In a tearful Instagram Live, the singer explained how comments about ‘Rumors’ had been affecting her
The video for “Rumors”, Lizzo’s latest track with Cardi B, depicts her as a literal goddess: dressed as a gold plated Greek muse. It’s been watched over 12 million times, but the singer’s recent success has sadly been dampened by a slew of racist and fatphobic comments which have been left underneath the video.
Taking to Instagram Live, Lizzo tearfully spoke about her reaction to the negativity, stressing how hard she’s been working recently: “I’ve been working triple time, quadruple time, doing 12 hours a day of promos, and interviews, doing studio, going studio with a fucking root canal – got a root canal twice, gone to the studio and wrote songs. Shooting (a) documentary,” she said. “Putting so much loving energy into the world.”
“Sometimes I feel like the world just don’t love me back,” she continued, “I’m grateful, I just feel like I’m seeing negativity directed towards me in the weirdest way. People say shit about me that just doesn’t even make sense. It’s fatphobic. It’s racist, and it’s hurtful. If you don’t like my music, cool, if you don’t like “Rumors” as a song, cool, but a lot of people don’t like me because of the way I look.”
“What I won’t accept is y’all doing this to Black women over and over and over again, especially us big Black girls. When we don’t fit into the box that you want to put us in, you just unleash hatred onto us. It’s not cool. I’m doing this shit for the big Black women in the future who just want to live their lives without being scrutinised or put into boxes.”
She promised that from here onwards, she would be ”focus(ing) on positive comments – I don’t have time for your negativity, your internalised self-hatred that you project onto me with your racism and your fatphobia. I don’t have time for it.”
Cardi B took to Twitter in support of her song’s co-star, writing: “Stop trying to say the song is flopping to dismiss a woman’s emotions on bullying or acting like they need sympathy. The song is top ten on all platforms. Body shaming and callin’ her mammy is mean and racist as fuck.” In a following tweet, she added: “Whether you skinny, big, plastic, they going to always try to put their insecurities on you. Remember these are nerds looking at the popular table.”
Watch a recording of Lizzo’s Instagram Live below.