If you aren’t a Lizzo diehard, you likely only encountered up to four pieces of intel about her last year: She hinted at quitting the music business. She had a weight-loss drug named after her in the South Park Ozempic special. She endorsed Kamala Harris for president. And she was removed as a defendant from a sexual- and racial-harassment lawsuit brought by her backup dancers (her touring company remains a defendant). It was a paucity of activity for the 36-year old singer-songwriter, rapper, flautist, and TV personality. It was also the start of a canceled-arc rebound. Laughing maniacally after spray-painting “Bye bitch” over the cover of her 2022 album Special on Instagram earlier this month signaled her eagerness to move on, while onlookers and admirers speculated over what she was happy to get away from. The post was probably only telegraphing the upcoming release of a new single, “Love in Real Life,” but the wrong guesses in the comments — “So, all the self-love was a lie?” — spoke as much to a fraught moment in her career as the measured messaging in the polished track and video. Lizzo hovers in several kinds of limbo, able to declare innocence while stressing the case is ongoing, optimistic about losing weight while facing facile suggestions that diet and exercise are hypocritical acts for the body-positive, and seeking forward motion while saddled with expectations to churn out the kind of uplifting song that finds its way into ads with sped-up side-effect advisory readings.
“Love in Real Life” sees the artist molt into a manicured malcontent. It’s a rocker, a ripple in the succession of opening-salvo singles otherwise documenting growth from rap blog to pop-chart sensation. 2013’s “Batches & Cookies” reached for attention though spitfire virtuosity. 2019’s “Juice” wormed into appreciation in the plastic Calvin Harris dance-pop years, approaching from a place of real reverence for funk and post-disco innovators. 2022’s “About Damn Time” modeled itself after classic end-of-the-workweek disco standards. “Love in Real Life” toes a similar line. Lyrics haunted by nebulous adversity seek the better time waiting on the other side. The track, produced by Blake Slatkin and longtime Lizzo collaborator Ricky Reed, is a placid Strokes-y thumper whose riff periodically breaks free from its cage during a chorus that kicks the aughts-rock shtick back a few decades into roadhouse territory. It’s the usual aesthetic — multi-hyphenate pop, soul, and other sounds bound by keen awareness of their own ’60s and ’70s antecedents — with the particles rearranged. When the vocals cut loose and the guitars jump out in the mix, “Love” reaffirms the versatility of Black women in music, like Betty Davis or Donna Summer. But as a feat of marketing, the single lands like a push to get you to think about that instead of negative news. The video threads this needle indelicately.
A bit “Beat It” and a bit “When I Think of You” with a helping of “Thriller,” the clip plants the artist in dance scenes brimming with the horror of being perceived and aggressively lurked. It’s a fascinating deployment of combative choreography. Fighting for space in a rock club swiftly taking darkly supernatural airs, Lizzo delivers a “get these zombies out of my face unless they know how to party” routine to dovetail with lyrics about checking out of social obligations and into somebody’s bar. She is literally and physically struggling to set boundaries and change her narrative. Pitching one straight to the dives, where past singles have maintained the traction of a mountain goat, “Love” reveals an artist-and-producer team in touch with their formula. The song gets that people come to Lizzo for zesty stress relief and works at a less Celexian presentation, highlighting how much she’d love to get back to serving the customer base. (The South Park bit terrorized via mock advertisement to prey on the real-world TV fluff Lizzo’s late-2010s singles figured into.) But the lawsuit looms like all the stuff there’s no way in hell we’ll hear Drake address with litigation pending. These artists want you to know they’re getting over the rough patch; they’re carrying out easygoing genre excursions that underscore the idea. Did the blues-rock bop need the winking, pedestrian pop-rock bits crowding it? “Of course,” a hundred thousand equivalent units may one day retroactively say. “Canned goods move.”