Teen Vogue is excited to share our music issue — Pass the Mic. In our June cover package, we profile young women disrupting the music industry, how they are doing it, and why it matters.
Every morning before school, a teenage Melissa Viviane Jefferson performed a very important ritual. In the haven of her bedroom — a space decorated with Sailor Moon paraphernalia procured from her local comic book shop, (Sailor Saturn was her favorite, duh) — Melissa would carefully select a favorite song at full volume. Then, the self-proclaimed “chubby girl with funny teeth,” would undergo her own mystical transformation. With Panic! At the Disco blasting on the speakers, Melissa would begin her perfectly executed choreography, complete with pirouettes, twirling, and jumping on the bed. Nobody in her household protested when they heard the loud music or the inevitable thumping on the floorboards. They must have known any efforts to stop the concert would have been in vain — Melissa was born for this sort of thing.
To be precise, Melissa was born “during rush hour” in Detroit, on April 27, 1988. This is vital information because Melissa — who would become better known as Lizzo — takes the stars very seriously. In fact, she has “been begging” famed astrologer Chani Nicholas to read her birth chart. “I’m like, ‘Chart me, please!’” she screams over the phone before erupting into laughter.
In honor of Lizzo’s very first Teen Vogue cover, Chani happily obliged. And, unsurprisingly, she reveals that Lizzo’s birth chart is “not about to back down” and has “an undeniable bounty of personality, vitality, and ambition.” With a sun in “solid, sturdy, stubborn, and incredibly sensual” Taurus and a moon in “hard-working, unrelenting” Virgo, Lizzo has all the astrological ingredients she needs to make it as a star. And even though we couldn’t calculate her rising sign (“rush hour” didn’t quite meet Chani’s requirements), her partial chart reveals plenty of secrets about her rise to success and when she should finally drop that new album.
I. Sun conjunct Jupiter in Taurus
“One of the most significant set-ups in Lizzo’s chart is the fact that she was born with sun conjunct Jupiter. This gives her a royal, spiritual, opulent, abundant, generative, and generous personality. She can create through being a force of good. Her sun conjunct Jupiter makes her ready for anything, gives her the optimism, belief in her abilities, bravado, and the appearance of undeterred confidence. This kind of personality tends to make its own luck.”
To witness Lizzo perform is to have a truly soul-cleansing experience. Flanked by a girl group of all different sizes and colors, all bedecked and bedazzled, all sweating, dancing wildly, and laughing at each other, Lizzo’s voice moves deftly between gospel riffs and Ludacris-inspired, suffocating raps, while her body sashays, twerks, and shakes to the rhythm.
“She had the crowd in the palm of her hand every night,” say the sisters of HAIM, who are currently on the Sister, Sister, Sister tour with Lizzo. “We stood there with our jaws on the floor, wishing we could go onstage and be one of her dancers.”
Her music, like her sun sign — royal, spiritual, and generous — acts as a map for her life. Lizzo learned the power of gospel at her Pentecostal church where “secular music was the devil.” Forbidden from wearing pants to services and committed to her flute lessons, she played every bit the good girl. In her adolescence, her family moved to Houston — and unexpectedly, away from religion. It was there that Lizzo had her teenage rebellion, embracing Destiny’s Child, Missy Elliot, and twerking (thanks to the under-18 nights at a dance club nearby). It was when she finally settled into adulthood in Minneapolis to establish her music career that these contrasting influences started to blend.
“I see similarities from gospel to metal music in the technique and in the feeling,” Lizzo explains of her sound. “I think because of that I’m able to find that common thread...I have to find the soul in everything.”
But it’s Lizzo’s confidence that is perhaps her most magnetic trait — she exudes an undeniable self-assuredness from her performances onstage to her studio recordings to her various snaps on Instagram Story, where her phone camera documents her thighs, ass, hair, and nails as she smirks confidently. To the outside viewer, Lizzo is her own biggest fan.
In an industry as notoriously impossible as music this gives her a serious edge. After tweeting years ago that she wished she could afford a beat by the producer Lazerbeak, Lizzo was amazed when he responded directly to her, saying he’d accept payment in the form of Mike’s Hard Lemonade. That transaction later turned into Lizzo’s first studio album, Lizzobangers.
After witnessing the legendary Big Freedia onstage as a teenager, Lizzo started incorporating twerking into her own stage performances. Big Freedia’s people took note, and their relationship would ultimately culminate in the track “Karaoke” off Big Freedia’s EP Ward Bounce that just dropped this month. “That track needed the right voice and the right energy,” Freedia tells Teen Vogue. “Lizzo nailed it!”
None of these fortuitous events come across to Lizzo as “making her own luck” as much as creating her own destiny. “People, especially artists, are so afraid of looking thirsty. They don’t want to ask for the things that they want. But you’ve got to ask and you’ll receive,” she says.
II. Sun/Jupiter/Mercury opposing Pluto in Scorpio and Sun/Jupiter/Mercury/Pluto/Mars t-square
“It is incredibly important for Lizzo to be in opposition to the powers that be; we might even say it is the way that she comes into relationship with her own power. In fact, figuring out how to beat the system may very likely be the thing that drives her, at least in the beginning."
Much of Lizzo’s self-advocacy isn’t simply about overcoming astrological conditions. Instead, it’s a behavior developed from being overlooked in a world that favors the thin, the white, and the male.
“When I was in high school, I was a big girl with a cute face. So dudes liked me secretly, but they didn’t like me publicly. I never had a boyfriend because they didn’t want to claim me,” Lizzo says. “So now in this industry, I’m a big girl with a cute face and some cute music and I’m still being liked secretly and not claimed publicly.”
This is particularly frustrating because Lizzo is undeniably gifted. When she first entered the studio with the Grammy-nominated producer Ricky Reed from Nice Life Recording Co. (who’s worked with artists like Jessie J, Jason DeRulo, and Meghan Trainor), he asked her about her singing voice. Before “Coconut Oil,” Lizzo was primarily being marketed as a rapper, but Reed was working with her on the beat for the contemporary gospel track, “Worship,” a song that required an intensely high melody.
Lizzo initially demurred, explaining that she just “sang a little growing up,” and was unsure she could hit the notes. But once she opened her mouth, Reed says the roof blew off the studio. “I heard Aretha, I heard Chaka, I heard the soul of all my favorite singers in a whole new style that was all Lizzo,” he tells Teen Vogue. “I left that day and hit my manager, ‘We need Lizzo. The world needs Lizzo.’”
Reed describes Lizzo’s rise as “slow and steady,” insisting that “when your career builds like that, nobody can take it away from you.” Lizzo, however, compares this gradual build to being kept at bay in an industry that puts traditional beauty norms front and center.
“[People] will be like, ‘Lizzo’s my favorite new artist...why am I late for the Lizzo train?’” she says, growing serious. “You’re late, honey, but it’s not your fault. You’re late because I’m just at the back of the shelf. But I’m glad you’re here because you worked to find this.”
III. Moon in Virgo, and Venus conjunct Chiron in Gemini
“Virgo doesn’t need everything to be perfect, but when it sets its sights on what should be it’s like a dog with a bone. It can, and does, tear itself apart in search of a perfect self. The antidote lies within the other strength of Virgo: thoughtful care of the body. Making time and space to love, feed, cleanse, and create spaces of healing for the body are essential to Lizzo’s well-being.
Venus is the feminine energy that we all have and hopefully feel free to express. Lizzo’s is merged with Chiron, the Wounded Healer. As Lizzo takes up space to express her individual style and self, she does so in a way that unpacks and helps to heal a deep and historic wound that all women and femmes feel — the wound of never being enough, or of being too much. As she dismantles it, she spreads healing and opportunity in a very public way for us all.”
Before Lizzo was called “body-positive” or interviewed about “self-love,” and before the songs devoted to healing ingredients (“Coconut Oil”) or the naked photoshoots on album covers (“Water Me”), she was struggling to find peace in her body.
“I didn’t love myself until I was 21,” she reveals. “Twenty-one was the worst year of my life.”
Lizzo’s dad had just passed away and she found herself homeless and deeply unhappy, despite being the skinniest she had ever been in her whole life. “I was addicted to the gym, I didn’t eat, and I was sleeping in a dusty car, all for music,” she says. “I thought my life was over.”
She says that hitting rock bottom and “crawling out of the tunnel” helped to inform the Lizzo we know today, and she says the experience was intrinsically unfair. “Everyone shouldn’t have to hit rock bottom to love themselves,” she says. “That’s just the society we’re all unfortunately born in — the one where you have to hit your worst and hate yourself in order to love yourself? Those laws only exist because self-hate is so prevalent. Body positivity only exists because body negativity is the norm.”
Lizzo’s profile has risen at the same time as the rise of body positivity in culture. And while outlets have been quick to point out how Lizzo is a trailblazer, she’s not keen on that association, either. “It’s bizarre to me that what I’m saying and doing is revolutionary, because it should be so innate and first-nature. Not even second-nature,” she says. “We should love ourselves first. We should look at our bodies as vehicles for success, and not a signifier of who you are, how good your pussy is, if dudes like you or not, or if you can fit certain clothes...that’s not what your body’s for.”
Because her own road to self-love was so difficult, Lizzo has made it her mission to showcase hers as loudly as possible, and nowhere is this more apparent than the music video for “‘Scuse Me,” a masturbation anthem that’s filmed in, of all places, a church. (“I don’t see nobody else, ‘scuse me while I feel myself,” she repeats during the chorus.)
Inevitably, Lizzo’s journey of acceptance was one of rebellion — against both society and her religious upbringing. “That’s a part of my journey: I want to love myself, and to truly be in love with yourself is freedom.”
But now with her considerable visibility, Lizzo’s “self-love” no longer has to do with just the “self.” “I’ve always stood up for the underdog and the underrepresented because I can’t escape from that myself,” she says. “I can’t wake up one day and not be black. I can’t wake up one day and not be a woman. I can’t wake up one day and not be fat. I always had those three things against me in this world, and because I fight for myself, I have to fight for everyone else.”
It’s no coincidence that you’ll see Lizzo all over the country during Pride month, or that Gay Twitter lit up after seeing her as a guest judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race. But, it turns out, Lizzo’s not just an ally: “When it comes to sexuality or gender, I personally don’t ascribe to just one thing. I cannot sit here right now and tell you I’m just one thing,” she says. “That’s why the colors for LGBTQ+ are a rainbow! Because there’s a spectrum and right now we try to keep it black and white. That’s just not working for me.”
IV. Current Transits: Saturn return, transiting Saturn conjunct Uranus and Neptune, trine sun and Jupiter. Transiting Jupiter opposing Jupiter (sun and Mercury).
“Saturn return is something that we all go through at the end of our 20s. It’s a transit that helps us to define ourselves for ourselves. Lizzo’s is quite growth enhancing and affirming of the creative work that she has done. Since December of 2017, she’s had confirmation of her hard work and ambition — this transition continues until 2020, although the most important parts of it are over. For the rest of 2018, it’s especially important that she make her dreams as real as she can."
Lizzo senses she is on the cusp of a turning point. “I know this is a really important time for me,” she says. “I have a lot of eyes on me finally, and I’m in this place where this next album could potentially be something that goes really, really big or it can go really, really calm.”
According to her chart, timing is of the essence and she doesn’t have much to lose. For the record, her fans on Twitter have been saying this for a while, always begging her to drop the album. So what on earth is the holdup?
“The album has changed so many times,” she reveals, dodging questions about the record’s influences or collaborators. “But the album I’ve gotten to in this moment is gonna be so unexpected and so musical, but so me.”
For all of her talent, intelligence, and the sanctity of her mission, Lizzo deserves to be more famous than she is right now. But after creating a body of work that’s earned almost one million monthly listeners on Spotify, based mostly off of just a six-track EP, she knows she can’t have kept us waiting this long for anything that’s less than Virgo levels of perfection.
And after looking at her chart, it’s easy to bet on the stars that she’s about to be the brightest out there — so long as she doesn’t wait until 2019.
“I want to drop it!” Lizzo says, laughing. And then, after she catches her breath, “Once again, I’ll speak something into existence on the Internet: It’s gonna be sooner than that.”
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More from Teen Vogue's Pass the Mic issue:
- Charli XCX Isn't Just Breaking the Rules — She's Throwing Them Out
- Chloe and Halle Aren't Afraid to Speak Up About What's Wrong in the World
- The Haim Sisters Open Up About Their Firsthand Experiences With Harassment and Unequal Pay
- Bebe Rexha Says Fighting Her Anxiety Is an Everyday Battle
- Billie Eilish Wants Girls In the Mosh Pit Too
- Grace VanderWaal Doesn't Mind If You Only Know Her As the Winner of "AGT"
Credits:
- Photo Assistants: Cailan O’Connell and Carlos Quinteros.
- Fashion Assistant: Alexa Eschert.
- Makeup Assistant: Mikey Castillo.
- Hair: Shelby Swain.
- Manicure: Stephanie Stone
- Teen Vogue creative director: Erin Hover
- Teen Vogue senior visuals editor: Noelle Lacombe
- Polaroids provided by Polaroid Original
