In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
“Toxic positivity.” That’s a buzzword, or rather it’s two buzzwords jammed together to create a superbuzzword. I would probably be embarrassed to use “toxic positivity” in everyday speech, unless I was talking to a therapist. (My wife is a therapist, so it does come up.) But buzzwords don’t have to be meaningless, and a lot of things clicked into place for me the first time I heard the phrase “toxic positivity.” It’s a new name for an old phenomenon, a handy label for something that might otherwise be easy to detect but hard to articulate. This particular buzzword is more applicable to regular-life interactions that cultural moments. Usually, it applies to the mentality where people refuse to acknowledge anything difficult, in their lives or in yours — the thing where every struggle has to lead to something good, even when that’s not realistic. But the term also works just fine to describe a certain forcibly cheery cultural artifact, and the collected recorded works of Lizzo make for prime examples. Anyway, we’re going to need to use buzzwords to discuss Lizzo, an artist who largely communicates in buzzwords.
Plenty of celebrities are assholes. Often, it’s part of the job. To become a famous artist, you often need to be a demanding collaborator. But when those famous-asshole types build entire personas around being uplifting, it’s absolutely devastating the world discovers evidence of shadiness. Often, the shadiness doesn’t have to be all that heavy to poison the vibe. When celebrities give off whiffs of toxic positivity, they generally become bigger targets than the ones who always seemed like miserable wretches in the first place. We’re seeing it with Arcade Fire now. Arcade Fire are cooked. That party is over. Simply by revealing himself to be kind of a creep, Win Butler has cast himself and his bandmates into permanent cultural ignominy. (Arcade Fire’s only Hot 100 hit, 2013’s “Reflektor,” peaked at #99.) Ellen DeGeneres: same deal. Dory’s not finding her way back anytime soon.
Lizzo has multiple chart-topping hits, so this column won’t get into her dramatic and seemingly irreversible downfall until later. In the grand scheme of things, that downfall wasn’t the most appalling thing in the world. We’re not dealing with a Kanye West situation, where the entire music-critical establishment now needs to reckon with everything that they ever loved about this character. Still, in Lizzo’s case, the toxic-positivity vibes were hanging in the air long before any backup dancers filed any lawsuits. On paper, she was the perfect Obama-core artist for the first Trump era — a large, charismatic, and undeniably talented Black woman who found stardom with a message of empowerment that felt hard-won merely for existing in the first place. But from the very beginning, something was off. That off-ness is built right into the DNA of “Truth Hurts,” the song that made Lizzo famous in the first place.
Lots of people rooted for Lizzo. She was easy to root for. Lizzo was no record-label creation. She started honing her pan-genre party-music blend on the Minneapolis underground, and she made tons of cool-kid connections before finding her way to the most mainstream version of pop stardom. She’s a singular figure. She raps, sings, dances, and plays flute. She’s got catchy songs, and she wants you to feel good about yourself. She had plenty of visible haters, and the most visible of them seemed to react with horror and/or derision at the very idea of a bigger woman being sexual. Those guys are the fucking worst, which made Lizzo the enemy of your enemy. But Lizzo’s version of pop-feminist positivity always felt showily shallow. It seemed like she was making the musical equivalent of Instagram captions long before we found out that her breakout hit really was an uncredited adaptation of an Instagram caption.
In some ways, it’s too bad that Lizzo didn’t get famous in the ’80s, when nobody needed pop stars to be beacons of empowerment. Early in her career, Lizzo crossed paths with Prince, and nobody expected that guy to be nice to everyone. Nobody expected it of Madonna, either. If anything, their standoffish personas helped build their mystique. Lizzo found stardom in a social-media age when mystique simply wasn’t an option. She was the perfect figure for her moment, until she wasn’t.
Lizzo presents herself as an inspiring figure, and in a lot of ways she really is. She created herself, and she recognized that there was an audience for what she could do. Melissa Viviane Jefferson was born in Detroit, where her great grandparents founded a church. (When Lizzo was born, Whitney Houston’s “Where Do Broken Hearts Go” was the #1 song in America.) Her parents met in that church, and they worked together running mortgage businesses. I would look deeper into their careers, but I suspect that the results would be boring.
When Lizzo was a kid, her family moved to Houston. In high school, she and her friends messed around with rap. Later on, she told The New York Times that they called themselves the Cornrow Clique: “We all wore different color cornrows, and we all had our own verses because we were inspired by Crime Mob.” (Crime Mob’s highest-charting Hot 100 hit, the 2006 Lil Scrappy collab “Rock Yo Hips,” peaked at #30. Incredibly, the 2004 masterpiece “Knuck If You Buck” couldn’t get past #75.) Rap was fun for her, but another kind of music was serious business. Lizzo studied classical flute intensively in high school and then at the University Of Houston. She thought she’d become a professional, but she had a hard time in college. She dropped out at 20, around the same time that her father died. For a minute, she sang for a prog-rock band called Ellypseas. For a little while, she lived out of her car. When a friend and collaborator moved to Minneapolis, Lizzo went along with her.
In Minneapolis, Lizzo and her friend Sophia Eres formed a group called the Chalice. They made synthy, bubbly club-rap, releasing the 2012 DIY album We Are The Chalice and finding a local following. For a little while, Lizzo also had a very similar side project called Grrrl Party. In 2013, Lizzo released her solo debut Lizzobangers on the local Minneapolis label Totally Gross National Product. Ryan Olson, from the soulfully spacey indie rock supergroup Gayngs, and Lazerbeak, from the backpacker collective Doomtree, produced it. Like Macklemore before her, Lizzo was a regional underground-ish phenomenon long before she found national fame, and Lizzobangers has a lot of the same festival-ready zaniness as the stuff that Macklemore made early on.
A year after Lizzobangers came out, Lizzo got the biggest cosign that a local Minneapolis artist could possibly hope to get. In 2014, Prince, someone who has appeared in this column many times, released Plectrumelectrum, the only album that he ever made with his all-female backing band 3rdeyegirl. Lizzo and Sophia Eres both guested on Prince’s track “Boytrouble,” and they found the experience overwhelming. Lizzo was on the road a lot around that time, and she got some early exposure performing on Letterman and landing a song on the Broad City soundtrack. She recorded Big Grrrl Small World, her second album, at Bon Iver mastermind and Gayngs member Justin Vernon’s Wisconsin studio, and Vernon sang backup and played keyboard on it. (Bon Iver doesn’t have Hot 100 hits as lead artist, but he reached #6 as a guest on Taylor Swift’s “Exile” in 2020. It’s an 8.)
With her two indie albums, Lizzo made herself more and more visible, to the point where she landed a temporary gig as the host of the MTV live-music show Wonderland. Somewhere along the way, she came into contact with Eric Frederic, the producer known professionally as Ricky Reed. Reed got his start as the person behind a project called Wallpaper., and he made sparkly, poppy early-’10s club-rap tracks for people like Cee-Lo Green and former Number Ones artists Far East Movement. In 2013, Reed produced “Talk Dirty,” a #3 hit for past and future Number Ones artist Jason Derulo. (It’s an 8.) Over the next few years, Reed produced a string of bright, energetic, vaguely clubby tracks like that for a string of artists that included Derulo, Pitbull, Meghan Trainor, and Twenty One Pilots. Those folks don’t have much to do with one another, but they all got energy-boosts from working with Ricky Reed, a producer who is extremely good at making super-fizzy, rap-adjacent pop. In 2016, Reed started Nice Life Records, his own Atlantic imprint, and he signed Lizzo.
When Lizzo signed, she’d already built a rep as a DIY indie type. The first time she got a Stereogum headline, for instance, it was for a 2016 collaboration with Speedy Ortiz’s Sadie Dupuis. The major-label move must’ve been a huge mental adjustment. Suddenly, she wasn’t making dusty, splattery music anymore. But it seems like she locked right in with the songwriting-session system. In 2016, she and Ricky Reed wrote “Good As Hell,” a simple and memorable if slightly irritating ode to confidence. The song didn’t find a mass audience at first, but it appeared on the soundtrack of the movie Barbershop: The Next Cut. Over the next few years, “Good As Hell” kept popping up on the soundtracks of studio comedies — A Bad Moms Christmas, I Feel Pretty, Blockers. Lizzo wasn’t making hits yet, but if an entertainment corporation needed a frothy, feelgood all-purpose party song, Lizzo was right there.
Lizzo’s song “Truth Hurts” didn’t become a #1 hit until it had been out for two years. She released the song on Coconut Oil, a major-label EP that came out in 2017 and didn’t get much attention. “Truth Hurts” is another Ricky Reed production. When the song blew up, Lizzo told Billboard the backstory. She’d been dating someone, and he left her a voicemail to tell her that he was getting back with his ex. Lizzo was devastated when she went into her scheduled songwriting session with Reed. She vented about this guy to Reed, and Reed took notes on what she was saying. When she asked him what he was writing, he told her, “I hope you know you just wrote a song.”
Ricky Reed built a track with a piano loop that he got from a producer named Steven “Tele” Cheung’s sample pack; Tele is credited as co-writer and co-producer. Lizzo hated the piano at first, but she liked the track better when Reed added his drums to it. When Reed filled out the beat, Lizzo kept thinking of other things that she wanted to say, and she kept running into the booth to record them. She told Billboard, “I don’t know what type of magical honey was in my throat when I woke up that morning, but shit, every motherfucking thing I said was the goddamn song!”
That’s Lizzo’s version of the story. There are others. There is, for instance, the matter of the opening line: “I just took a DNA test, turns out I’m 100% that bitch.” That’s a good line. Lizzo didn’t write it. In February 2017, a singer named Mina Lioness tweeted that line almost word for word, and it went viral. Lizzo later claimed that she saw the line in an Instagram meme, and she didn’t realize that the meme came from that tweet. Later on, Mina Lioness got a co-writer credit on “Truth Hurts,” but that didn’t happen for a while. After “Truth Hurts” reached #1 in 2019, the producer Justin Raisen accused Lizzo of ripping him and his brother Jeremiah off. Justin Raisen had worked with cult-pop favorite like Sky Ferreira and Charli XCX. His brother Jeremiah, otherwise known as Sadpony, is a rap beatmaker whose work will eventually appear in this column. Both of them were moving in the same circles as Lizzo.
The Raisens said that Lizzo and the Raisens came up with elements of “Truth Hurts” in a session together and that fellow pro songwriter Jesse Saint John was the one who showed her the “100% that bitch” meme. The Raisens didn’t take legal action at the time, but they went public with the dispute in a since-deleted Instagram post: “After reaching out to Ricky Reed and Lizzo’s team about fixing it, we put the song in dispute in 2017 when it came out. We’ve tried to sort this out quietly for the last two years, only asking for 5% each but were shutdown every time.” Lizzo denied the Raisens’ statement through a lawyer. Soon afterward, she had Mina Lioness retroactively credited as a songwriter, and she filed a harassment lawsuit against the Raisen brothers and their songwriting collaborator Yves Rothman. In an Instagram statement, Lizzo wrote, “There was no one in the room when I wrote ‘Truth Hurts,’ except me, Ricky Reed, and my tears. That song is my life, and its words are my truth. I later learned that a tweet inspired the meme. The creator of the tweet is the person I am sharing my success with… not these men. Period.”
I can’t find any trace of that original “Healthy” demo online, so I can’t judge whether Lizzo came up with any of “Truth Hurts” in that session or whether the Raisens and Rothman had anything to do with it. I do, however, know that I find Lizzo’s statement to be deeply irritating — like she’s getting righteously angry about how she ripped off a woman, not these men. The Raisens countersued, and a judge dismissed their lawsuit while allowing for the possibility of future compensation, which just goes to show that I have no idea how the legal system works. Lizzo and the Raisens finally settled things out of court in 2022, and the terms of that settlement have been kept secret. In any case, the Raisens are not officially credited on the song. I’m not the Raisen brothers’ lawyer or accountant, so none of this story should really affect how I feel about “Truth Hurts” as a song. But the whole saga leaves a bad taste, or maybe it’s more like “Oh! That’s the bad thing I’ve been tasting!”
Heard in a vacuum, “Truth Hurts” is a pretty catchy breakup song. Lizzo’s version of rap has very little to do with anything that was happening in the genre in 2017 or 2019, but she delivers her lyrics with verve and precision. Her singing voice comes into play, too. She puts a lot of subtle melody into her delivery, and she sings pretty backup harmonies even when she’s rapping hard. The piano is kind of annoying, but it cuts through and makes an impression. Ricky Reed’s drum programming keeps the track moving, and I really like the bits where he drops out everything but the digital handclaps. Lizzo takes a simple fuck-my-ex premise, and she makes it work by turning it into a series of one-liners. Most of those one-liners weren’t Instagram memes when she wrote the song, but they could’ve been. It’s an Instagram-meme sort of song.
On “Truth Hurts,” Lizzo insists that she’s not heartbroken. He tried to break her heart? Oh, that breaks her heart. Instead, she’s mad that her ex would have the temerity to drop her. She might even pity him for being so pathetic. He could’ve had a bad bitch, noncommittal. He was supposed to hold her doooown, but he’s holding her back, and that’s the soooound of her not calling him back. His friend is already in her DMs. She’s got fresh photos with the bomb lighting and a new man on the Minnesota Vikings. (Lizzo said that she really did go on a date with one of the Vikings, but she didn’t say which one. Apparently, the team name got bleeped when a radio station in Green Bay put “Truth Hurts” into rotation. Packers fans are more sensitive than I realized. That’s like if the whole “Black And Yellow” chorus got bleeped in Baltimore.) Some of Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts” punchlines work, and some of them — “I put the siiiing in single” — are dumber than fuck.
Lizzo made a fairly low-budget “Truth Hurts” video where she’s a bride who marries herself, I think? I’m not really sure what’s going on there. Lizzo’s Coconut Oil EP came and went without much notice, and she later said that she was depressed when “Truth Hurts” didn’t make an immediate impact. She thought it was the best song she’d ever made, and the world didn’t seem to notice. Lizzo kept working. She wasn’t a pop star yet, but she was a regular on the music-festival circuit. She opened for HAIM and Florence And The Machine on tour. She collaborated with other culty artists like Charli XCX and Open Mike Eagle. In 2019, Lizzo released Cuz I Love You, her first major-label album, and she got a big media push for it. She played Coachella, performed on TV shows, and did magazine profiles. The disco-infused lead single “Juice” was supposed to be Lizzo’s big breakout, and that song did reach the Hot 100, but it peaked at #82. Instead, something funny happened.
The same day that Lizzo released Cuz I Love You, the made-for-Netflix romantic comedy Someone Great came out. I’ve never seen that movie. Gina Rodriguez plays a music critic? I don’t want to watch a Netflix romantic comedy about a music critic. I would get too annoyed. I’d be like, “No, we don’t answer emails like that, we answer emails like this!” (Just kidding. I never answer emails.) But people liked Someone Great. It got pretty good reviews, and it did well on those internal Netflix charts that cannot be verified because the company never shares the actual figures on how many people watched a given thing. In any case, there’s a scene in Someone Great where Rodriguez and DeWanda Wise sing along to “Truth Hurts” together. It’s cute, and it went viral.
In May 2019, “Truth Hurts” was at #50 on the Hot 100 — way higher than “Juice” ever went. (Actually, “Juice” didn’t make it onto the Hot 100 until a week after “Truth Hurts,” so it really just drafted on that song’s momentum.) This was a funny new situation. The album that was supposed to turn Lizzo into a star wasn’t really working, but one of her old songs had suddenly and unpredictably caught on. Atlantic quickly added “Truth Hurts” to Cuz I Love You and pushed the song to radio stations, and the track steadily rose up the Hot 100 for months. We’ll see more and more examples of this in the years ahead — an older song finding new levels of success after it goes viral on TikTok. But TikTok was new in 2019, and so was this phenomenon.
As “Truth Hurts” took off, Lizzo got more and more famous. She played a voice role in the animated movie Uglydolls, and she and Cardi B, another artist who has been in this column and who will return, played background characters in the stripper heist Hustlers. The novelty of the belated success of “Truth Hurts” got more and more press. That phenomenon happened again when “Good As Hell,” the first major-label single that Lizzo released, gained its own viral steam soon afterwards. “Good As Hell” made its Hot 100 debut in September 2019, three years after Lizzo first released it. At the 2019 VMAs, Lizzo performed “Truth Hurts” and “Good As Hell” in front of a giant jiggling inflatable butt. It felt like an underdog triumph when “Truth Hurts” reached #1 and when “Good As Hell” followed it up the chart, eventually peaking at #3. (It’s a 4.)
There was backlash. For one thing, Lizzo was making rap music for people who don’t necessarily listen to rap music, always a dicey proposition. “Truth Hurts” and “Good As Hell” got play on pop radio, not rap radio. To people who pay attention to rap, that kind of thing always reads as corny. (I worry about the same thing happening with Doechii, who’s currently having her own viral-phenom moment. Sexism probably has something to do with that fake-rap suspicion, but so does the mercenary pop instinct behind songs like “Truth Hurts” or Doechii’s own #9 hit “Anxiety,” which is a 4. Doechii’s other music is so much better than that.) On top of that disconnect, there was the matter of Lizzo sometimes acting like a dickhead online. When Pitchfork published a thoughtfully mixed review of Cuz I Love You, Lizzo tweeted that non-musician music critics should be unemployed, which did not exactly endear her to me. She also tweeted the name and photo of a Postmates driver and accused the girl of stealing her food, which led to a lawsuit. Lizzo apologized for that and promised to be more considerate about how she used social media. It was a bad look.
But the feelgood aspects of Lizzo’s rise, as well as the Target-commercial positivity of her two big hits, overwhelmed the backlash, at least at first. At the 2019 Grammys, Lizzo opened the show and won a handful of awards. Amazon developed a reality show where larger women would compete to become Lizzo’s backup dancers. In 2021, Lizzo teamed up with her Hustlers co-star Cardi B to release “Rumors,” a bouncy and snarly song about the people talking shit about her online. That’s probably my favorite Lizzo song, and not just because Cardi is on it. To me, the nastiness of “Rumors” hits harder than the general uplift on Lizzo’s other hits, and the rapping/singing fusion feels more fully formed. The line about NDAs and people trying to sue her didn’t age well, but that feels real, too.
“Rumors” was a proper hit, debuting at #4. (It’s a 7.) Apparently, it wasn’t enough of a hit. The single was supposed to launch Lizzo’s next album, but it was fated to become a one-off orphan instead. Lizzo’s next album didn’t come out for another year, and it had a bigger hit as its lead single. We’ll see Lizzo in this column again, and then we’ll get into how everything fell apart.
GRADE: 5/10
BONUS BEATS: I usually ignore the whole Kidz Bop institution in this column, but the Kidz Bop kids’ version of “Truth Hurts” demands to be heard, if only for the line about “I’m 100% that kid.” “Truth Hurts” already sounds like a Kidz Bop song with cusswords, so the kids just took those cusswords out. Here’s their version:
BONUS BEATS: Juice WRLD and YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s “Bandit” — an effortless, floating back-and-forth singsong flex party with a weirdly beautiful music-box beat — peaked at #10 behind “Truth Hurts.” It’s the definition of a 10.
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. Book book bi dook bi dook book buy.
