Lizzo gave a TED Talk on the black history and positive body image of twerking. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to TED Twerk,”She laughed at the start.
The rapper notes that the August 2021 TED Talk is the first time she’s been in front of a crowd since March 2020; she’s since performed at a handful of shows, including this past weekend’s Firefly Festival. The rapper opened the talk by discussing how she feels about being a woman. “through the movement of twerking, I discovered my ass is my greatest asset.”
“I used to hate my ass, believe it or not. I have my father’s shape and my mother’s side, because it’s big and long,” Lizzo said. “I used to think that only asses like J.Lo’s or Beyonce’s could be famous, I never thought that could happen to me. I always felt like my body type was never the right one or the desirable one growing up. I grew up in an era where having a big ass wasn’t mainstream.”
She continued, “I felt like the ass odds were against me, but baby, this badonkadonkdonk is going places. My ass has been the topic of conversation, my ass has been in magazines, Rihanna gave my ass a standing ovation. Yes, my booty, my least favorite part of my body.”
Lizzo talked about her first experience of people twerking in a Houston nightclub, where they were surrounded by adoring fans. “moving their booty to New Orleans bounce and I was like, ‘How are they doing that?’ It was incredible to me.”As she learned her craft, she realized that “My ass could do magic.”
Over the 13-minute TED Twerk, Lizzo goes into a detailed history of the dance, tracing it back to West African culture — where it was “a celebration of joy and religious worship” — up through hip-hop music and on to social media apps like TikTok, which now threaten the “erasure of blackness”Twerking.
“Black people carried the origins of this dance through our DNA, through our blood, through our bones. We made twerking the global cultural phenomenon it has become today,” Lizzo said. “Now, as a big black woman who has ass, who can twerk, who has been doing it her whole life, I kind of think I’m an expert on the subject. I want to add to the classical etymology of this dance because it matters. Black people will not be erased from the creation, the history, and the innovation to twerking.”