Lizzo has been able to dive into many different forms of music and she excels at all of them. There may be a really good reason for that as well as in a new interview, Lizzo said she felt compelled to keep her love of Radiohead “hidden” to avoid being “made fun of” by her classmates.
She said: “It was a Black school, mostly Black and brown, Caribbean, I had Nigerian friends… They were all listening to what was on the radio: Usher, Destiny’s Child, Ludacris, and I was into Radiohead’s OK Computer.”
She said she “kept it hidden, even when I was in a rock band, because I didn’t want to be made fun of by my peers — they’d yell, ‘White girl!’ Also, I was wearing these flared bell-bottoms with embroidery down it — and they’d say, ‘You look like a white girl, why do you want to look like a hippie?’ I wanted to be accepted so bad; not fitting in really hurt.”
After a few years, Lizzo was ready to be more open about her love of all forms of music as she said: “My first singing voice was a rock voice in my progressive rock band when I was 19 or 20… very Mars Volta–influenced. That gave me the [vocal] power I’ve got now. It wasn’t until 2015 when I realized I have a very powerful singing voice with a lot of soul.”
Lizzo then spoke about playing a crystal flute once owned by former president and slaveowner James Madison, which prompted a conservative backlash from trolls.
Lizzo said: “When people look back at the crystal flute, they’re going to see me playing it. They’re going to see that it was owned by James Madison, but they’re going to see how far we’ve had to come for someone like me to be playing it in the nation’s capital, and I think that that’s a cool thing. I don’t want to leave history in the hands of people who uphold oppression and racism. My job as someone who has a platform is to reshape history.”
A great message from Lizzo.
