Lizzo finds it “very hurtful” that she’s been accused of writing “music for white people”.
The ‘Good As Hell’ hitmaker accused her critics of “diminishing” her identity with the accusation, insisting she makes music which is for “literally everybody and anybody” because she doesn’t want to “gatekeep” her message.
Asked how she feels about the criticism, she told DJ Howard Stern: “[It’s] very hurtful, only because I am a Black woman, and I feel like it really challenges my identity and who I am, and diminishes that, which I think is really hurtful.
“I don’t try to gatekeep my message from people. So all three of those things for me, I’m just like, ‘You don’t even get me at all’.
“And I feel like a lot of people, truthfully, don’t get me – which is why I wanted to do this documentary, because I was like, ‘I feel like y’all don’t understand me, y’all don’t know where I came from…’
“And now I don’t want to answer no more questions about this s***. I want to show the world who I am
The ‘Juice’ singer views her style as “funky, soulful, feel-good music” which has its roots in “a lot of Black music – that was made for Black people – in the ’70s and ’80s.”
Lizzo previously claimed pop music has “racist origins”.
She explained: “I think if people did any research they would see that there was race music and then there was pop music. And race music was their way of segregating Black artists from being mainstream, because they didn’t want their kids listening to music created by Black and brown people because they said it was demonic and yada, yada, yada.
“I think when you think about pop, you think about MTV in the ’80s talking about ‘We can’t play rap music’ or ‘We can’t put this person on our platform because we’re thinking about what people in the middle of America think’ – and we all know what that’s code for.”