lizzo

PARIS—While the rest of the planet argued about whether World War III would begin with a submarine ping or a TikTok trend, Lizzo—flute in one hand, disco ball in the other—managed to become a one-woman diplomatic incident on three separate continents last week. If you missed it, congratulations: you were probably busy watching glaciers file for divorce from Greenland. For the rest of us, the singer’s latest contretemps is less gossip-column detritus than a handy synecdoche for how celebrity, body politics, and late-stage capitalism now perform their awkward tango on the world stage.

Start in Seoul, where Samsung’s marketing wizards thought it clever to splice Lizzo’s “About Damn Time” into an ad for foldable phones thinner than most people’s attention spans. The spot aired forty-eight hours after South Korean customs impounded 2,000 counterfeit Lizzo T-shirts made in Pyongyang—yes, the Hermit Kingdom apparently knocks off booty-positive merch between missile tests. Meanwhile, Berlin’s transport union blasted Spotify streams of “Good as Hell” through U-Bahn stations to drown out the sound of climate protesters gluing themselves to the tracks. Nothing says ecological urgency quite like a brass section borrowed from Juilliard.

Zoom out and you’ll notice Lizzo has become a global Rorschach test: the same song that scores a Zumba class in São Paulo is weaponized by culture warriors in Warsaw who insist Western decadence is measured in decibels and dress sizes. Last month the Vatican’s unofficial Spotify playlist quietly nixed “Rumors” after conservative Catholic influencers discovered the lyrics; their TikTok tantrums were immediately remixed by Gen-Z nuns in Manila who choreographed a viral dance using rosaries as percussion. Somewhere in an air-conditioned think tank, a junior fellow is already drafting a white paper titled “Soft Power and the Strategic Deployment of Flute Solos.”

The economics are equally absurd. Lizzo’s shapewear line, Yitty, is manufactured in Sri Lanka, packaged in Poland, and marketed to Americans who believe self-love can be overnighted in a cardboard envelope. Cargo ships carrying the latest drop navigated the Red Sea while Houthi rebels played her tracks over marine radio to taunt passing tankers. Analysts at Lloyd’s of London now list “pop star brand saturation” as an emerging maritime risk, somewhere between piracy and floating plastic continents. One underwriter told me, off the record, that insuring a shipment of sequined bodysuits is more volatile than insuring grain because “wheat doesn’t get canceled on Twitter.”

Ah yes, cancellation—the international sport where everyone competes but nobody wins. When former dancers filed suit in Los Angeles, alleging a hostile work environment, the story detonated across WhatsApp groups from Lagos to La Paz. Nigerian Twitter crowned her #AuntyLizzo and debated whether diaspora success obliges you to be nicer to your payroll. Argentine talk-radio hosts, meanwhile, reran the allegations as proof that yanqui feminism inevitably implodes under its own contradictions—this from a country currently debating whether to replace the peso with TikTok views.

What’s remarkable is how quickly the discourse metastasized into geopolitical metaphor. In Delhi, right-wing columnists compared Lizzo to the Global South itself: celebrated for her abundance, policed for her audacity, commodified for the profit of distant boardrooms. A leftist podcast in Mexico City flipped the script, arguing that demanding flawless virtue from a Black, plus-size woman was simply colonial purity culture in a new corset. By the time the story reached Australia, it had been digested into a single sentence on a chyron: “Singer Accused of Being Human.”

Which, in the end, might be the most radical thing about Lizzo on the world stage today. In an era when every public figure is expected to moonlight as NGO, lifestyle guru, and diplomatic envoy, she still commits the revolutionary act of insisting her body is her own—no matter how many algorithms try to chop it into exportable pixels. That the global conversation keeps ricocheting off her hips says less about her than about our inability to look away from the mirror she refuses to hold up for us. If that sounds like a lot of weight for one pop star to carry, well, welcome to 2024: the year gravity filed a complaint.