[272/365] Lizzo

[cosmolinguist]

I finally got around to watching this video I was told about the other day, of Lizzo playing a word-association game wehre she has to sing a song for the word. It's really cute watching her try to credit a song to Wolverine, swearing a lot (why do they bleep out the swears?! she doesn't make any sense without them sometimes, heh), I was giggling by the time she was doing the Spice Girsl, it's so cute how excited she is about doing well at this game (when she nearly can't think of one and says "I nearly peed myself!"), and when she starts singing Rhianna for "shine" but then goes "Oh, [bleep] what about me!" and then starts singing "Juice." It's great to watch her own song bring her so much joy. Same when she sings "Good as Hell" at the end; her songs make me happy and it's so fun to see her happy with them too.

Speaking of "Juice," I watched a making-of kind of video about it too. I like the songwriter, Theron Thomas, saying "it made me think, yo this has a throwback feel, but they definitely made it in 2019." I am a bit chagrined that when the producer Ricky Reed said he was going for "that whole Bowie/Prince kind of thing" it surprised me because yeah then they play the song after it and that stuff is right there but I'd never noticed it before because the song is so...Lizzo. I like the music analysis generally: she says the song was really simple before Ricky "was a muso" on it. It's got two horn parts, 80s electro synthesizers, a little keyboard part I hadn't really noticed that he said Lizzo came up with and called "one of the most important parts," and you know what it is.

I like her talking about how "I woke up like this" means, underneath that, "I was born like this." She changed the line in the song, from one to the other, and it's so much better this way. I've never been able to relate to "I woke up like this," it's way too femme for me (I literally always do wake up like this because I do nothing to my body beyond the demands of hygiene and warmth) but "I was born like this" just lights me up.

Theron says "You know what it felt like? It felt like fun. I just kept saying, whatever we wnat to do I want people to hear it and smile." And I always do.

So, furthering my goal to have YouTube only recommend me Lizzo videos, I watched Lizzo doing nine things she's never done before. She writes a love letter to her butt ("Dear ass, I love you so much..."), named nail polish ("I will call this 'Alien Snot.' No! 'Barney Doodoo.' No I like Alien Snot more than Barney Doodoo because Barney's doodoo wouldn't be purple. Barney's purple, that don't mean his doodoo purple. I'm brown and my doodoo brown but...white people got brown doodoo too! So I feel like I@m gonna call this Alien Snot.") But really the best are when she's trying to teach a kid a dance move and she has a "compliment battle" with a stranger, which she loses because the stranger loves her so much, they end up hugging. Her and the kid do too. It's just great watching her interact with people. They clearly adore her, but she adores them all right back.

Comments

[cosmolinguist]

Oh also, I shared that last one on Facebook and it made a friend ask me "If someone wanted to try listening to Lizzo, what's her most accessible song? I find a lot of new music [in all genres] hard to get into at first."

And it was such a tough question! Most accessible to get into is such an interesting approach. All it took for me was hearing "Tempo" on the radio one time, but I wouldn't call that accessible. "Truth Hurts" seems kinda obvious. But the only other comment to the Facebook post so far had been someone else saying he was listening to "Juice" right then, and I was about to share the video about that too, so it seemed kinda obvious but I went for it anyway. And my friend liked it! So I'm glad I was able to find a good answer to that question.

[silveradept]

She looks line she's having fun, and that's a rare thing. I do wish they would have a version that's unbeeped, though, because it interferes with the cadence.