Doing It For The Big Girls – Lizzo is the Plus-Size Powerhouse the Music Industry Needs

It’s safe to say over the past few years Lizzo has taken the music industry by storm. Known for her self love anthems paired with feel good rhythms, Lizzo has amassed a legion of loyal fans. 

In 2022 Lizzo released her fourth studio album titled ‘Special’, with this era of her career certainly being special indeed, becoming the musicians highest charting album to date. The lead single from the album, ‘About Damn Time’, earning her a Grammy for ‘Record of the Year’. 

‘The Special Tour’ began in September ’22 and is due to end July ’23. The tour is a two and a half hour spectacle showcasing Lizzo’s many talents, from belting notes to twerking to flute playing. Having gone to a show myself, I don’t think it would be possible to leave the arena not feeling, as Lizzo puts it, ‘Good As Hell’. A sentiment couldn’t be reflected more by fans I spoke to who also attended shows. 

“It was very colourful, very happy and accepting, everyone was so respectful of everyone else,” Maud, a nineteen year old student from France, told me. “I went alone and just spent the whole concert dancing, everyone was so nice, it felt like a big family”. 

In between songs Lizzo takes the opportunity to ensure her fans feel special. She hands out roses to fans after her song “If You Love Me”, a stripped back acoustic song about the importance choosing to unconditionally love one another starting with ourselves. 

Lizzo goes onto spend 10 minutes of the show to giving members of the audience their time to shine, taking time to have quick conversations with fans in the audience from those close to the stage, all the way to the nosebleeds, their happy faces projected onto the big screen. 

Shyanne, aged twenty-three, attended the tours first London show at the O2 Arena, at which she has the experience of a lifetime when her sign reading “learnt the choreo just in case you need me to dance for you”, caught the attention of Lizzo and her team. 

“[Lizzo] was like ‘here’s what I want to happen, when we sing ‘About Damn Time’, I want her to be right here’ and pointed at the front of the stage”, Shyanne explains to me over zoom, “it was amazing, it was so cool!”

“It just made me feel really, really happy because she gets it. She gets what it’s like to have someone you love so much and take inspiration from acknowledge you even in the slightest way, it was amazing.”

Lizzo went on to repost the video on her Instagram, @lizzobeeating, with the heartfelt caption: “Rewind to the summer of ’07, I learned the entire Beyoncé ‘Get Me Bodied’ choreography…it literally saved me at a time I was dealing with depression & loss… then I remember doing the ‘Single Ladies’ choreo at the Mrs Carter tour, and she looked at me! It was a brief moment but absolutely changed the world for me. Fast forward to last night when this young girl danced ‘About Damn Time’ (LIVE VERSION) with me & the big grrls. What she doesn’t know is I cried backstage. To know I mean to her what my favourite artist meant to me is so deeply touching.” 

The underlying message of self love, body inclusivity, and representation is one not only reflected onstage by Lizzo herself, but her super group of plus sized dancers she performs with; affectionately known as ‘The Big Grrrls”. Many of which were selected on Lizzo’s Amazon Prime series “Lizzo’s Watch Out For The Big Grrrls”, a reality competition show in which plus sized dancers competition to become back up dancers for ‘The Special tour’. 

“All I want to do is share a story that hasn’t been given the opportunity to be shared”

“This whole show is me receiving a platform, being on a stage and not just taking it up myself, but reaching out and pulling people up on it with me and sharing the stage with them.” Lizzo expressed, in an interview with Variety. “Quite literally! I share the stage with these women. And I hope that the industry can see the value in bigger bodies, darker skinned bodies and getting them jobs, because we are valuable, we are talented and we can do anything just as good as anybody else.” 

Despite Lizzo’s feel good message, she receives plenty of criticism, which more often than not is in relation to her size. Some criticising that the acceptance of plus-size bodies in mainstream media, will only encourage impressionable people to gain weight by choice. Criticism regarding Lizzo is often deeply rooted in fatphobic rhetoric, which the Boston Medical Center defines as, “the implicit and explicit bias of overweight individuals that is rooted in a sense of blame and presumed moral failing”. 

Meanwhile, Lizzo’s fans agree that people are too concerned about celebrities bodies, “[people] have an expectation of what an artist should look like, and the minute somebody doesn’t meet that expectation they’ve like ‘Oh, they’re rubbish, they can’t be good’, but they are.”, Shyanne explains, “Why are you so focused on somebody’s size, somebody’s skin tone? Just appreciate the music.”

There is legacy of plus sized musicians who certainly paved the way and broke down barriers within the industry. And Lizzo wasn’t the first, and unfortunately won’t be the last plus size musician to face such scrutiny regarding body type. 

To understand why Lizzo’s success in the music industry is something to be celebrated, we need to look back at how fatphobia has impacted to way in which plus-sized artists have been treated in the past. 

Cass Elliot, most known as the lead female vocalist of ‘The Mama’s & The Papas’, with hits such as “Monday, Monday” and ”California Dreaming”, received tireless scrutiny for her weight throughout her career, which continues to tarnish her legacy almost five decades after her death. 

Aged just 32, Cass was found dead in her London apartment, the cause of death being ruled a heart attack. A ham sandwich, found on the bedside table next to her body would spark a shameless rumour, that Cass Elliot had died choking on a ham sandwich. 

Sue Cameron, a proclaimed friend of Cass’, who was at the time a columnist for the Hollywood Reporter, was the one to report rumour. In a 2020 interview with People, Cameron claims that Cass’ manager, Allan Carr, was the one who told her to make the report on the ham sandwich, in  hopes that said rumour would distract against any talk of substance abuse. Carr believing at the time that substance abuse was the cause of her death. 

While the sandwich rumour seemed to have been a spur of the moment attempt to protect Cass’ legacy, the rumour still caused harm to in its own way. “It’s been hard for my family with the sandwich rumour,” Cass’ daughter Owen told The Guardian. “One last slap against the fat lady.”

Another way in which plus sized artists have been mistreated within the industry is though the use of ‘ghost-singing’. 

Similar to the idea of ghostwriting, ‘ghost-singing’ which can be loosely defined as the idea of another persons vocals being used on a song that has been credited with another artists name or likeness. The use of ‘ghost-singing’ within the industry lends itself to the erasure of plus size artists in the mainstream, in which their voice is taken and slapped onto a slimmer body often without the original artists knowledge or consent.

An artist of the 90s who, through no fault of their own, fell victim to ‘ghost-singing’s’ clutches, was American singer Martha Wash. Her powerhouse vocals becoming somewhat of a cultural phenomenon in the dance anthem, “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)” by C+C Music Factory. Despite her vocals belting one of the most recognisable phrases in music, Wash was left uncredited and without royalties. 

Her voice continued to become one of the most recognisable within the 90s dance music scene, her distinct vocals continuing being used in anthems such as, Black Box’s “Everybody Everybody” and “Strike It Up” as well as, “(You’re My One and Only) True Love” by Seduction, to name a few. 

Wash eventually sought justice when she sued both Black Box and C+C Music Factory for lack of vocal credit. Both cases resulted in the introduction of new legislation in which it became mandatory for all vocal credits to be disclosed on records. However, this new legislation didn’t mean the act of ‘ghost-singing’ went away. 

Amber Riley, prior to her big break as Mercedes Jones of the musical comedy-drama ‘Glee, was also a ‘ghost-singer’ for many mainstream artists. Riley opened up about her time as a ‘ghost-singer’ in an interview on the ‘Jennifer Hudson Show’, “some artists couldn’t do what I did in the demo, and they would have me come and imitate that artist to kinda fix vocals”

Riley went onto share how producers were often misleading when it came to how much of her voice would be used in a song, “they used to try to lie and be like ‘oh, its just a background’. No, it’s not, it’s lead. Like I know my voice when I hear it.”

Time and time again we’ve seen plus size musicians being put down or even erased entirely for their fatness. And here we have Lizzo, one of the few plus size artists taking space in mainstream music, who celebrates her body so unapologetically while uplifting those who look like her. She refuses to change herself for the comfort of others, giving those inspired by permission to do the same.  

Lizzo is a direct reminder that a physically healthy body and an aesthetically ‘healthy body’ are two separate ideas, that don’t always correlate in the way society expects them to. With Lizzo being a plus size women, who has the fitness and stamina to perform a two and a half hour choreography dense show. 

“When I was a little girl, all I wanted to see me in the media. Fat like me. Black like me. Beautiful like me,” Lizzo says as she tearfully during her acceptance speech at the 2022 Emmys. “If I could go back and tell little Lizzo something, I would be like, ‘You are gonna see that person but b*tch, it’s gonna have to be you’.”

Images by Megan Ross.