How’s a bitch doing, really? I don’t quite mean women or craven men—not anyone who’s been named one, shamed as one, not even the ones who have, in the usual idiom, reclaimed insult for affirmation. No, I mean “bitch,” the word; or, “BITCH,” as Lizzo stylizes her fifth studio album, released this past Friday. In the title track, Lizzo interpolates two elder singer-songwriters, Missy Elliott and Meredith Brooks, who each flipped the slur into biting hooks in the late nineties. From the former comes a statement of fact, expressed and embraced on behalf of some third party: “She’s a bitch,” Lizzo spits like Missy, with whom she collaborated for “Tempo,” in 2019. Brooks, whose “Bitch” was edgy enough for 1997, supplies those famous binaries—bitch, lover, child, mother—though Lizzo, as Lizzo would, replaces “Hell” and “dream” with “mess” and “queen.” Also all-Lizzo are the verses, rebutting the negativity of name-calling with lyrics like “Uh, you mean boss? / . . . If I lost some followers, it ain’t a loss.”

“BITCH”—both track and album—isn’t as bombastic as its acknowledged predecessors, including Lizzo’s previous records. The caps-lock title and eff-you art work, in which the artist’s image is transposed onto a hand as a triumphant middle finger, overshoots the tone. (The title track, for one, is more of a smirk.) The album revisits, but is not insistent on, familiar touchpoints, be it self-love after heartbreak or generic emulations of genre (the piano ballad; the emo plaint; the eighties, the nineties, the sixties), settling into these tropes as one would life’s grooves. That is not to call this a great work, but neither is it an abysmal showing. Maybe something like an abeyance. “BITCH” is competent, measured, and medium, and therefore not usual for the artist who became known for saying it with her tits.

A read on the times, perhaps. For all the redux going ’round, it is no longer the nineties; it is not even—culturally or otherwise—the twenty-tens, the heyday for the marketable I’ma-do-me positivity that composed the ill-fated ferment for Lizzo’s fame. Her career suffices for a neat object lesson in what my peers have taken to calling, with dubious irony, Woke 1.0. Core memories of the era replay the commercial capture of identity, from Beyoncé’s questionably feminist “***Flawless” to Meghan Trainor’s whole thing, then unduly heralded as political action and now unduly blamed on people who found some of the music fun. Coterminous with that journey has been the artist’s run-in with “Lizzo’s Pass,” a comedic yet profound coinage by the comedian Sam Taggart, who co-hosts the culture podcast “Straightiolab.” An artist on the come-up, so the paradigm goes, can either go in “a cool direction” or “not a cool direction,” represented, respectively, by Pitchfork and Target. The force of the example, as Taggart explains, lies in us forgetting that Lizzo was once an oddball rapper-flautist who was anointed by Prince; an indie artist with pipes who endeared herself to mean Brooklyn gays. Then she chose Target. Though it might be as accurate to say that Target (and Old Navy and Cadillac and Macy’s and Walmart and L’Oréal and Pepsi and Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, all of which used her music in commercials) chose her.

Lizzo’s charting songs of herself, as encapsulated on her 2019 platinum record “Cuz I Love You,” were infectious, if not cool; her fat and Black body, much as it became an avatar for white women with cellulite, could be viewed as a token of changed values. This assigned her music an unproven political heft, much to her (and associated brands’) profit, with potential for a nasty recoil. It did not help that the music became too brazen in yanking from that particular money tree, juicing the juice of say, “Juice,” till the bit ran dry. Her fourth studio album, “Special,” capitalized on the mounting enthusiasm for what the critic Rawiya Kameir dubbed “empowerment-core,” epitomized by a song like “Grrrls,” a flip of the Beastie Boys song given such decaying lyrics as “That’s my girl, we C.E.O.s / And dancin’ like a C-E-ho.” (This combo—the flip and groan-worthy quip—that’s the Lizzo special. And results sure do vary.)

Some in the pop commentariat will say that it was controversy and hypocrisy that transformed Lizzo into the sort of artist for whom polling the group chat’s feelings about the new album serves to inform them of its existence. In 2023, former employees filed a series of lawsuits against Lizzo for a hostile work environment inclusive of sexual harassment, racism, and fatphobia. These latter two accusations got better play in the court of opinion, and, in hindsight, one gets the sense that we were ready for the unmasking of body positivity, now outmoded. I can believe that some superficial share of Lizzo’s fandom abandoned her out of principle, though I also believe, out of an abundance of evidence, that lawsuits matter little when an artist is making music that people want to hear.

Rather, I suspect it goes back to Target, and the cheery co-optation of diversity that helped relegate Lizzo to the realm of cringe. “Cringe,” as the writer Charlie Markbreiter puts it, “is the gap between how others see you and how you want to be seen.” Target doesn’t even want to be seen as “woke” anymore, having recently scuttled much of its Pride merch—perhaps a concession to our moment of right-wing, Christian revanchist escalation. On the other side, Lizzo’s fame, refracted through Lizzo’s sound, has become an unflattering reflection of liberal unseriousness in the face of such hostility. Of course self-love won’t solve all of this. How did anyone let mass culture run away with that idea? Nor does it matter whether the idea was Lizzo’s in the first place—her sound is inextricable from a bygone article of faith. That’s her real liability.

And maybe she knows it. Maybe to this we attribute the composure of Lizzo’s “BITCH,” as ethos, as idea, as music. Songs like “Don’t Make Me Love U,” “She Stole My Man,” and “Little Black Cat” breeze through power pop (à la Tina Turner), pop punk, and rainy-day R. & B., tapping the usual beats of heartbreak. “And it felt just like a crime / Broke my heart and stole my life,” she sings over acoustic guitar on “Like a Crime.” Cliché is not the issue—heartbreak precisely reminds us how conventional and repetitive love is in its guaranteed permutations. (Olivia Rodrigo, darling of the moment, understands this to popular effect, as on recent, ramping singles “Drop Dead” and “The Cure.”) But competence can engender yearning for its opposite, for a metabolizing, in-medias-res idea. In a recent interview with the New York Times, Lizzo says she’s never had the benefit of a persona to hide behind when the going gets tough, yet she admits that it is “not appropriate,” in our cultural and political atmosphere, for stars to wax morose about their problems. If the real Lizzo is ever with us—whatever “real” can mean in the surveilled world of pop stardom—she would still rather us see her sparkle instead of sweat.

Signs of something interesting can be found in some of Lizzo’s other recent music, namely “MY FACE STILL HURTS FROM SMILING,” a mixtape from 2025 that I’m sure my group chat also doesn’t know about. It’s not a perfect bunch of songs by any means, but the two-disc dump is rangy and untidy, groovy and funny and even a bit mean. Skip the first track, with its opening a-cappella instruction to “protect your peace,” for another set of instructions on track two, during which Lil Jon repeatedly implores listeners to “shut the fuck up, bitch” and Lizzo’s sing-talking adopts a bratty lilt: “If fatherless behavior is a problem / Be a dad.” Her raps, heard on songs like “BOP IT!,” “LACE LIFTERS,” and “YITTY ON YO TITTYS,” hark back to a prior Lizzo, the Lizzo of her 2013 début, “Lizzobangers.” I won’t call it cool. Cringe remains—it’s Lizzo, after all. There’s also abrasion and bad attitude. It is, dare I say, bitchy. ♦