celebrity

"I’m tired of the bullsh*t." Lizzo's performance was the best 4 minutes of the VMAs.

 

Amongst her fellow performers at the MTV Video Music Awards, Lizzo stood out like a beacon of bling. Yellow, dazzling bling.

As she performed “Truth Hurts” and “Good as Hell” at the New Jersey based awards show, with a ginormous inflatable ass wobbling behind her, Lizzo used her platform to, simply, make the audience feel good.

The rapper and singer, who has achieved a new level of prominence within the past year, performed her popular songs while surrounded by her backup dancers whom, like Lizzo herself, don’t replicate the quintessential women Hollywood tends to triumph – all of them women of colour; all of them proudly displaying their different shapes and sizes.

lizzo vma performance
How could this not make you feel good as hell? Image: Getty.
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As the cameras cut to the audience members, where Queen Latifah amongst others were standing, singing and swaying, the energy in the room was palpable.

"Let me talk to y'all for a second," Lizzo said as she stepped onto a pink platform, donning a sequined yellow leotard. "I’m tired of the bullsh*t. And I don’t need to know your story to know that you’re tired of the bullshit, too.

"It’s so hard trying to love yourself in a world that doesn’t love you back, am I right?" the 31-year-old asked the audience, receiving a loud scream in response. "So I want to take this opportunity right now to just feel good as hell. Because you deserve to feel good as hell. We deserve to feel good as hell!"

lizzo vma performance
"I’m tired of the bullsh*t. And I don’t need to know your story to know that you’re tired of the bullshit, too." Image: Getty.
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For those watching on, seeing a woman be so ferociously fierce in displaying her self-confidence proved to be inspirational.

"I cried like a baby watching Lizzo and all those beautiful black girls whose bodies look just like mine on that stage tonight," singer and actor Amber Patrice Riley tweeted.

"Lizzo is incredibly important. She is doing so much to help change the landscape of beauty, and I am so grateful," media personality Nicole Michalik wrote.

Watch a clip of Lizzo's 2019 Video Music Awards performance here. Post continues after video.

Although Lizzo, who's real name is Melissa Jefferson, has been labelled one of 2019's biggest and brightest stars, her success hasn't been overnight. After years of “fighting” to be heard, Lizzo released her first EP Lizzobangers in 2013. She said to V Magazine earlier this year of her sudden and steep rise to stardom, “I feel like I’ve just been marathon training for this my whole life".

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While the amount of people hearing her message has exponentially increased in the past 12 months, her brand never has: She has always stood for universal acceptance.

“My movement is for everyone. It’s about inclusion," she told the V Magazine. "And if I am going to fight what I have been marginalised for, I am going to fight for all marginalised people… Because f*ck boxes; I’m too big to be put in one anyway. I’m a fat bitch.

“I have felt excluded my entire life, from so many things. I have felt excluded from [my] blackness because I wasn’t [culturally] well-read on certain things. I feel like, because of that, I never want anyone [else] to ever feel excluded.”

"It’s not about me being big. It’s about me being me," she added.

And certainly in every performance she does and every song she releases, she shouts her message loudly and proudly.

Now please, excuse me while I go watch her VMAs performance for another 43 times. How can you blame me? It makes me feel good as hell.


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