Popcast, a New York Times podcast, the July 27, 2022 episode, “Lizzo’s Complicated, Joyful Pop” Prompts Me To Direct Message Its Host

Just finished listening to the Lizzo part of the recent, primarily Lizzo, Popcast.

(These remarks respond to the July 2022 Popcast about Lizzo and her new album, Special. Listening to it before reading further will give good context, but isn’t essential. Spotify link to the episode: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7zyIVoetcF38FgDxe1hJbK?si=_lHBTyCxRUusgnmLRdPz2w  

(Originally written and sent July 30, 2022. Lightly edited, August 15, 2022.)

(Sent as a direct message to the host, but not about the host personally, to whom I gave no indication I’d post the message publicly, so I won’t include the host’s name here.)

Some things:

I’m a 63 year old (puts me at the end of the Boomers) man who got excited by Lizzo before she hit, when first I heard “Good As Hell”. 

And I’ll tell you, it wasn’t and isn’t because she is “affirmative”. 

Several aspects to her performances and presentation attracted and attract me:

What y’all (cynically?) call “her brand”, I experience as her presenting a fairly thin overlay of a persona over who she is on the inside. IOW, she asserts who she is and expresses it well. She is among the best performers at more or less being herself in public. (I don’t think I’ll ever see Paul McCartney let his guard down, for example. At least, not since McCartney (the first one).

When Lizzo complains about how she is treated, I don’t hear naïveté nor a dramatic overreaction. I hear her justified “clapping back” at those who try to thwart or hinder her mission, so to speak, that people can join together, each as fully themselves as possible, and appreciate each other, while “You do you”.  (BTW, speaking of “Join Together”, is what she often sings about all that much different than what Pete Townsend wrote about in a good chunk of his songs?)

Which kinda brings me (I’m not really working to make smooth transitions between my points) to that word y’all kept repeating: “affirmative”. 

I guess I owe you my gratitude for giving me a little more insight about why I am so very often out of step with what almost all music writers and almost all well-regarded presenters of what’s agreed to be top shelf music (especially new music) think is critically laudable.

I feel I have a robust ability to think critically, am not afraid of receiving criticism, and wish most people would stop equating criticism with berating or negativity. But I don’t recognize my opinions often in music reviews or journalism, and do often find music punditry to have baffling priorities. 

Which leads me to ask:

Do other music pundits relegate the positive attitudes and messages (briefly stated) in Lizzo’s and many other musicians’ work as just being “affirmative”?

If so I believe y’all are making a big mistake.

Have you never considered that people listen to Lizzo’s music because, like her (perhaps), we believe we already have, and are confident about, our positive self image, and our value as people?

The word y’all were not even looking for instead of “affirmative”, the word I’ve been using since early this century, the word that illustrates an important distinction between your assumption about the way many people hear the messages in her music (and in this kind of music), and how I and (I somewhat confidently assume) many other people really hear the messages in this music, is:

Aspirational.

(Whenever one of you said “affirmative” I kept mentally yelling “Aspirational!”, as if I could magically get you to hear me.)

Aspirational describes a desire, or a hope, or a wish, to be more like… fill-in-the-blank! Especially about non-material things. (It’s not the kind of wanting-of-stuff which Lorde makes fun of so many status symbol seekers for wanting (and reveals some envy towards) in “Royals”; that’s something else.)

For example, I don’t believe I already have that Lizzo-like quality to be “all that”, to have that confidence, that self-acceptance, particularly not in public. Trust me, I’ve worked on self-improvement for over 40 years, and “all that” was rarely even something I imagined was in sight as a goal. It takes a lot of work just to stand up for yourself with people in one’s local communities. (For that matter, I also wish I could have friends “join together [in a] band”. Or that people would seriously “give peace a chance” and decide “war is over if (we) want it”. Or even just agree that “Everyone Deserves Music” that gets “Everybody Ona Move” and helps us “Stay Human”. (Kudos to Michael Franti for those. Mr. Franti got to Stay Human first, Mr. Batiste.))

I may have driven my point into the ground. 

I drove my point a little further and deeper than just stating it because I have the sense I’m encountering and countering some deep defenses against it. Perhaps I’m wrong, and I’m overthinking. 

But it sure does seem as though critics and pundits are embarrassed by admitting to resonating to expressions of hope and idealism in aspirational music. 

Shifting gears, I’m surprised that no one on the Popcast mentioned Lizzo’s voice. 

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. Critical appreciation of singing skills seems so last century. 

While Lizzo was bursting onto the popular scene, promoting the bleep out of “Good As Hell” and other singles for three years until the Cuz I Love You album appeared, I caught her (on video or audio) performing live multiple times, singing with a full-spiritedness and full-throated-ness that doesn’t dare to show itself in pop music much these days. (NOT a melismatic show-off-iness. NOT just loud.) I also heard her pushing the limits of her voice. More than once. 

And as I feared, on Special her voice shows a little wear from overuse. I suppose it can be chalked up to a quality that “gives it character”. Or just a few years of aging. But I think some of what y’all are hearing, that maybe doesn’t connect her performance with “her brand,” comes from her slightly rougher, slightly matured voice.

Finally, I need to say that, at the time, 4-5 years back, after 4 to 5 decades of hoping for Queer musicians to breakthrough to much greater acceptance, I did not anticipate that Lizzo was part of a persistent flood of power-flaunting, publicly bisexual or Lesbian hitmaking women who would be open about that aspect of their selves at or near the start of their hitmaking careers. (I also won’t digress to describe the difference between Before Them and After Them — but it’s huge.) Nor did I anticipate Lil Nas X’s success and the similar but not as floodgate-opening Out Gay Men musicians who followed. 

As an Out Gay Man for over 40 years myself, and as a listener / music fan who did / does as much as I could for the last 25 years to share and promote great Out Musicians’ under-appreciated tracks, before the decidedly better state of acceptance for Out Q musicians that we enjoy today, I had no guarantee of when or if I’d live to see this level of acceptance finally happen.

(Much as the Lesbian musicians who came out in the 90s after they had become established in their careers, and men like Sam Smith in the 2010s, were milestones, you know it’s still one of the many roads musicians need to decide to navigate in public or not.)

Since I’m a fan who seeks out, pays attention to, and appreciates many different varieties of music by many kinds of musicians, Q and otherwise, when Lizzo owned her bisexuality before “Good As Hell” became a hit, she was and remains worthy of my respect.

Whether now she pulls “Everyone Is Gay” from the zeitgeist or from a Kurt Cobain lyric, and distills/dilutes (depending) the sentiment for the general public, she is doing the work. The music business is so rampant with bandwagoneers and style copiers, hearing a musician commit to the work when it wasn’t trendy, and then commit to staying on message even as she finds new ways to refresh the words used in the Q equality conversation, is not as small a matter as the lightness of the song might make it seem to you. 

I’ve pretty much covered (and detailed) the thoughts I had listening to you three converse. (Oh yeah: Christian pop is almost never aspirational. It’s conventional and conformist. Kinda the opposite of what “affirmative” means.)

I hope what I wrote comes across respectfully. I acknowledge: You all are the professionals. I’m just not. And, sometimes, I just have to wonder why professionals seem stuck in a disrespect cycle for music that for whatever reasons doesn’t tweak pundits’ and critics’ need for a certain deconstructive kind of novelty.

But now I’m also reducing “critics and pundits” into a single mass, and I do know that’s not right. 

Thanks for reading and for your patience. 

Bill Stella

@BillRealman (Twitter)

PS: Tempting as it is to illustrate how my tastes differ from today’s music pundits, I won’t [will] digress now to tell you about the best damn album of the year — and in many years — because… [this no longer is a Twitter DM! That album — ridiculously ignored by reviewers — is Frank Turner’s FTHC. It] would take many paragraphs to say everything I want to say about it and why it’s so extraordinary and special. But that is for another post. …

Additional details, as they say, provided on request.