Lizzo rags on the haters with help from Cardi B on ‘Rumors’: Watch
Fame in the age of social media kind of sucks — but not even the troll-iest troll can get Lizzo down for long.
That’s the message of the singer’s new single, “Rumors,” which dropped Thursday night accompanied by a Greco-Roman fantasia of a music video starring Lizzo and her guest on the track, Cardi B.
“Last year, I thought I would lose it / Read s— on the internet,” Lizzo admits, “My smoothie cleanse and my diet / No, I ain’t f— Drake yet.”
In the chorus of “Rumors,” which rides an ebullient, horn-accented groove, Lizzo takes aim at the haters “spending all your time trying to break a woman down,” then reminds them: “Realer s— is going down, baby, take a look around.”
“Rumors” is Lizzo’s first single since 2019’s “Cuz I Love You” album, which after years of work on the margins of show business brought the singer fully into the mainstream. The LP made Lizzo the most-nominated artist at the 62nd Grammy Awards in 2020 with eight nods; she won three prizes, including best pop solo performance for “Truth Hurts,” which spent seven weeks atop Billboard’s Hot 100.
For Cardi B — who appeared alongside Lizzo in 2019’s “Hustlers” movie — “Rumors” follows her recent cameo on Normani’s “Wild Side” and comes nearly exactly a year after “WAP,” her smash collaboration with Megan Thee Stallion.
“We are aware that there might be some pushback, but I’m confident we will be on the right side of history” the Coachella and Stagecoach promoter said Thursday.
In a YouTube livestream before the “Rumors” premiere, Lizzo said the new song “has been a long time coming for your girl,” adding that she’d written the song in February.
“If you thought that I was ratchet with my ass hanging out, / Just wait until the summer when they let me out the house,” she sings in “Rumors.”
Lizzo is scheduled to play a number of festivals this fall, including a headlining appearance — the first ever by a woman — at Tennessee’s Bonnaroo in September.
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