Lizzo ‘very hurt’ by claims she makes music for white people
In a minute she’s gonna set the record straight.
Lizzo issued a rebuke Monday to critics who accused her of making music that only appeals to white people — an allegation raised in her new HBO Max documentary, “Love, Lizzo.”
“[It’s] very hurtful, only because I am a Black woman, and I feel like it really challenges my identity and who I am, and diminishes that, which I think is really hurtful,” the “Juice” singer, 34, said during an appearance on “The Howard Stern Show.”
The three-time Grammy winner noted she doesn’t try to “gatekeep” her message.
“I feel like a lot of people, truthfully, don’t get me — which is why I wanted to do this documentary, because I was like, ‘I feel like y’all don’t understand me, y’all don’t know where I came from …'” she continued. “And now I don’t want to answer no more questions about this s–t. I want to show the world who I am.”
Lizzo said she is influenced by Black music from the 1970s and ’80s, calling her own work “funky, soulful, feel-good music.”
In an interview last month with Entertainment Weekly, Lizzo called out pop music as “racist inherently.”
“I think if people did any research they would see that there was race music and then there was pop music,” she explained. “And race music was their way of segregating Black artists from being mainstream, because they didn’t want their kids listening to music created by Black and brown people because they said it was demonic and yada, yada, yada.”
The singer claims she was bullied in school because she liked bands like Radiohead.
“It was a Black school,” Lizzo told Vanity Fair for its November cover story. “Mostly Black and brown, Caribbean, I had Nigerian friends … They were all listening to what was on the radio: Usher, Destiny’s Child, Ludacris and I was into Radiohead’s ‘OK Computer.’”
“I kept it hidden, even when I was in a rock band, because I didn’t want to be made fun of by my peers — they’d yell, ‘White girl!’” she recalled.
Lizzo alleged the students even made fun of her clothing.
“I was wearing these flared bell-bottoms with embroidery down it — and they’d say, ‘You look like a white girl, why do you want to look like a hippie?’” Lizzo recounted. “I wanted to be accepted so bad; not fitting in really hurt.”
