Cuz I Love You

The precise moment of Lizzo’s transformation has been viewed nearly 200,000 times. In 2014, the same year she released her frenzied rap debut Lizzobangers, the rapper-singer-flautist participated in a web series called The What’s Underneath Project. In her episode, Lizzo sits on a stool before a brick wall and speaks warmly about the evolution of her self-image while shedding her clothing one piece at a time. First goes a plaid shirt, then a pair of retro Jordans, and a beanie, until she’s wearing just a bra and panties. Makeup mostly scrubbed and a teeny weeny afro forming a halo around her face, she is finally, fully herself. This literal disrobing, she has said, prompted an unexpected revelation that would go on to shape her life and her art.

That experience inspired her to write “My Skin,” the breakthrough rap-ballad from her 2015 album Big Grrrl Small World. In an accompanying essay, she described the song as “a summoning of bodies: all shapes, sizes, and shades to unite in their pride, and wear their skin like the gift it is.” Since then, she has sharpened that sensibility, becoming a tireless cheerleader for herself and for millions of people she’ll never know. Cuz I Love You, her first full-length on Atlantic, is something of a thesis on internalized and externalized confidence—so much so that the music can feel like a means to a greater end. The rollout for the album, featuring magazine covers and late-night talk show appearances, has been one extremely long yaaaaaaas, centering her welcome approach to body-positivity and self-love as much the soaring mid-chorus notes of the single “Juice” and her uncanny ability to play a flute while twerking.

Lizzo is clearly a talent. On songs like the soul-tinged “Cuz I Love You” and the naming-and-shaming “Jerome,” she bellows from somewhere deep within, her voice so powerful that it’s a surprise to learn she spent much of her life ashamed by it. Her pledge to be “ARETHA FRANKLIN FOR THE 2018 GENERATION” is evident, if not quite actualized; this generation’s Natasha Bedingfield is maybe more accurate. Songs like “Juice” or the equally upbeat “Soulmate” have enough sheen and universality to stand in for Bedingfield’s mid-aughts empowerment anthem “Unwritten” in any given rom-com or yogurt commercial. (Lizzo faced a minor scandal last year when she allowed one of her songs to be used in a campaign for Weight Watchers. Fans were critical of the decision because WW, despite a recent rebrand to health and wellness, reinforces diet culture, putting it fundamentally at odds with interpretations of Lizzo’s fat-positive principles. She eventually apologized.)

Despite her obvious skill and charisma, some of the album’s 11 songs are burdened with overwrought production, awkward turns of phrase, and ham-handed rapping. It’s hard to imagine her earning a spot in the pantheon of great, or even good, rappers when the opening lines of “Like A Girl” have the energy of an “SNL” sketch: “Woke up feeling like I just might run for president/Even if there ain’t no precedent/Switching up the messaging/I’m about to add a little estrogen.” Later, alongside perpetually cool labelmate Gucci Mane on “Exactly How I Feel,” echoes of the Black Eyed Peas’ triumphant, if soulless, stadium-pop ring hollow. There are highlights throughout—nearly every song has multiple captivating hooks—but the album’s peak comes at its end, with “Lingerie,” the sexy closer that is essentially orgasm-as-song. It is tongue-in-cheek, but somehow the most sincere Lizzo we hear.

She joins the proposition for genreless music at an interesting time, with artists as varied as Halsey and BTS and Khalid confirming the inevitability of such a future. “I’m the genre. My voice is the genre,” Lizzo said in a recent interview. And that’s technically true; she is what ties together the fun, anti-gravity pop of “Tempo,” featuring an inventive, compelling verse from Missy Elliott, and the pussy-hat optimism of “Better In Color.” But really, much of Cuz I Love You sounds like an improvement on any given major-label writing session. “Soulmate,” for example, plays like it could just as easily, if more cloyingly, be performed by someone like Meghan Trainor. (Lizzo and Trainor share a producer in Ricky Reed.)

In a piercing essay last month about the value of identity politics, former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams wrote of recent “demographic and technological changes” that have “[bolstered] demands for inclusion and raising expectations in communities that had long been conditioned to accept a slow pace of change.” She continued: “These changes have encouraged activists and political challengers to make demands with a high level of specificity—to take the identities that dominant groups have used to oppress them and convert them into tools of democratic justice.” Of course, Abrams was focused on the activism galvanized by marginalization.

But the point is universal, even if the stakes are lower outside the realm of electoral politics. A similar phenomenon has clearly manifested in arts and culture, and in music in particular. 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. In fact, Lizzo does have a genre, something like empowerment-core, and she offers songs for an astonishing array of demographics: thick women, independent women, women in general, anyone struggling with body image, people who are single, people who wish to become single, etc. Lizzo’s music performs an important social function. The sound might disappoint, but there will be people moved to transformations of their own thanks to her songs. And that’s important, too.