Album Review: BITCH by Lizzo

Lizzo is funnier and meaner than she is grand. The jokes and grudges hold up where the big self-claims sag.

Courtesy of Nice Life/Atlantic.

Most pop singers sing the jealousy out of a song before the chorus, or direct it at an easy villain that you can take the part of. It’s usually a dirtier, duller feeling-late-night screen-staring and passive-aggressive scorekeeping-that would rarely make it onto a big pop record with the discomfort intact. Lizzo does it, leaving the discomfort in is what she’s best at here, a more capable writer of obsession and writer of spite than grand statements of self-worth. Songs written with grand statements of self-worth, or anything vaguely related to them, suck. A song built on one ugly, boring feeling gnawed over for long enough turns unreasonably good. She keeps returning to hooks.

The best conceit here belongs to “She Stole My Man”: it should collapse, then keeps finding new space. The man doesn’t know her. “Have you ever loved a man that you ain’t never met? The man that I know, ain’t know me,” she asks, “2 am, I’m looking at him on the internet/4 am, I’m still awake and still don’t know him yet.” A picture of him with someone else gets her forever hatred: “I hate that bitch forever.” “But honestly, I let her.” It’s just better than you think it’ll be, despite the cheesy production: “Whose hair is this” is similarly masterful from the opposite perspective, all investigative confidence, narrowing it down based on color (“I’ve been blonde, brunette/But I ain’t been red”) and physical clues (“My lashes in your bathroom, and my glitter on your sheets”) then deflating the entire pursuit of him, and with it the chase, in the final line, “Oh shit, I did have red hair last week.”

Her kiss-offs operate in the opposite mode to the comedy. There’s no punch line; just a grievance stating and leaving itself where it stands. “Too Nice” lays out one way friendship and stops: “Then when the bill comes, everybody leaves/I pay the check, but no one checks on me.” Meanness pops without foreplay: “You’d still be workin’ at the mall if it wasn’t for me,” followed by a barely-apology. The piano-driven “A Toast” offers a toast to “waste of time,” and the energy she puts “into these people,” sending a little off, “Still love you though”—a stranger-truer place for holding a grudge than outright venom. “Like a Crime” begins with an outlandish, impossible premise: “Me and my period fighting to the death/She just might win if I don’t take another breath,” but moves into deadpan fact reporting.

Heartbreak becomes mystical on “Little Black Cat,” a superstition-themed breakdown. Black widows, a psychic’s accurate premonitions, a nursery rhyme: “Bad little black cat ain’t bringin’ you back.” The absurdity stacks: “Amethyst on the dash in the HOV lane,” “Full moon lightin’ up your ex at three.” The fantasy reconciliation devolves to child-speak: “Watch a little Hulu and split me in two, two/Like zooma, zooma, zoom, zoom.” “Sexy Ladies” shifts the ‘woo’ to a D.C. Go-go groove with the help of Tay Keith; UCB’s “Sexy Lady” sample handles the track. Lizzo responds as a clique of women—rather than rivals: “Love when real bitches win, it do somethin’ to me.” In the third verse, she’s encouraging a girlfriend through rough times: “When you going through the bullshit, I’ma hold you/Girls night, put your hair up in some rollers.”

There are two places on the title track where the writing gets thinner. The grievance at the heart of it is legitimate—Lizzo’s “been up since 6 a.m,” working her “A to Z,” wear down to “You want me to be everything except a human being,” and the phrase “I ain’t lost sleep since I slept in my car” has the offhand toughness the funny songs run on. The song cedes its largest beat and biggest chorus to Meredith Brooks, lifting “I’m a bitch, I’m a lover/I’m a child, I’m a mother” straight from 1997, and the bridge draws on lines that have been popular for years, “I’m not a bitch, I’m that, I’m that bitch.” Her verses are better than the hook she borrowed to carry them.

On “That GRRRL,” Lizzo sounds most convincing when she stops chanting. The hook, “Say you don’t like a big bitch, don’t trip,” is a sturdy insult that does very little work. It’s a thing that you would have a crowd yell back. The verses are where it gets closer to the bone—“Everything is bigger outta Houston, Texas, but they call me fun size”—before she stops singing for a spoken section that has nothing to soften the thing that she quietly says out loud: “You can be fat, and you can be Black/You can’t be no fat, Black bitch, man/That’s what it takes to be me.” It’s the most straightforwardly pointed thing on her fifth album, and when it comes out with no embellishment, the chant feels like an afterthought.

When Lizzo aims for the saccharine or motivational, she writes by the book. “Don’t Make Me Love U” is the same old ultimatum, but “I’m a big fine woman, don’t lose your place in line” has a little more sting to it than the chorus around it. “Happy 2 Be” is a straight thank you, but for one verse that states depression without flattery, “I broke in Houston, Texas, couldn’t get off the sofa/The thing about depression, you think your life is over,” a reportage on rock bottom that the rest of the song just can’t live up to. “Goodmorning!” finishes the pep-talk way, “Time to get your ass up/The day is waiting for ya,” and is redeemed only by an image of not getting out of pajamas for no reason, “Running on empty, but no one can tell/Whoever gon’ see me, gon’ see the Chanel.” This single unflattering detail carries more weight than the platitude it’s part of.

Above Average (★★★☆☆)

Favorite Track(s): “She Stole My Man,” “Whose Hair Is This,” “Too Nice”