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For years, music industry insiders were certain that Lizzo would become a star but no matter how much critical acclaim she received she was unable to make the transition from obscure indie hip-hop darling to mainstream success. It was assumed that people weren’t ready for her joyous musical celebrations of plus-size black sexuality, but Lizzo would not be deterred. Through a combination of determined persistence and serendipitous coincidence she finally found her path to success, sweeping up Grammys and Emmys as she conquered the entertainment industry, a True Superhero whose love for her fans is only surpassed by their love for her.

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Becoming Lizzo

Lizzo was born Melissa Jefferson in 1988 in Detroit, and while her family were all musical - as she later described them “everyone can hold a note. Everybody can sing. Everybody can play an instrument” - at first Melissa’s musical education was exclusively limited to gospel singing at church. This all changed when she was 10 and the family moved to Houston where suddenly she found herself exposed to a wide range of musical styles. She was surrounded by rap, everywhere from the local radio stations to her fellow pupils freestyling on the school bus, but at school she was immersed in the world of classical music thanks to her influential music teacher, Claudia Momen, who inspired her to specialize in playing the flute. Meanwhile, she was rapping with friends after school, forming a girl group called Cornrow Clique and acquiring the nickname Lizzo, in tribute to a popular Jay-Z song of the time, Izzo (H.O.V.A). She had her heart set on a career in music but, despite her ambition and obvious talent, she would always seek to form groups, lacking belief that people would accept her as a solo artist. 

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She continued her flute training after graduating from high school, studying classical music at the University of Houston, but her ambition was still to make it as a rapper. Sadly, things began to fall apart in 1999 when her father died; she became chronically depressed, dropped out of college, and ended up living in her car for a year before eventually moving to Minneapolis in an attempt to reinvent herself in the bustling music scene of the Twin Cities. After a couple of years performing with local musicians, she eventually secured her first record deal with a local independent label and by 2013 her first album, Lizzobangers, was released. Reviewers loved it; the album has an 85/100 average score on the review aggregator site Metacritic, matching Beyonce and Run The Jewels’ albums of the same year, and putting it 1% ahead of Kanye West’s Yeezus. Very few people bought the album, however, and Lizzo continued to perform to small crowds while supporting other more successful Minneapolis acts such as Har Mar Superstar. Her critical success did win her one very important new fan, however; the biggest name in Minneapolis history - Prince - invited her to perform on his song BOYTROUBLE in 2014. 

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Writing (deep) sleeper hits

Buoyed by the Prince co-sign, Lizzo secured a record deal with Atlantic Records and began work on her new album, 2015’s Big Grrrl, Small World, which featured her singing about her body and self-image for the first time. It was another critical success and another commercial failure. Lizzo continued writing and, between 2016 and 2017, she released two singles that she was incredibly proud of: Good as Hell and Truth Hurts. The latter, in particular, felt like it should be a huge hit; as she later told Rolling Stone, “It was the first song that was like, ‘Oh, this is a cool song… I’m doing that rap-singing thing and the beat was lit. I was proud of it. I could play it for my friends back home in Houston.” Both singles flopped and Lizzo almost quit the music industry as a consequence, only being talked out of it by her crew. 

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In 2019, Lizzo released her third album Cuz I Love You. In a remarkable coincidence, on the same day the album was released Netflix released Someone Great, a romantic comedy movie featuring Gina Rodriguez in which she drunkenly lip syncs to Truth Hurts in a scene which quickly went viral on social media. Six months later, Truth Hurts belatedly made it to number one on the Billboard charts and stayed there for seven weeks, making it the longest-running chart-topper by a female rap artist of all time. Further vindication came when Lizzo performed at the 2019 MTV Music Awards, segueing from Truth Hurts into Good As Hell in a triumphant medley, leading to Good As Hell also going viral and becoming a chart hit three years after it was originally released. Lizzo had taken a strange route to the top but she had finally arrived. The following year, she collected three Grammys including Best Pop Solo Performance for Truth Hurts, released three years earlier, and she was also nominated for Best New Artist, a mere five years after her major label debut! 

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Watching out for the Big Grrrls

Lizzo’s initial success was driven by her music, not her looks or personality, but her sudden visibility as a breakthrough musical artist meant that women who looked like Lizzo saw themselves being represented in the entertainment industry as beautiful, sexually confident people for the first time and this greatly enhanced her burgeoning popularity. That lack of representation is something Lizzo was familiar with herself, telling US Weekly in 2019, “I wasn’t really given the opportunities or the privileges to feel like a sex symbol when I was growing up. I was a fat, black girl in Houston and I didn’t see myself in magazines… I was like, ‘You know what, bitch? I want to be a sex symbol!’ I said that to myself when I was like 22, 23. And I really started to embrace the sexiness about me, not just the cuteness or the beauty. I started to work on it more and more and I realized the vulnerability that I show when I’m naked is my greatest strength.”

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Fans agreed, and Lizzo’s star has continued to rise ever since. It comes as no surprise that the entertainment industry has beaten a path to her door, with Amazon Studios inking a deal to produce TV shows with the new star; the first of these, 2022’s Lizzo’s Watch Out For The Big Grrrls, has been an enormous critical and commercial success and scooped an Emmy in the Outstanding Competition Program category. The show features 13 contestants auditioning for a position in the Big Grrrls, Lizzo’s troupe of plus-size backing dancers who have been supporting the singer on stage since the Big Grrrl Small World era and, typically for Lizzo, it breaks many of the established rules of reality competition programs; the mood is relentlessly positive rather than adversarial, none of the contestants are ridiculed, and in some weeks nobody is ejected from the show. It is a competition program that seeks to create winners, not losers, and in that regard it is a true reflection of Lizzo’s own ideology, not just of body positivity, but of celebrating everything about the people who have elevated her into a position of fame. As she told British Vogue in 2019, “I’m not trying to sell you me. I’m trying to sell you, you,” and this insistence on holding a mirror up to her fanbase so they not only see Lizzo, but also themselves is the key to this True Superhero’s enormous success.

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