The importance of being Lizzo

Pop culture is full of here-today-gone-tomorrow starlets. Male and female, they burn brightly for a year or two, and then vanish. Most of pop culture by definition is disposable. It's not geared toward fostering long careers or sustained art. And that's fine; not everything has to be Ulysses, not everything has to last two hundred years like Beethoven. Sometimes all you want is a song or a movie or a show or a book which whiles away the time and takes your mind off of your troubles. That's no small thing.

The break-out pop star of 2019 is the artist Lizzo. Here's her first hit:

Now, quite simply, this is a jam. This is the song you put in your car as you're driving out of the city on a road trip. It's frothy, it's sunny, it's positive.

But Lizzo is more than her music.

She is unapologetically thick. She's unapologetically sexual. She's unapologetically a woman. And she's unapologetically Black.

All of these traits are four strikes against her, especially in an industry as superficial as the entertainment industry.

This industry doesn't take risks. It's created a mass culture from which it doesn't want to deviate. Thinner is better. Sexuality based on the male gaze is the default. Women are only useful as long as they serve the male gaze. And Blackness is a commodity.

For me, her size is what hits home with me.

My wife has struggled with her weight all her life. People have attempted to make her feel ashamed. It's probably contributed to her issues with her joints. She finally had to undergo weight-loss surgery so that she could lose enough weight to undergo a knee replacement.

But what's hurt me the most—and what I had to teach myself to recognize in myself—was the fat-shaming she and other heavy people have to endure.  Whether they're relatively healthy or not, the assumption is that they're lazy, gluttonous, undisciplined. There's something wrong with them. They need to be fixed. I had to learn the hard way that this is untrue. I had a lot of learning and growing up to go through.

But my wife and Lizzo share a common trait: that little purse. That little purse is the only thing small enough to hold all the fucks they give about what people say about them.

What Lizzo embodies is a thick, sexual, Black woman who takes on the odds stacked against her and defeats them on her own terms. She may lose weight. She may not. It's not what defines her. What defines her is her talent, her personality, her belief in herself. In that she holds important lessons for all of us, whatever our problems, wherever we find ourselves in life. In the face of opposition, you have to depend on yourself and those who love you. With that, you can get through anything. It won't be easy. Fat-phobia will still exist. Slut-shaming will still exist. Misogyny will still exist. Racism will still exist. All of the world's hatreds will still exist. But this is the world in which we live, and nothing changes without struggle, and without bravery.

As we go into 2020, be like Lizzo. Be brave. Be present. Be yourself. Don't let fear rule you. As the poet wrote, fear is the mind-killer, it is the little death. It's useful as a guide of what to be wary; it paralyzes you if you take it for more than it should be.

Remember, as Lizzo says: you've got the juice.