Lizzo The Incomparable

Fans Have Been Awaiting Her Next Album For Three Years. Can The Music Industry’s Most Fearless (Andgenredefying) Artist Finally Break Through?

- Eve Barlow

LIZZO TOTTERS INTO THE KITCHEN, FLASHES OF HER legs peeking through fishnets, her silhouette wrapped in a bodice. The artist begins to improvise her way out of her stilettos with a riff on the Weeknd’s “Can’t Feel My Face.”

“I can’t feel my feet when I’m in shoes,” she coos. “But I love it.”

An order of pad thai arrives promptly at six P.M. She has been on set at this 1970s-Barbie-themed Hollywood apartment since this morning, and she hasn’t eaten all day. “I’m happiest when I’m working or eating,” she says with a laugh that sounds like nothing less than a celebration of life. “Sometimes I can work and eat, like right now. That’s when I’m real happy. Ha!”

Happiness isn’t what Lizzo is serving; Lizzo serves positivity. Positivity is an outlook — it’s something you have to actively practice. Sometimes positivity results in happiness. Yesterday Lizzo wasn’t happy. On Twitter she was subtweeting someone who had upset her (“You a LYIN ASS NIGGA…IM SICK AND TIRED OF BEING TOLD YA BUM ASS FAIRYTALES”). She calls her online presence a “body-positive persona.” Persona. That’s key. Her music matches that persona. Her most-streamed song, “Good As Hell,” is a petition to women to prioritize themselves in relationships: “If he don’t love you anymore / Just walk your fine ass out the door.”