Yet whatever the music sounds like and whoever is listening has no bearing on the fact of who Lizzo is, and who she is is a Black woman. “I’m making music that hopefully makes other people feel good and helps me discover self-love," she said in the same story. "That message I want to go directly to black women, big black women, black trans women. Period.”There’s an existential dilemma that swirls around nearly all Black stars of her caliber, who make the kind of music she makes: They come to be marginalized in a manner that creates an ambient conflict between identity and expression. This is underscored by the industry’s (and, indeed, the country’s) original sins of capitalism and racism. How does one exist as a Black pop musician when pop music has been defined to exclude parts of you?How does one exist as a Black pop musician when pop music has been defined to exclude parts of you?
At its essence and most simple, pop is a hybrid genre; its makeup in any one era is an amalgamation of the popular sounds that define that time. In the past decade, pop has taken most of its cues from electronic and dance via the powerful influence of EDM (and wasn't that really just the final financial frontier of the decades-long theft of dance music?), along with hip-hop (namely trap), and, as always, R&B (especially that of the 80s). But despite the racial roots of such a mixture, today’s pop doesn’t align with Black expression in the popular imagination; its bubbly neon production, escapist tendencies, and chaste, unburdened attitude are at odds with the hypersexual and aggressive stereotypes that tend to inform the white gaze when it comes to Black music. Such elements are also particularly troublesome in the Black Lives Matter era, not least due to the simultaneous, contradictory expectation that popular Black art—especially that of Black women—must also perform its politics explicitly.Today’s effervescent pure pop, say Lizzo’s “Juice” or MNEK’s “Head & Heart,” carries with it the legacy of the "sonic color line," the notion that racial cues exist audibly just as they do visually. Pop remains, perhaps, music’s most racialized space—one that brings race front and center by asking you not to see it at all.Pop remains, perhaps, music’s most racialized space—one that brings race front and center by asking you not to see it at all.
As Greg Tate put it in a 1987 essay about Michael Jackson and his relationship to race, there's a "fine line between a black entertainer who appeals to white people and one who sells out the race in pursuit of white appeal.” This tightrope act is one that has followed Black pop stars through time, with some of the biggest—from Jackson to Prince to Jimi Hendrix to Whitney Houston—facing similar scrutiny. In each case, the prevailing narrative of their careers was one of race transcendence, because that is what pop demands—in spite of the impossibility.In the 80s, the idea of crossing over, as Tate was referring to, was used explicitly to describe a non-white artist who “crossed over” to white audiences. It’s a phrase that’s (thankfully) rarely used openly today, but the concept remains—frequently as a way of describing artists who abandon their sounds of old in favor of what’s popular. In Usher’s shift from R&B chart-topping records like “Nice & Slow” to electro hits like “DJ Got Us Fallin In Love,” Ne-Yo’s move from multi-platinum singles like “So Sick” to splashy clubland jams like “Let Me Love You,” or Alicia Keys’ shift from it-girl R&B releases like “Fallin’” to anthems like “Girl On Fire,” a portion of their original listening audience was alienated. The leap to poppier frontiers brought side eyes from longtime fans who, at best, saw these creative evolutions as not creative at all and, at worst, saw them as cynical cash grabs, an exercise in trading in one cultural audience for another, more lucrative one. (It does little to help when an artist like Pharrell, for example, advances an idea of “new Black” just as he reaches his peak pop moment with “Happy.”)This tightrope act is one that has followed Black pop stars through time, with some of the biggest—from Jackson to Prince to Jimi Hendrix to Whitney Houston—facing similar scrutiny.
Beginning with her 2010 debut album, Pink Friday (with tracks like “Check It Out” and “Super Bass”), and peaking on its follow up, Roman Reloaded (with its slew of quirky records, including lead single “Starships” and “Pound the Alarm”), fans who insisted on keeping her in a pure rap box were miffed by her forays into the bubblegum world of pop. Minaj came to exist in a perpetual state of tug-of-war, where questions of authenticity collided with her own aspirations as well as fans’ desire to lay claim to her. For Black artists, “crossing over” into pop fallaciously suggests that one has made a choice about who one’s people are—a predicament not shared by their white peers, no matter how much those peers dabble in hip-hop or R&B.The world of pop, in its everything and yet nothing state, requires participation in a game that is predicated on stripping Black artists of their identity in order to render them hypervisible and disappear them at once.