Lizzo is nominated for eight Grammy Awards. Photo / AP
She has eight nominations, a performance slot and the devotion of fiercely loyal fans. What's behind this Lizzo momentum? New York Times critics discussed the wave of momentum that Lizzo is riding.
JON PARELES: Lizzo enters this year's Grammy Awards with the most nominations — eight, including all four top categories. Nominations don't guarantee wins — ask India.Arie or Jay-Z — but Lizzo also has a prime-time slot as a performer, and she knows how to take over a screen.
Going big, of course, is Lizzo's home turf and her brand. She's a physical force, revelling in her body. Her musical skills are considerable: Singing, rapping, writing, playing flute and leading an ecstatic troupe onstage, she's a full-spectrum entertainer. She's ubiquitous as a celebrity, online presence and self-appointed idol, an exemplar of unshakable self-love and punch-line-slinging, take-no-guff arrogance who started her 2016 EP, Coconut Oil, with a song that instructed, "Worship me!" (Her social-media posts mingle her own milestones with fans testifying about how she helped them accept themselves.)
And she turns up the volume, speed and energy. Cuz I Love You, her long-in-the-making major-label debut album — Lizzo's first indie album, Lizzobangers, came out in 2013 — literally starts with a scream and rarely lets up from there.
CARYN GANZ: Wins or no wins, this is Lizzo's year at the Grammys, which isn't a shock because 2019 was Lizzo's year everywhere: the charts (she earned her first No. 1 with Truth Hurts), the red carpet (did you catch her tiny Valentino bag?), so many presidential candidates' playlists (we see you are feeling Good as Hell, Pete Buttigieg!). It helped that her hallmarks — the emotional cheerleading, the fierce attitude, the big-tent sound — aligned so perfectly with the national mood distilled to its rawest form on social media, where people (young women in particular) are anxious, angry, craving humour and distraction, and tired of seeing perfectly posed influencers flogging tummy-slimming teas and pretending to be flawless. And the B-side to all that, of course, is Lizzo has the voice and stage presence to back everything up.
JON CARAMANICA: In a year when the Grammys were looking to display an embrace of difference, a modicum of open-earedness, a sense that the show is taking place in the present day and not being hologrammed in from a decade or two earlier, it would have been difficult to invent a musician better suited to the situation than Lizzo.
Lizzo is indisputably modern — a singer and a rapper, a meme-ready (or meme-biting) songwriter, a hilariously present personality in every sense. And yet she is completely legible to the sorts of people who vote for Grammys: She prefers time-tested pop structures, she revisits the sweaty soul and disco energy of the 1970s, and sometimes even finds herself channelling some 1920s bawdiness. Or there's that one song that (lawyers stop reading here) rips off Bruno Mars ripping off everyone else, which is the type of thing Grammy voters love, because it reminds them of when they were relevant.
WESLEY MORRIS: That, Jon C., I must say, is the only nagging element of "Juice." It really is a Bruno Mars song. And Lizzo makes the approximation feel like a dare — anything Bruno can do, she can do with a flute. But there's more going on with the sweetest sugar of that song. The chorus also knows the real delight of CeCe Peniston's Finally is the stanked-up "Ya-ya-ee," so it swipes that, too. Juice is a perfect pop song. All high. Even the deadpan bridge — "Somebody come get this man" — is cleverer than it needs to be. (You guys, why is that not up for record or song instead of, or alongside, Truth Hurts?)
PARELES: Probably the metrics: Truth Hurts was the bigger hit. And yes, she is rooted and obviously steeped in her sources. After all, pop rides on familiarity with a (copyright-defying) twist. But what makes me happiest about Lizzo's rise is her sheer maximalism. So much of the hit music of the past few years — SoundCloud rap, indie singer-songwriters, trap, reggaeton — has been sullen, drab and lean to the point of being skeletal. Lizzo's real-time virtuosity and full-time exuberance are welcome correctives, along with her willingness to reclaim funk, soul and gospel, to fill her recordings with live-sounding instruments and to balance self-aggrandisement with campy amusement. And her message — that she rules because craft, determination, humour and ambition are more important than conforming to a particular set of beauty standards and privilege — is a hopeful one.
But Lizzo was a dynamo — a breakneck but melodic rapper with dense, multifaceted tracks — all the way back on Lizzobangers. Some of her biggest songs (Good as Hell and Truth Hurts) have been around since 2016 and 2017. What makes it her moment now? Is it just the major-label promotion that qualifies her as a "new artist"? Or has she started narrowcasting her brand, maximising self-love and carnality and setting aside larger issues?
MORRIS: What's exhilarating about her as an artist: She's got nerve. And the nerve is what's made her a hit. Her persona is head-on in a way that solves our current megastar crises. You can hear joy in her recordings. She likes being onstage. And not in the curlicue, crypto-grime, Leprechaun 2 way that Billie Eilish does. But there's one thing I am eager to introduce, which is a question of meaning. Like, not "what is the meaning of Lizzo?" but "what does Lizzo mean?" What's in quotation marks and what's for real? Where is she taking her comedy? In that regard, she's in good company in the top categories. Lana Del Rey, Eilish and even Ariana Grande understand the power of humour to both disarm and destroy. Lizzo happens to be funny in more than one mode.
GANZ: During Coachella last year, a social media dumpster fire of flower crowns, the escape was Lizzo's Instagram, where she posted a slow-mo video of herself twerking in a pool with the caption "Asschella." It was the perfect antidote to the artificiality of — well, everything.
JOE COSCARELLI: Lizzo — like her labelmate and fellow blink-and-you'll-miss-it "Hustlers" cameo-maker Cardi B — definitely loves a little Lucille Ball slapstick, especially on social media and in between songs onstage. But I think her dominant mode, both on record and in performance, is sincerity, and that's why I think she'll ultimately be a career Grammys darling even if she doesn't dominate the major categories this year. When I saw her headline a sold-out Radio City Music Hall in September, I went with an open mind and a lot of questions: Is this for real? And if so, for how long?
What I found was pure devotion (and yes, she performed from a church pulpit). There were silly moments, and she knows how to lean into a shtick, but the self-love sermons were the real draw for the almost entirely female audience and Lizzo always came back to earnestness. (Ask me about the best photo I took in 2019: the entirely vacant male urinals at the Lizzo concert.) There are few live shows I've seen in recent years that can match the noise, focus and palpable gratitude that these fans were giving.
GANZ: And this is a very tricky tightrope. I have been to more than one Lady Gaga concert that felt like a Tony Robbins seminar, yet this early into her headlining-concert career, Lizzo has figured out when to preach and when to belt. And empowerment isn't something she deploys sporadically: It's baked into her entire proposition. What you were feeling at the show, Joe (and I did too, at Brooklyn Steel in May), was the physical manifestation of representation mattering.
CARAMANICA: Her level of lyrical self-regard isn't that much different from a Nicki Minaj or Cardi B. That she receives so much attention — positive and negative — for it says far more about who society deems worthy of loving themselves publicly than about how intense that self-love is. How she chooses to express it, though, can feel overly literal. The loudness isn't cut with toughness, or wryness, or nuance — it simply blares. Outside of self-actualisation circles, that intensity can be distracting.
MORRIS: I believe in the ambition of the self-love anthems and the way she manages to play it for truth and laughs. The feat is to find humour in vulnerability. You hear a smoky "I'm dumping you" ballad like Jerome and you're arrested. For one thing, "Take your ass home/where the peaches have thorns" is just a pleasure to sing. Her Big Maybelle-Etta James roustabouts find this classic form. Right up top, her "uh uh" and "hee-hee" and "look, listen, shut up" over the doo-wop plink are funny. It's another comedy record. But the pain in the singing sounds unleashed and controlled. It sounds real. This song is up for best traditional R&B performance (these categories!) and it's a perfect wedding of ancient and present — a little "Tyrone," Amy Winehouse and "Love on the Brain," with less drama and more "ha ha ha." The tradition is discipline. She's under so many influences — from Betty Davis and Millie Jackson to Missy Elliott — and yet none of them buries her.
PARELES: The production is also packed with clever details. She immersed herself in Prince's Minneapolis funk scene and recorded with Prince, who is the foundation I hear in Juice. One of my favourites is about halfway into Exactly How I Feel — as she's whipping up the enthusiasm, there's the sound of a whistling teakettle about to boil over. I checked my kitchen the first time. Or Heaven Help Me, a ratchety trap-gospel track carrying complaints about the pains of love. After a big "Amen," it drops into half-speed, her voice turns tearful and then out comes the flute, sounding desperately alone.
CARAMANICA: On the whole, Lizzo is more impressive than her music — a nimble, audacious, flexible talent performing workout-session songs that are subtle as a pneumatic drill. But one thing that's in those songs' favor: Many of them don't sound like anything made by her peers. Her juxtapositions — of vocal approach, of genre, of era, of tempo — feel sui generis. Cuz I Love You (Deluxe) might not be the best album nominated for album of the year, but it is easily the one with the most zigs and zags, the one that has the most unusual sort of ambition. Unlike Billie or Lana or Ariana, all of whom are sandpapering their aesthetics down to the micron, Lizzo is full of surprise, and hopefully will remain that way.
COSCARELLI: Yet when it comes to combining capital-B brand and actual songs — and while I did bet on Juice being the hit — it's not totally surprising in retrospect that Truth Hurts and Good as Hell, which originated on years-old projects, became the defining smashes.
To me, those were Lizzo finding her version of sincerity and owning her persona in real time, whereas the album felt a bit more like trying to do that deliberately, for mass consumption. Whatever she does next — rap again? — will be the real test, post-Grammys.
PARELES: Gathering attention is its own internet-era talent. But what you suggest is my worry for her future, that her songs become one-dimensionally about Lizzo herself rather than all she could represent. Does she want to bring everyone up alongside her, as she did early on, or is it all about elevating her brand? Maybe her fans will continue to insist that her success is their success, and cheer her on as her ambitions get even bigger.
Written by: Jon Caramanica, Joe Coscarelli, Caryn Ganz, Wesley Morris and Jon Pareles
Photographs by: Ivor Prickett
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