Keeping it one hundred percent real as she makes videos of herself using Tik Tok (because it isn’t a rap video until you’ve seen that app appear) in a diner called–what else–Lizzo’s, Lizzo’s latest video for “Tempo” repurposes the “drive-thru” concept of the 50s (which, incidentally, Britney Spears also kind of did for “[You Drive Me] Crazy”) to make it just a little bit raunchier, therefore more interesting. Painting a hip hop portrait of the sort of people who would go to a diner and/or drive-thru as their event of the evening, Lizzo’s version is also extremely reliant on the car–that once great American beacon of success so heavily favored in the 50s–only her vehicles include low-riders with spinners and Missy Elliott popping out of select trunks.
As she proceeds to bounce-dance in the parking lot, myriad backup dancers descend from the sky behind her as though they’re holding onto imaginary stripper poles (Lizzo, after all, is slated to appear in the upcoming stripper movie, Hustlers–not to be confused with The Hustle), all soon bouncing around themselves (though they don’t look quite as “thick” to be worthy of fucking it up to the tempo).
And as we watch Lizzo parade around in a cowboy hat and sequined bikini (she did serve time in Houston, in case you didn’t know), it has to be acknowledged that the most fascinating thing about “the Lizzo phenomenon” is how much she, above all other “thick bitches” of the past decade, has managed to turn the notion of being thin into something derogatory (“Slow songs, that’s for skinny hos/Can’t move all of this here to one of those/I’m a thick bitch, I need tempo”). Perhaps no other person made such callouts in rap other than Missy Elliott herself, who is now, ironically, rather slender. But once upon a time, she, too was a thick bitch, which made it okay for her to say things like, “If you’s a fat one, put your clothes back on/Before you start putting potholes in my lawn” (a sentence that would never fly in today’s “body positive” quagmire). In fact, there were many times when Missy fell prey to feeling like her body needed to be altered despite her occasional declarations of being a proud “thick” woman. One such example being contained within “Work It,” when she tells her prospective Non-Minute Man, “Lost a few pounds and my waist for ya” and further self-shading with, “Let’s get drunk, that’s gonna bring us closer/Don’t I look like a Halle Berry poster?/See the Belvedere playing tricks on ya.”
But when teamed with Lizzo, now the spokeswoman for being a female rapper with no fucks given about her body shape, Missy comes across as more genuinely confident about her assertion, “All the thick girls down on the flrrr/Ice on my neck like brrr/I’m big-boned with nice curves/Look at me, I know I look grrrd.” The dichotomy being, of course, that she seems to think she looks good precisely because she is no longer the size she used to be (at the hands of Graves’ disease, the least enjoyable “diet” of all time).
And as Missy puts the spotlight on Lizzo by literally making way for her in the video, it seems that she is also making peace with the idea that while she might have started to pave the way on declarative body positivity in the rap game, she’s happy to let Lizzo carry the torch in an even more bombastic way. After all, when Missy came up in the mainstream, we were ruled by an oppressive conservative leader and assless chaps were in vogue. Little has changed, of course. But now at least it’s okay for thick bitches to wear assless chaps without shame (now that they’re not in style).
