*Lizzo recently chopped it up with shock jock Howard Stern and addressed the online remarks that she makes “white music.”
It’s an issue that’s mentioned in her new HBO Max documentary, “Love, Lizzo.” As reported by Uproxx, when asked by Stern how she feels about the criticism, Lizzo explained “[It is] very hurtful only because I am a Black woman. I feel like it challenges my identity and who I am. It diminishes that, which I think is really hurtful. And on the other end, I’m making funky, soulful, feel-good music that is so similar to a lot of Black music that was made for Black people in the ’70s and ’80s.”
The Grammy-winning songstress continued, “Then, on top of that, my message is literally for everybody and anybody. And I don’t try to gatekeep my message from people. So, all three of those things from me, and I’m like, you don’t even get me at all. I feel like a lot of people truthfully don’t get me, which is why I wanted to do the documentary. I feel like y’all don’t get me. Y’all don’t know where I came from. And now, I don’t want to answer no more questions about this sh*t. I just want to show the world who I am.”
Lizzo touched on this “white music” topic in October, telling Vanity Fair, “I am not making music for white people. I am a Black woman. I am making music from my Black experience, for me to heal myself [from] the experience we call life.”
READ MORE: Lizzo Unpacks the Racist Origins of Pop Music
Speaking previously to Entertainment Weekly about her journey as a Black pop star, Lizzo unpacked the racist origins of pop music and how her own artistry can be compared to musical icons such as Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey.
“I think if people did any research they would see that there was race music and then there was pop music. 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,” she told the publication.
“So then there were these genres created almost like code words: R&B, and then of course eventually hip-hop and rap was born from that. I think when you think about pop, you think about MTV in the ’80s talking about “We can’t play rap music” or “We can’t put this person on our platform because we’re thinking about what people in the middle of America think” — and we all know what that’s code for,” Lizzo continued.
Watch Lizzo’s full conversation with Stern on his SiriusXM show below.
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