If you've spent any time with the music of the bedazzled pop star Lizzo, drop into "Too Nice," from her new album Bitch, and it won't take you long to spot a difference.Her last big splash, the infectious, chart-topping 2022 single "About Damn Time," was upbeat in the face of stressors: "Bitch, I might be better!" she whooped.
"Too Nice," comparatively, is fed up and scorned, downbeat and reactive."You said 'I love you and I miss you' last time we talked / Now you playin' on the internet like you forgot," goes one verse.
"You'd still be workin' at the mall if it wasn't for mе / Sorry if I'm soundin' broken, but you tried to break mе." For much of her defining run, Lizzo was emblematic of an idyllic extramusical experiment, her songs a wellspring for yas queen enthusiasm."Everyone looks to an artist for something more than just the music and that message of being comfortable in my own skin is number one for me," she told Billboard in 2015.
But take Bitch's music as a clear indication: She hasn't been truly comfortable for a while.Lizzo was a benchmark of the 2010s zeitgeist, a rapper who emerged into a pop idol on the slow-burn conquest of the 2017 megahit "Truth Hurts," which topped the Billboard Hot 100 and won a Grammy.In building a kind of self-care empire, she went from viral phenom to feel-good success story — a vivacious sex- and body-positive entertainer who sang and rapped, twerked while playing the flute, and did it all with gusto.
She closed the decade with 2019's Cuz I Love You, her major-label debut and the key time capsule of her effervescent songcraft and tremendous cultural footprint."An artist's identity and how it is narrativized are by necessity inextricable from their work, making the task of assessing an album's merit increasingly layered and complex," the critic Rawiya Kameir wrote in a Pitchfork review of that record, musing on its perceived genrelessness.
"In fact, Lizzo does have a genre, something like empowerment-core, and she offe...