Lizzo: The Bitch Review – a power star who can no longer find her way | Lizzo

JUst year ago, Lizzo appeared on Saturday Night Live, announcing a new album called Love in Real Life in high fashion. With an electric guitar, wearing a Trump outfit A T-shirt that says Tariffiedhe did his thing theme song and two new songs, Still bad and Don’t Make Me Love You. As he appeared earlier that week on the nightly talk show – where he ran across the audience to the leading fans who were shouting “we love you Lizzo!” – appears to be an insulting comeback, appropriate to remove him from the controversy that began at the end of his successful 2023 world tour. The three former dancers were in the background and the dressmaker sued against the plaintiff for harassment and discrimination: damaging claims based on the nature of Lizzo’s music He preaches a message of inclusion, body awareness and self-esteem. Some of the allegations were dismissed by the judge but others continue; Lizzo has refused to settle in courtHe says: “I am fighting this case because I know it is not true.

But The Love in Real Life single, a pivot to rock that was indebted to Tom Petty’s American Girls – or the Strokes’ American Girls-indebted Last Nite if you will – failed to make the charts, a cry from between 2018 and 2022 when Lizzo’s music seemed to go multi-platinum. The same fate befell Still Bad, a hugely popular song that played his biggest hits, which led to a rethink. The album was released, Lizzo apparently in control of his destiny – “I have to do evil my way”. The composition that takes him back to where he started, before pop history came – punchy hip-hop, although it was tricked by guest appearances from Doja Cat and SZA – appeared instead: My Face Hurts from Smiling received mixed reviews and negative numbers.

All of this means that Bitch, her fifth album proper, has reached an unusual peak in Lizzo’s career. Since people don’t want him to play mainstream music, or to play Lizzobanger songs in 2013, or to make the kind of music they were buying three million years ago, the question of what they really want weighed heavily on his production.

Lizzo didn’t come up with a definitive answer. Bitch tries a little bit of everything, from pastiching Tame Impala on Happy 2 Be to creating new songs with Cure-like guitars on She Stole My Man; Sexy Ladies is a recap of girls’ night-time bodybuilding quotes. This method of dispersion makes the Bitch listen in an inconsistent manner.

Plus, there’s something haunting about her tone, whether she’s playing in 80s retro – Don’t Make Me Love U brings to mind the funky keyboard hook of Tina Turner’s The Best, but translates it into distant, unaffected vocals – or looking into jazzy R&B on Too Nice. The heavy beat of the vibraphone at the end is pleasant, full of small hours, but the actual song feels absent: it only lives in its dead time, after Lizzo stops singing and starts playing the flute solo. The song paraphrases Meredith Brooks’ 1997 pop-grunge song of the same name, but somehow stops it. Embellished with smooth, G-funky R&B, it feels stripped of its fiery energy, hums and lows.

The words often seem similar. You don’t want to see the evidence that Lizzo is facing problems recently – “I hope it makes you happy to hurt someone”, “an emotional thing, you think your life is over”, “you would have been working in the market if it wasn’t for me” – but they finally see not pugilistic or chaos, just confused and painful: “I have a feeling of the piano on Tono.”

There’s nothing here to worry about: Whose Hair Is It. That grrrl uses a Chicago house bassline to give it a boost. But what’s missing is an obscure pop smash, something Lizzo once seemed to be able to write to order.

Perhaps that is inevitable. One of the reasons why Lizzo was a big hit in the first place was that he made pop songs that captured the zeitgeist, and that the zeitgeist has moved on: the era of body positivity has been replaced by the era of Ozempic and Mounjaro; a kind of post-pandemic, post-Trump prospect of 2022 About Damn Time now sounds like a spillover from the lost years. We’re living in a different world now, and Bitch suggests that Lizzo didn’t know how to respond: “I’m doing my best,” she sings on A Toast, which sounds like the most popular song of all.

This week Alexis listened

Charlie Franklin – Bird Writer
Two minutes of lo-fi acoustic allure, from an EP that seems to reflect the dangerous, unstructured people of Jolie Holland’s first British albums.