B.S.

Jesus Rose from the Dead So Lizzo Could Twerk, STFU Diddy

This is the lord's day. There is no body shaming on the lord's day.

First, God created the heavens and the earth; second, he made the sea and the animals; and then, he created people.

God quickly realized he'd made a mistake with the "people" recipe, so he tried again, a few billion years later, and thus was born the gift that is Lizzo. If there is anything that proves the presence of a loving and sentient god, surely it's Lizzo in all her flute-playing, note-hitting, body-positive glory. But, apparently, some would disagree.

On Sunday, Rapper and businessman Diddy hosted the "world's biggest dance-a-thon" on his Instagram account in an effort to raise money to benefit healthcare workers in underserved areas. Many big names and excellent dancers joined in, including Jennifer Lopez, Alex Rodriguez, and, of course, Lizzo.

As is her trademark, Lizzo started to twerk while Diddy's sons danced on his Instagram live stream. Diddy quickly shut it down, shouting, "Whoa, whoa, whoa!" jumping into the frame and stopping the music. "It's Easter Sunday, let's play something a little more family friendly." Lizzo appeared to be, understandably, embarrassed and said, "Sorry, sorry, sorry! Let's do something fun. Well, don't play that kind of... play something I can bop to."

If Diddy had found Lizzo's dance moves too suggestive for his sons, that would be one thing. But he soon proved that the twerking wasn't the problem when model Draya Michele danced similarly on the dance-a-thon just a few hours later.

"You killed that!" Diddy told Draya. "I think that was one of the top performances."

Twitter users, rightfully, had issues with Diddy's hypocrisy.



It's obvious that Diddy shutting down Lizzo's dancing had nothing to do with it being "the Lord's day" and everything to do with fat phobia. Online backlash was so severe that he later tried to excuse himself by claiming that he stopped Lizzo because of the song she chose: "When I stopped the music, it was 'cause it had a lot of curses in there," he posted on Instagram. "Not 'cause she was twerking. She's one of the best twerkers in the world, okay? So, let's keep that clear. You are allowed to twerk on Easter. There was a lot of cursing in the record and I don't need child services knocking on my door right now." Cursing on Instagram has never brought child services to anyone's door, but okay, Diddy.

It's sad that some people still can't see the divine miracle that is the female form in all its many variations—especially the holy gift of Lizzo's butt. Of course, so close to Easter, all we can do is pray for Diddy's hypocritical, fat phobic soul and twerk our hearts out, no matter what size we are.

Music Lists

15 Songs to Sing While You Wash Away Coronavirus

We've all been taught to sing "Happy Birthday" twice, but times are tough, and we need a change.

Since the COVID-19 (coronavirus) outbreak reached the U.S., a number of states—including Washington, New York, and California—have called a state of emergency and canceled large gatherings.

Originally scheduled to take place this week, Austin's South by Southwest was canceled for the first time in its 32-year history. Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden both just called off rallies in Ohio due to fears surrounding the virus, while Coachella is in talks to be rescheduled for October. As the number of confirmed cases climbs, more and more employees are working from home. Harvard University is evacuating its dorms for the remainder of the semester. Times are tough.

Still, experts assure us that as long as we're generally healthy, we don't need to worry so much about coronavirus. But with so much media coverage and the reality of quarantine feeling more imminent, what better way to help us through the crisis than with song?

Health officials maintain that the best way to ease the spread of coronavirus is to avoid touching your face and, of course, wash your hands thoroughly–for at least 20 seconds. Singing "Happy Birthday" twice is a tried-and-true method, but times are changing. It's 2020. We need better songs to wash our hands to.

So, here are just a few options to sing to yourself while you get your hands squeaky clean. Go ahead and sing them out loud. We won't judge.

"Sugar, We're Goin' Down" by Fall Out Boy

Am I more than you bargained for yet?
I've been dying to tell you anything you want to hear
'Cause that's just who I am this week
Lie in the grass next to the mausoleum
I'm just a notch in your bedpost
But you're just a line in a song

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Photo by SADAKA EDMOND/SIPA/Shutterstock
It's easy to forget that most social media accounts we interact with have actual faces behind the screen names.
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MUSIC

Will Pop Music Get Happier in 2020?

How did we get from Lorde's dystopia to Lizzo's exultation?

Lizzo at the 63rd Grammys

Photo by Jordan Strauss-AP-Shutterstock

"In the current pop firmament, Lorde is a black hole," goes the opening line of Pitchfork's review of Pure Heroine, the debut album from a then-16-year-old kiwi named Ella Yelich-O'Connor.

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MUSIC

The Top 10 Most Influential Albums of the 2010s

These albums not only shaped the past decade: they'll determine what music will be in the coming one.

Photo by: Kelvin Lutan / Unsplash

Music has never been extricable from culture, but in the 2010s, it became crystal clear that music has the ability to shatter norms and reshape the world.

Take a moment and think back to the albums that changed your life over the past decade. Most likely, they altered your worldview on a fundamental level, reshaping the way you saw yourself and your life. Some albums are capable of doing that on a massive scale, and that's what this list is intended to highlight: Albums that managed to shift the way people saw music, culture, and themselves, and that paved the way for what music might become.

10. Kendrick Lamar — To Pimp A Butterfly

Kendrick Lamar - Alrightwww.youtube.com

Poet and firebrand Kendrick Lamar creates music that's both timeless and entirely of its time. To Pimp A Butterfly was Kendrick at his most inspired and radioactive. It cut into the pain and rage and hope of an era and a community and a person, and collapsed time into a tangle of sound and memory that reviewers and listeners will be playing and attempting to understand for decades.

It made an indelible impact, becoming a juggernaut and an easy name-drop, but fortunately, To Pimp A Butterfly searingly addresses all the trappings of fame, shallow understanding, and commodification that follow it, retaining an indomitable inner life.

9. BTS — Map of the Soul: Persona

BTS (방탄소년단) MAP OF THE SOUL : PERSONA 'Persona' Comeback Trailerwww.youtube.com

The 2010s were the era that K-pop entered the global theatre, and nobody dominated more than BTS. Their album Map of the Soul: Persona may not have been critically lauded, but it was legendary in the hearts and minds of their fans.

Map of the Soul: Persona was glittery boy-band pop, pristine and starry-eyed. Rolling Stone described it as "harmless" and "impregnable," but BTS fans are not harmless, and neither is K-pop, but what this band is is unavoidable, pervasive, and larger-than-life. To ignore the impact of BTS would be to miss a massive portion of the 2010s and to remain blind to what the 2020s will hold, which is a far more globalized music industry that, no matter what, will always, always have its beloved boy bands.

8. Carly Rae Jepsen — E•MO•TION

Carly Rae Jepsen - Run Away With Mewww.youtube.com

Jepsen's seminal debut album gained her a cult of devoted fans and spread a wide-eyed sense of pop optimism across the 2010s. Just what about E•MO•TION was so singular, so moving, so unforgettable? As Jia Tolentino wrote, "Carly Rae Jepsen is a pop artist zeroed in on love's totipotency: the glance, the kaleidoscope-confetti-spinning instant, the first bit of nothing that contains it all." As one Twitter user insinuated, "Carly Rae Jepsen's E•MO•TION is for all the gays in a healthy relationship for the first time."

Electric Lit argued that with E•MO•TION, Jepsen ushered in a "queer renaissance," one that exists because her music occupies a familiar feeling: "the struggle to express a desire that isn't supposed to exist." From the raw ecstasy of "Run Away With Me" to the dreamy chaos of "LA Hallucinations," Jepsen's music is desperate to bridge the gap between the self and others, to leave behind loneliness, to cut straight to the feeling; and in that, it left an indelible impact for those who were there to experience its majesty.

7. Lana Del Rey — Born To Die

Lana Del Rey - Born To Die (Official Music Video)www.youtube.com

Lana Del Rey is, rightfully, credited with ushering in the wave of sad-girl pop that is still going strong, thanks to artists like Halsey, Billie Eilish, and of course, Del Rey herself. The artist formerly known as Lizzy Grant emerged onto the scene as a cyborgian, hyper-manufactured industry plant refracted through a vintage DIY filter, and now she's one of the voices of her generation, whispering platitudes on America and sex and sadness in the same breath.

Born To Die was Del Rey at her most manufactured, her most glittery, her must luxurious and opulent and depressed, and it's beautiful in its decay. Its kitschy Americana held no bars, and from its nihilistic title track to the sultry "Blue Jeans"to the weird glamour of "Off To the Races," it effectively spawned an entire generation of flower-crowned teens who are now sad Trump-hating adults.

6. Lady Gaga — Born This Way

Lady Gaga - Born This Waywww.youtube.com

Lady Gaga might not have the clout she did at the beginning of the 2010s, but back in the day, Gaga was a wild card and game-changer, crushing norms, changing fashion, and standing up for the LGBTQ+ community. She was proudly weird and always daring, and she created a whole space for weird pop stars after her. She blended drag, burlesque, and shock-factor performance with genuinely catchy pop, and created a new blueprint for stardom in the process.

Born This Way was arguably her crown jewel, the point where she blossomed into the true freak she'd been waiting to become. It had the ecstatic "You and I" and "Edge of Glory." It marked an era where pop music became inextricable from its visual component and political implications—not that it ever really was.

5. Lizzo — Cuz I Love You

Lizzo - Truth Hurts (Official Video)www.youtube.com

Most likely, Lizzo will be even bigger in the 2020s; after all, she only just released her major label debut album. But Lizzo has already changed the game, creating space for a type of beauty and confidence that pop stars before her have only played at or insinuated. From her refusal to tolerate inadequate men to her willingness to rock thongs at baseball games and her decision to pay tribute to the great women who paved the way for her, at this point, Lizzo might be our best hope for the future.

Cuz I Love You synthesized the hits Lizzo had been building up for years, twining them into a euphoric testament to self-love in spite of a world that teaches you to hate yourself. From the celebratory "Good As Hell" to the buoyant mic-drop that is "Truth Hurts," the album is a gift to us all.

4. Lil Nas X — 7 (EP)

Lil Nas X - Old Town Road (Official Movie) ft. Billy Ray Cyruswww.youtube.com

Lil Nas X's fantastic "Old Town Road" was the perfect conflagration of factors that hit at exactly the right time. It was also supremely, unbelievably catchy. Using memes, blurring genres, buying beats off SoundCloud, coming out on Twitter and being open about how he made "Old Town Road" while sleeping on his sister's couch, Lil Nas caught us all in our heartstrings and created a blueprint for music's undeniably post-genre and multimedia future.

X's EP, "7," wasn't a high-quality work so much as it was a cultural flashpoint, an inspiration that no doubt has marketing executives scrambling to replicate it.

3. Billie Eilish — when we all fall asleep, where do we go?

Billie Eilish - bad guywww.youtube.com

Billie Eilish is changing the game in terms of what pop music can sound like and how pop stars should act. Any producer who attempts to drag pop songs into clear-cut and old-fashioned forms involving high notes and beat drops will find themselves challenged by the innovative, glitchy, challenging tunes that Eilish creates with her brother in their childhood home. Her refusal to fit into gender norms and her insistence on standing up for things like climate make her emblematic of what a future of Gen-Z stars might look like.

when we all fall asleep, where do we go? is a peculiar album. A lot of its songs don't even try for radio play, and some are so sad they can take your breath away. Some are barely whispers, like the moody "when the party's over," while others are cracked and angry and challenging, like the smash hit "bad guy," but all of it's undeniably unforgettable and boundary-breaking.

2. Kanye West — My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Kanye West - Runaway (Full-length Film)www.youtube.com

Provocative, raw, and almost bloody with emotion, Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy continues to reverberate nearly 10 years after it was released. West's album is full of unexpected dips into guitar solos and alien sounds that draw it into new dimensions; it's peppered with cheesy lines, dirty jokes, and shockingly confessional lyrics; and no matter how far West has gone into Christianity, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is an enduring ode to the devils we all know.

Its best songs, "All Of the Lights," "Devil In A New Dress" and "Runaway," explore what West has always been working through—the ragged edge where sin meets faith, and where success meets corruption. MBDTF sinks its teeth into the rough, infected parts of the world and creates something great out of them. Though we might not see West exploring this territory again, his work sparked an entire generation of artists looking to dive into the world he created.

1. Beyoncé — Lemonade

Beyoncé - Formationwww.youtube.com

Beyoncé's brilliant Lemonade has yet to be surpassed, even as other artists try to mirror her surprise video-drop format. Lemonade mixed poetry, visuals, and beautiful, kaleidoscopic music to form a treatise on freedom, love, black women's power, and of course, Jay-Z. It made an indelible impact on all the music that came after it, setting the standard for what a truly creative release could look and sound like.

From the harmony-laden "Pray You Catch Me" to the gritty Jack White duet "Don't Hurt Yourself" to the triumphant, anthemic "Freedom," Lemonade changed everything. We can only hope we'll see more like it in the 2020s.

Lizzo poses in the press room at the 63rd annual Grammy Awards at the Los Angeles Convention Center on March 14 with both live and prerecorded segments63rd Annual Grammy Awards - Press Room, Los Angeles, United States

Photo by Jordan Strauss/AP/Shutterstock

Lizzo dazzled on her SNL debut this weekend, but fans might have noticed another source of energy and talent emanating from next to the "Truth Hurts" singer as she belted out her tunes.

That would be Celisse Henderson, who shredded on guitar as Lizzo sang.

Lizzo: Truth Hurts (Live) - SNLwww.youtube.com

Henderson is a vocalist and multi-instrumentalist who is a member of the band Ghosts of the Forest. She took center stage during Lizzo's performance, adding a layer of gritty, bluesy rock to the unbelievably catchy song about getting over a man who doesn't deserve you.

Henderson styled her look and guitar after the legendary Sister Rosetta Tharpe, whose gospel and blues recordings were instrumental in shaping rock and roll. As one of the first guitarists to use distortion, she inspired many blues and rock players, and her voice and stage presence helped make her a star.

Seeing Lizzo's pristine, very 21st-century pop mixed with a tribute to one of the greatest rock and roll guitarists of all time gave scope and depth to the performance and helped make it the unforgettable showstopper that it was.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe - Up Above My Headwww.youtube.com






Celisse Henderson - Stuck On You Blues | Sofar NYCwww.youtube.com


Lizzo, who took to the stage covered in head-to-toe Gucci and hit stratospheric notes from start to finish, also posted a heart-warming tribute to her journey.

Between Henderson's masterful guitar playing, Lizzo's unbelievable pipes and stage presence, and the dancers that lit up the stage, it was a performance to remember.

Lizzo's sets were highlights of Eddie Murphy's star-studded, highly acclaimed, and hilarious SNL episode, which also braided tributes to icons of the past (like Gumby, dammit) with very modern humor.

Eddie Murphy Monologue - SNLwww.youtube.com