Lizzo Is On The Cover Of Vogue
Lizzo is on the cover of Vogue. Lizzo! Vogue! Lizzo! In the singer’s own words, she is the “first big Black woman on the cover”, which is very big deal. And unlike Melissa McCarthy’s 2013 ELLE cover, Vogue actually let Lizzo show off her waistline and didn’t make her starve herself first? Damn, Tina Knowles and André Leon Talley really must’ve scared the bejesus outta Anna Wintour if she’s celebrating non-white, non-skinny women. 2020: officially opposite year.
Lizzo Instagrammed a bunch of pictures from her Vogue shoot, featuring quotes from her interview, in which she talks about Black Lives Matter, new music, her body, and the election. In her first post, she acknowledges what a huge deal her cover is:
I am the first big black woman on the cover of @voguemagazine. The first black anything feels overdue. But our time has come. To all my black girls, if someone like you hasn’t done it yet— BE THE FIRST.
She also thanks Anna Wintour, because, like, she had to:
Lizzo talked about how the body-positivity movement is commercialized, and a lot of the time when you see that hashtag it’s smaller, curvy, white girls, and that’s not inclusive:
“What I don’t like is how the people that this term was created for are not benefiting from it. Girls with back fat, girls with bellies that hang, girls with thighs that aren’t separated, that overlap. Girls with stretch marks. You know, girls who are in the 18-plus club. They need to be benefiting from…the mainstream effect of body positivity now. But with everything that goes mainstream, it gets changed. It gets—you know, it gets made acceptable.”
“I think it’s lazy for me to just say I’m body positive at this point,” Lizzo says. “It’s easy. I would like to be body-normative. I want to normalize my body. And not just be like, ‘Ooh, look at this cool movement. Being fat is body positive.’ No, being fat is normal. I think now, I owe it to the people who started this to not just stop here. We have to make people uncomfortable again, so that we can continue to change. Change is always uncomfortable, right?”
Lizzo thinks it would be great if Kamala Harris became VP, because she’s “always rooting for Black people”, but she wants actual change to happen:
She also gets into the Black Lives Matter movement. Lizzo started her music career in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was murdered:
Lizzo knows the streets where Chauvin knelt on Floyd as he called out to his deceased mother. She is familiar with the places where the protests occurred. “I saw one of my friends say, you know, ‘Fuckin’ cop just shot another Black man. Let’s all head out,’ ” she tells me.
She says she’s been “brokenhearted” by America since she was a child, and her late father taught her “what being Black in this country is”. She was hopeful when the Black Lives Matter movement formed after George Zimmerman was acquitted for the murder of Trayvon Martin, but when Tamir Rice was murdered, she “shut down”:
As she describes it to me now, she was thinking, “They don’t actually care. And ‘they’—I don’t know who ‘they’ are. But I know that they don’t care, because if shit like this is still happening, there has to be a ‘they.’ They don’t care about somebody’s actual life.” The realization in part prompted her to write “My Skin,” which she released in 2015, just after the Jamar Clark shooting in Minneapolis by police officers Mark Ringgenberg and Dustin Schwarze. “I woke up in this,” Lizzo sings. “I woke in my skin. I can’t wash it away, so you can’t take it away—my skin. Brown skin.”
When I ask her how she’s feeling now, she responds that she is allowing herself to be hopeful. But hope, she admits, is a scary word, “ ’cause I’ve been let down so much, you know.”
When Lizzo first began her music career, her audiences were a lot of younger, white crowds, “lotta white feminists”. And despite music execs initially telling her she can’t go “white to black”, she went on to build a very diverse fan base:
“When I go hiking or whatever,” Lizzo tells me, “it’s Black girls being like, ‘I like your music.’ ‘Hey, that’s Lizzo.’” These Black fans confirm for Lizzo what she already knows, that she’s “a Black woman making music from a Black experience”—and that her message can speak to anyone. Suddenly Lizzo’s usual unflappable confidence gives way to genuine disbelief: “I never thought that I would have…I guess you could call it ‘crossover appeal.’”
Lizzo says she’s been working on new music during the pandemic. Her new LA home has its own recording studio, and she was delighted to discover she doesn’t need “at least two and a half white boys to make a song” (one of them is a centaur, I guess), like she always thought. She can be her own engineer and producer! Lizzo doesn’t know when the album will be released, but she says, “it’s gonna be motherfucking good.”
Finally, here’s Lizzo’s 73 Questions video, which is 18 MINUTES LONG, and starts off with Lizzo very wisely forcing the interviewer to sanitize before entering her home:
Seriously, who is this 73 Questions guy? Can we trust he’s been tested for corona? He better be sure not to infect Lizzo, or she’ll come for him like she did TikTok, that vacation homeowner, or the litigious Postmates driver. Don’t fuck with the Lizzo.
Pic: Instagram