A pair of summer “event” records, by Lizzo and the rising artist Imani Imani, offer opposite ways to listen: flooded with backstory, or shrouded in mystery
Lizzo (left) and Imani Imani each released major albums the week of June 1.
Lizzo by Jason Renaud / Imani Imani courtesy of pgLang
hide caption
toggle caption
Lizzo by Jason Renaud / Imani Imani courtesy of pgLang
If you’ve spent any time with the music of the bedazzled pop star Lizzo, drop into “Too Nice,” from her new album Bitch, and it won’t take you long to spot a difference. Her last big splash, the infectious, chart-topping 2022 single “About Damn Time,” was upbeat in the face of stressors: “Bitch, I might be better!” she whooped. “Too Nice,” comparatively, is fed up and scorned, downbeat and reactive. “You said ‘I love you and I miss you’ last time we talked / Now you playin’ on the internet like you forgot,” goes one verse. “You’d still be workin’ at the mall if it wasn’t for mе / Sorry if I’m soundin’ broken, but you tried to break mе.” For much of her defining run, Lizzo was emblematic of an idyllic extramusical experiment, her songs a wellspring for yas queen enthusiasm. “Everyone looks to an artist for something more than just the music and that message of being comfortable in my own skin is number one for me,” she told Billboard in 2015. But take Bitch‘s music as a clear indication: She hasn’t been truly comfortable for a while.
Lizzo was a benchmark of the 2010s zeitgeist, a rapper who emerged into a pop idol on the slow-burn conquest of the 2017 megahit “Truth Hurts,” which topped the Billboard Hot 100 and won a Grammy. In building a kind of self-care empire, she went from viral phenom to feel-good success story — a vivacious sex- and body-positive entertainer who sang and rapped, twerked while playing the flute, and did it all with gusto. She closed the decade with 2019’s Cuz I Love You, her major-label debut and the key time capsule of her effervescent songcraft and tremendous cultural footprint. “An artist’s identity and how it is narrativized are by necessity inextricable from their work, making the task of assessing an album’s merit increasingly layered and complex,” the critic Rawiya Kameir wrote in a Pitchfork review of that record, musing on its perceived genrelessness. “In fact, Lizzo does have a genre, something like empowerment-core, and she offers songs for an astonishing array of demographics: thick women, independent women, women in general, anyone struggling with body image, people who are single, people who wish to become single, etc. Lizzo’s music performs an important social function.”
As a result of speaking for her underserved coalition, Lizzo’s principles sometimes came to lead her music. She got backlash for letting Oprah use her song in a Weight Watchers commercial, and was called out for ableism after using the word “spaz” in another. In August 2023, her “empowerment-core” and its social function were altogether tested, as some of Lizzo’s former dancers sued the artist and her production company, alleging a hostile work environment that included weight-shaming, sexual harassment and assault. A similar suit from a clothing designer who worked on Lizzo’s tours followed that September; Lizzo denied the claims in each case. She lost weight in the aftermath of that episode, writing in a 2025 Substack post on the rise of GLP-1s and the resurgence of skinny culture, “I had been the subject of a vicious scandal, and it felt like the whole world turned its back on me.”
It would be unfair to retroactively treat Lizzo’s early career as virtue-signaling in the wake of these events, though some have. Yet it does also feel like some air has been let out of the balloon since her last album, 2022’s Special. She came to power at a defining juncture for millennial feminism, embodying that era’s intersectional girlboss ideal. It is understandably harder for her whole thing to resonate as intensely today, as the rah-rah, all-caps energy of the ’10s has given way to a lowercase, post-COVID reticence.
Even Lizzo has conceded losing ground, presenting a two-pronged explanation in response to a since-deleted post on X asking where all her fans went. “the industry changed so much in the last 3 yrs. streaming replaced radio & I was a radio darling,” she wrote. “That’s how my fans discovered my music. Not to mention the very obvious & public attack on my career changed things.” It’s only natural for an artist to plumb her life experiences for her art, even more so when facing career-threatening adversity. But the atmosphere around Lizzo has changed dramatically, the accusations have dented her image and artistic standing no matter whom you believe, and anyone familiar with even the broad contours of her story must reckon with that in her songs.
YouTube
Listening to Bitch, I could not escape all the history, of which even the title is a not-so-subtle acknowledgement. “So here’s a toast to wasted time / And all the energy I put into these people,” Lizzo sings over a sad piano rumble on the opener. “I’m letting go, just to free my mind / ‘Cause I’m finally who I said I’d be for the first time / It took some hard times.” Those hard times are never named outright, but the album exists in their shadow. As someone who has followed Lizzo closely over the years, I couldn’t shake the outside noise, everything I was bringing into the record with me: The old self-affirmation now felt like self-defense, a defiant reassertion of control. She called the title track a “WOMANIFESTO,” dedicated to those who “get called a Bitch for having boundaries, for being sexual, for speaking up for themselves,” or are seen as “mean” for running “a strict program” — all of which creates friction with the surrounding context. As a creator, Lizzo cannot enter into this music without bumping up against the figure she once cut in her songs, and how our understanding of that figure has changed. As a listener, I cannot enter into this music without doing the same.
It should be noted: This phenomenon is as much about the marketplace as the artists. Bitch is the kind of event album that the streaming model celebrates — a record slotted into the Friday-morning carousels of online platforms, to be treated as appointment listening. In order to set that appointment with an increasingly fickle and flighty audience, artists must usually have some story for it. There is a pervasive tendency of late to front-load narrative, baggage and personality when pushing new music, so that a uniform brand identity is preserved and prospective fans quickly indoctrinated. But as an artist accumulates experiences, the attentive listener starts to carry that baggage with them, particularly as artists spend more and more time selling the self than the art.
Lizzo is living in the effects of this reality. The issue with Bitch isn’t so much that it is a plot point in a broader narrative arc, but that the extramusical saga and its corresponding identity politic precede the music in a way that feels like psychic barrier around it — and the buffer this creates has become part of the default listening experience for these front-page records, particularly at the pop-rap intersection that Lizzo inhabits. From Drake’s zone-flooding comeback after a public thrashing, to The Weeknd killing The Weeknd, to Swifties’ sleepless relationship with the autobiographical Taylor songbook, to Beyoncé and Post Malone signposting their country roots ahead of creative pivots into the scene, the “I” of a song is usually in direct conversation with the public, and pop artists are overexposed to such an extent that narrative is the dominating force pressing against our frontal lobes as we load in to partake.
It was quite refreshing for me, then, when the spell was briefly broken, as I stepped into a sound world largely untouched by outside influence. After listening to Bitch, I decided on a whim to circle back to another record released a few days prior: Papercut, by an artist named Imani Imani, whose face in the cover photo is turned almost entirely away from the camera.
The stage name of Dutch musician Imani Ram, Imani Imani is a rarity in our brand-obsessed social ecosystem, a pop artist without a paper trail. All I knew when I pressed play on Papercut was that its release by pgLang, the entertainment company co-founded by Kendrick Lamar, carried the cosign of a rap dignitary with a music-first ethos. Digging uncovered little else: Stereogum noticed Imani Ram listed on a 2023 live album by the Dutch-Moroccan rapper Sef; as Imani Selina, she has one writing credit on an unreleased Kendrick song that played during Chanel’s spring/summer fashion show in 2024; there’s a video of her performing another song for Red Bull Music under that name, and some unofficial loosies preserved on YouTube. I didn’t even know that much as I parachuted into Papercut, and, as such, was able to have an old-school experience, as if flipping through pressings at a record shop.
These days, I normally have a clear sense of what I’m getting into with a major release. Even if I don’t, the records that get treated as events tend to billboard their narrative weight. Every release day, I run through a dozen or so albums sitting in the queue, letting them wash over me as I go about my various routines. Listening to Bitch and Papercut back to back, I quickly found myself zeroed in on the latter in a way I hadn’t with the former. My only entry point was Kendrick’s vote of confidence, more notable for the fact that the honor had thus far gone only to his cousin Baby Keem (who this year released a great record beholden to event-album constraints). Caught off guard and energized by its opacity, I stopped everything else I was doing and just sat with it, listening without interruption. I am typically pulled into lyrics first, but without an imposed story to draw upon, I was struck instead by Imani’s singing — how forward it was while maintaining its ambiguity, how it flitted through full yet subtle arrangements as if leading me deeper into an emotional labyrinth. The music wasn’t breaking the fourth wall, playing on expectation; its only interface with the outside world was that her voice was reaching me.
YouTube
That voice is lean and sweet — sometimes snappy, as on “Come Together,” sometimes flirty, as on “You’re Mine,” but usually as sturdy as it is lithe. She makes a fluid, watercolor R&B that opens up into a clicking electro-pop spelled by wraithlike acoustic flourishes, and sings of sensuality and its unrelenting grip. It is now as common for an artist to blur genre as to embrace it, but Imani’s music isn’t seeking post-genre abstraction via a formless full monty approach. If the songs feel undefined, they are so in pursuit of an incognito artistry, resisting efforts to triangulate where she is from, what’s on her mood board or her overarching vision.
Not only is there no prescribed meaning to these songs, but Imani chooses to remain hidden in them, and anonymity is often a feature of her storytelling. “I don’t even know your name / But I can feel all the things you say,” she sings on opener “Bet on Me.” She is usually retreating from lovers, even as she seeks to be known by them. “I know that you wouldn’t trust me if I’d told you ’bout my life / You know what to say, but I don’t know what’s on your mind,” she explains on “Mindgames.” She fights the pull of desire throughout “On Demand” and “Chasing,” as she tries to balance romantic ambitions with careerist ones. Eventually, as the Imani Imani world expands on “Let Go (wishes)” — the singer hitting the West Coast, doing shows and connecting with “big brands” — she renders companionship an escape from her own thoughts, before submitting the grander thesis of her formal introduction: “No one can define me.” That seems to include her, as the presentation and the performance elude narrativization. It is thrilling to hear an artist abruptly show up whole, without an explainer.
To state the obvious: The greatest leg up an album like Papercut can have on albums like Bitch is that it is a debut, the singular artistic opportunity that affords a clean slate. It’s still notable, though, as even making an introduction now comes with so much self-promotion that many young artists are burning out as soon as they arrive. As she builds a fan base, Imani Imani will likely find herself being more forward in the moves that follow; realistically, the extent to which contemporary artists can opt out of the influencer-ification of all creative fields is shrinking.
Equally difficult is engaging with an artist and the discourse around them without getting tangled up in their narrative web. Our relationship with artists in the pop sphere has always been dictated by how we perceive them — only now, impressions feel just as important as the music, if not more so. With each rollout, we make allowances for the artist’s self-concept first and the underlying story being told by the release second, often before we’ve heard a note.
Papercut disrupts that, if only momentarily. In a pop world that increasingly feels as if it requires coursework just to lend an ear, sitting down with an album and having nothing stand between it and you is a refreshing reminder of the form’s intuitive pleasures. It needn’t be like this all the time; it can’t. But every time the noise does clear, there’s a chance to rediscover the thrill of the journey.
Leave a comment