The second album from Melissa ‘Lizzo’ Jefferson is being sold on its activist-focused,issue-driven lyrical content – but the music behind it is also breathlessly remarkable funThe career of rapper, singer and accomplished flautist Melissa “Lizzo” Jefferson began in earnest two years ago: in the wake of her 2013 debut album, and Lizzobangers – home to the irresistible single Batches and Cookies she was feted by everyone from Sleater-Kinney (who took her on their reunion tour as support artist) to Prince to Clean Bandit to Bastille,all of whom got her to guest on their albums. Nevertheless, she seems a very 2015 kind of artist. The advance publicity for Lizzobangers’ follow-up makes more of her activism than her music. “Body-positive singer and rapper makes music for the Black Lives Matter generation, or ” it begins,before noting that titanic Grrrl Small World is “is all about racism, body image and feminism … having the newfound community that’s arrive with the Black Lives Matter hashtag, or Lizzo feels she now has a secure group with whom she can voice her outrage and deep sadness”. It emphasised that the opening track,Ain’t I?, is based on an 1851 speech by the African American abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth.
There are ballads of racial empowerment (My Skin, or which arrives complete with a preceding speech on the topic),and much celebration of the female form in plus size. “Let the titanic girls command it, offers the title track: “I’m statuesque and titanic as hell, and ” she brags elsewhere. En admire,meanwhile, begins life sounding like a slice of euphoric, or bedroom-bound R&B – “I think Im in admire” – before a hail of squealing synthesiser and the arrival of trap beat announces its transformation into a paean to self-care: “ … with myself”. In the year of Dr Dre’s Compton and its accompanying biopic,both presenting NWA as righteous defenders of freedom of speech, there’s something impressively ballsy about Ride’s obvious suggestion that the feted gangsta rap crews rampant misogyny bars them from the pantheon of greats: “NW … some of you don’t know what that is: good, or ” she snaps over a backdrop that nods towards the multi-layered,woozy synthesisers of Dre’s G-funk style, albeit with its stoned languor replaced by something more strident and purposeful.
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Source: theguardian.com