk about gender has to change,” she said. “Gender doesn’t really exist. We created social gender, so we gotta destigmatise it, take the importance off of skirt versus pants.”
She preaches self-love and wants her fans to love themselves too
Lizzo is breaking society’s beauty standards and is well-aware how her self-love can influence her fans. “I want people to feel that closeness,” she told Allure, “because if you can love me as much as you do without knowing me, and without me being like this archetype of modern beauty in media, then you can love yourself.”
