In an appearance on The Howard Stern Show, Lizzo responded to the “hurtful” suggestion that she writes music for white people.
“[It’s] very hurtful,” said Lizzo, as seen in the clip above after Stern noted that she discussed the criticism in her recent HBO Max documentary, Love, Lizzo. “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. And then, on the other end, it's like, 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."
She added that the message she wants to put across in her music is universal, too, and that she doesn’t want to “gatekeep” listeners from appreciating her output. "All three of those things, for me, I’m just like, ‘You don’t even get me at all,’” she continued. “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,' and now I don't want to answer no more questions about this shit. I want to show the world who I am."
Lizzo made similar comments in an interview with Entertainment Weekly last month, in which she said pop music as a genre is “inherently” racist. "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," she said. "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."
Watch what Lizzo had to say above.
