Lizzo is taking her temper off of the internet. Or so she says.
The Detroit-native took to Twitter on Sunday night after what can only be called a whirlwind couple of weeks. First, Lizzo's debut set at Coachella is plagued with an unbelievable number of sound and tech glitches, leaving the 30-year-old powerhouse to proclaim, “Ain’t nothing gonna fuck my time up, bitch!” to a roaring crowd.
Then, she drops her highly-anticipated debut record, 'Cuz I Love You on Friday, just two days before her second Coachella performance which, you guessed it, suffered sound issues. Naturally, Lizzo improvised, with some help from her faithful Sasha Flute, and performed acapella with the crowd acting as her backing track. As they did during week one, festival goers ate it up.
“If they ain’t gonna get the music right, I’m gonna get the music right,” Lizzo said during Sunday night's Coachella performance. “That’s why I got my music major.”
While most of the music-listening world has, in some capacity, fallen under the spell of the dynamic, body-positive, twerking flutist, others have converted fully to the church of Lizzo. However, among the rare few who have not sipped upon the Lizzo "Juice" are the writers over at Pitchfork who have reduced Lizzo's dream of becoming the "Aretha Franklin of the 2018 generation" to "this generation’s Natasha Bedingfield" — suggesting that a few of her tracks could score yogurt commercials.
"PEOPLE WHO 'REVIEW' ALBUMS AND DONT MAKE MUSIC THEMSELVES SHOULD BE UNEMPLOYED," Lizzo tweeted in the wee morning hours on Monday.
PEOPLE WHO ‘REVIEW’ ALBUMS AND DONT MAKE MUSIC THEMSELVES SHOULD BE UNEMPLOYED
— |L I Z Z O| (@lizzo) April 22, 2019
Pitchfork's contributing editor and author of the review, Rawiya Kameir, gave Cuz I Love You a 6.5, a ranking many artists might consider as being merciful. (Or if you're Greta Van Fleet, who received a 1.6 for last year's Anthem of the Peaceful Army, you might just think Pitchfork's writers are diehards.)
While Slate hails the record as a well-deserved "victory lap," and Rolling Stone calls Lizzo a "hero" and Cuz I Love You a "legend-making" album — just a few examples of the many shining reviews the record has received — Kameir goes on to say that "much of Cuz I Love You sounds like an improvement on any given major-label writing session."
Though Kameir can't help admitting that Lizzo is skilled and endlessly charismatic (despite calling the singer's high-energy publicity rollout for the record as being "one extremely long yaaaaaaas,") she says much of the record is "burdened" with "overwrought production, awkward turns of phrase, and ham-handed rapping."
It's not all bad, though. After Kameir digresses slightly by comparing a recent essay penned by Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams about electoral politics' “demographic and technological changes" to the narrativization of artists like Lizzo, she says that Lizzo's music "performs an important social function."
Kameir "The sound might disappoint, but there will be people moved to transformations of their own thanks to her songs," Kameir writes. "And that’s important, too."
A few hours after Lizzo pretty much demanded that all non-musician music writers be unemployed, she took a breath and invited music journalists to join Lizzo in the studio for her next record, so that they might better understand her world.
"I honestly feel this way about everything..." she said in a retweet of a GIF of Prince, "like don’t criticize my mac & cheese if you burn rice... period."
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