{"id":2737,"date":"2026-06-16T14:38:42","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T14:38:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bestusamoverss.com\/?p=2737"},"modified":"2026-06-16T14:38:42","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T14:38:42","slug":"pop-albums-are-drowning-in-narrative-what-happens-when-we-go-in-cold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bestusamoverss.com\/?p=2737","title":{"rendered":"Pop albums are drowning in ‘narrative.’ What happens when we go in cold?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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with the music of the bedazzled pop star Lizzo, drop into “Too Nice,” from her new album , and it won’t take you long to spot a difference. Her last big splash, the infectious, chart-topping 2022 single “About Damn Time,” was upbeat in the face of stressors: “Bitch, I might be better!” she whooped. “Too Nice,” comparatively, is fed up and scorned, downbeat and reactive. “You said ‘I love you and I miss you’ last time we talked \/ Now you playin’ on the internet like you forgot,” goes one verse. “You’d still be workin’ at the mall if it wasn’t for m\u0435 \/ Sorry if I’m soundin’ broken, but you tried to break m\u0435.” For much of her defining run, Lizzo was emblematic of an idyllic extramusical experiment, her songs a wellspring for enthusiasm. “Everyone looks to an artist for something more than just the music and that message of being comfortable in my own skin is number one for me,” she told in 2015. But take ‘s music as a clear indication: She hasn’t been truly comfortable for a while.<\/p>

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Lizzo was a benchmark of the 2010s zeitgeist, a rapper who emerged into a pop idol on the slow-burn conquest of the 2017 megahit “Truth Hurts,” which topped the Hot 100 and won a Grammy. In building a kind of self-care empire, she went from viral phenom to feel-good success story \u2014 a vivacious sex- and body-positive entertainer who sang and rapped, twerked while playing the flute, and did it all with gusto. She closed the decade with 2019’s , her major-label debut and the key time capsule of her effervescent songcraft and tremendous cultural footprint. “An artist’s identity and how it is narrativized are by necessity inextricable from their work, making the task of assessing an album’s merit increasingly layered and complex,” the critic Rawiya Kameir wrote in a Pitchfork review of that record, musing on its perceived genrelessness. “In fact, Lizzo have a genre, something like empowerment-core, and she offers songs for an astonishing array of demographics: thick women, independent women, women in general, anyone struggling with body image, people who are single, people who wish to become single, etc. Lizzo’s music performs an important social function.”<\/p>

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\"Lizzo:<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n
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Tiny Desk <\/h3>\n

Lizzo: Tiny Desk Concert<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n\n<\/div>\n\n<\/div>\n\n

As a result of speaking for her underserved coalition, Lizzo’s principles sometimes came to lead her music. She got backlash for letting Oprah use her song in a Weight Watchers commercial, and was called out for ableism after using the word “spaz” in another. In August 2023, her “empowerment-core” and its social function were altogether tested, as some of Lizzo’s former dancers sued the artist and her production company, alleging a hostile work environment that included weight-shaming, sexual harassment and assault. A similar suit from a clothing designer who worked on Lizzo’s tours followed that September; Lizzo denied the claims in each case. She lost weight in the aftermath of that episode, writing in a 2025 Substack post on the rise of GLP-1s and the resurgence of skinny culture, “I had been the subject of a vicious scandal, and it felt like the whole world turned its back on me.”<\/p>

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to retroactively treat Lizzo’s early career as virtue-signaling in the wake of these events, though some have. Yet it does also feel like some air has been let out of the balloon since her last album, 2022’s . She came to power at a defining juncture for millennial feminism, embodying that era’s intersectional girlboss ideal. It is understandably harder for her whole thing to resonate as intensely today, as the rah-rah, all-caps energy of the ’10s has given way to a lowercase, post-COVID reticence.<\/p>

Even Lizzo has conceded losing ground, presenting a two-pronged explanation in response to a since-deleted post on X asking where all her fans went. “,” she wrote. “” It’s only natural for an artist to plumb her life experiences for her art, even more so when facing career-threatening adversity. But the atmosphere around Lizzo has changed dramatically, the accusations have dented her image and artistic standing no matter whom you believe, and anyone familiar with even the broad contours of her story must reckon with that in her songs.<\/p>\n

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