“Come on. I’m very good at music, man,”In an interview with Zane Lowe, Lizzo stated this as if it were something unstated or understated that had to be said loudly.
You know, she’s not a liar.
So let’s just say that Beyonce has her work cut out for her. Not that this month ain’t big enough for both of the household mononyms that want to come at us with new music, but the line on Bey’s forthcoming record is that it might mark a return to dance vibes and good times. Now, in her great tradition of being MoreLizzo has released an album that provides all the poppy, clubby endorphins a person could need for one summer. Please, by all means, bring on the second course in a couple of weeks… but anyone who bites into “Special”you will already feel pretty satisfied with having fun.
This is the album where Lizzo really comes out as bi-… as in bi-pop/R&B, or bi-soul-and-bubblegum. It’s nearly downright bi-national, in a sense, with Swedish mastermind Max Martin and a few of his friends coming in to help great American record-makers like Ricky Reed. Throw in one short but potent track that has Londoner Mark Ronson as her collaborator and you’ve got an international rogues’ gallery of producers who are nearly superstars in their own right — all of whom prove smart at doing what they do best without ever looking to nudge the singer an inch from center spotlight. The album is almost complete in a sweet, symbiotic nexus. The star sounds as conversational as she can be and as quotable as the world needs her to sound. However, broad musical hooks play as important a role in the overall picture as her personality.
In other words, it won’t HurtIf you spent half-year stuck to her “Watch Out for the Big Grrrls” show, but you’ll also be fine if you missed the whole last four years of Lizzo-love because the time machine dropped you off directly from Studio 54.
What’s missing from “Special,”But not to its detriment: truth hurting. Ow-ees, of any kind, are virtually non-existent within this all-ebullient collection. But the memory is frequently invoked. It’s funny to hear the star saying she once came close to starting the album with “a sad song about love and loss” because not only is such a song not on the starting block, whatever that was didn’t make the cut at all. It takes till the ninth number on a 12-track album to even get a slow song… and that slow song is “Naked.” We probably don’t have to tell you that Lizzo is not about to get melancholy about nudity. In several of the tracks, she does go so far as to question whether the world or a lover will embrace her body image as much as she has — but she doesn’t question it for long. “I’ve seen every part of me and, babe, I can’t erase it,” she sings, in a falsetto that’s usually sweet and pretty by her brasher vocal standards. “If I get on top of you, you promise to embrace it?”
And there’s your closest thing to a slow, sad song, which is not very close at all. For just about all the remaining tracks, she’s straining a confessional cheerfulness into different kinds of dance-oriented tracks, many of them recalling more organic distant eras of R&B, a few more in the compressed here-and-now. Anyone who has listened to the album so far will be aware of the strong neodisco influence. “About Damn Time”will already know. “Everybody’s Gay” may put you in mind of how successfully Dua Lipa has mined that field even before you look at the credits and see that Ian Kirkpatrick, one of the ”Don’t Start Now” creators, joins Reed and Pop Wansel as a writer-producer. This track is sure to be a hit on any dance floor, regardless of where it’s played.
Ronson is expected to make a contribution to 21st-century disco, even if it’s only a handful of tracks. “Break Up Twice,”This is the subtle mix of soul and girl-group pop that Amy Winehouse fans might be hoping for. You can even hear a slight echo of Winehouse’s stand-by-your-man ethos in Lizzo’s lyrics (“When you came to my barbecue, they all gave you attitude / Well, shoot, every reason they mad at you is true”Although the vibe is more hopeful and less torturous,“It would be a shame not to see this through / Who gon’ put up with your Gemini shit like I do?”).
This is not the right time to be a skeptic, because the album opens with “The Sign,” a proper introduction to a record — and an outsize persona — if ever there was one: “Hi, motherfucker, did you miss me? / I’ve been home since 2020 / I’ve been twerkin’ and makin’ smoothies / It’s called healing.” There is a big part of Lizzo’s charisma in four lines: part Cardi B-style cuss-master, part Oprah-ready self-help guru, part sex goddess, part the master of the hilariously mundane detail.
But we can’t stress enough how none of this is belabored, and how she doesn’t pause for applause any time she tosses off one of the three dozen or so funny aphorisms that are already getting their own tweetstorms. You can read more “Special,” Lizzo is establishing that she really prefers things small and compact… in matters of her current music, if nowhere else. The 12-song album is a fast one-minute long, with the shortest song at 2:01 and longest at an impressive 3:36. The blink-and-you’ll-almost-miss-it quality applies to the often furious pace of the poppiest Swede-aphilic numbers as well as pace of her lyrical Bartlett’s candidates.
Even “2 Be Loved (Am I Ready),” the most maximal of the Max tracks, which has an old-fashoned Big Key Change going into the last chorus, doesn’t longer a second longer than necessary after that updraft. Lizzo doesn’t like being laden down with cumbersome song lengths any more than she does with, you know, clothes.
There’s a certain hall-of-mirrors quality to how we relate to Lizzo at this point: We’re affirming of her being so self-affirming, and now it feels like she’s affirming our affirmation. It’s possible that this all leads to solipsism, and greater levels of heroine worship. However, that is one of the most positive aspects about it. “Special” is how, even as self-focused as it is, there’s a good share of implicit and explicit empathy (which you may have already felt in her Amazon show) that makes the whole thing feel like a “We Will Survive”blast of potentially life-saving or even day-saving medicine. That is what you will get. “I Love You, Bitch,” which may be taken as some kind of lesbian anthem — and no one’s loss if it is — if you haven’t been paying attention to how universal a term of endearment “bitch”Approximately 10,000 times of the term were recorded on her album.
Another song of friendship “Birthday Girl” — a track in which the Monsters & Strangerz production team goes a little more modern with the electronic beat — may supplant the Beatles’ “Birthday”The most loved gift-opening song of the new era. (Patty Hill, Mildred J. Hill, beware! She may be looking out for you too.
This album is the perfect Lizzo album. It’s not filled with tense ballads and bathos, making it an emotional blast as well as a great listen. With just a handful of listens under the belt, it’s hard to guess how many of these songs might endure through the years, beyond the immediate mood lift they offer on day one. Will “Special” take us to December and beyond… and, more specifically, to Grammy season? Listen, it’s hard to imagine this isn’t immediately locked in as one of the leading album of the year candidates. On another day, maybe we’ll think that the lack of ballad showcases keeps this from being the career peak-to-date it feels like in the moment. It remains to be seen if the record will still be Ms. in years to come. Right may be anyone’s guess, but it is definitely Ms. Right Now.