Anyone who wrote Lizzo off hasn’t been paying attention. The singer is currently one of the busiest people in entertainment, and her Sports Illustrated Swimsuit feature makes that case without breaking a sweat.
Born Melissa Jefferson, Lizzo used the platform to talk about something sitting close to her heart right now: getting young people to fall back in love with music, specifically through instruments.
She is preparing to release her first children’s book, Lil Lizzo Meets Sasha B. Flootin, and the project is as intentional as it sounds coming from a classically trained flutist who has made the instrument part of her identity since long before she was famous.
“I simultaneously hope to inspire young people to fall in love with music and pick up an instrument,” she told the magazine. “I’m super adamant about young people playing instruments again.
It used to be mandatory, and I don’t know if it’s mandatory anymore and it scares me.” She connected the dots between reading, imagination, and instrument playing, describing all three as tools that shaped her own creativity growing up, and questioning why the education system has let two of the three quietly slip away.
The children’s book is one piece of a schedule that would exhaust most people. Her latest album B*tch is out and being promoted.
She is simultaneously deep in development on the Sister Rosetta Tharpe biopic, where she will star as the woman widely credited as one of the founding influences of rock and roll.
It is not a casual project. Tharpe was a Black queer woman who wielded an electric guitar in the 1940s and shaped the sound that white artists would later become famous for, a story that has never been told on screen with the scale it deserves.
Lizzo is clearly aware of the weight of that. “There’s a lot of research that has gone into the biopic and I want to be really careful and precious with the script because I think it’s really important to show a Black woman at that time in a different light,” she said.
“She was a lot larger than life. She was almost mythological, and I want her biopic to represent her as the superstar that she was.”
The combination of a children’s book rooted in music education, an album, and a biopic about one of history’s most overlooked legends paints a picture of an artist who knows exactly what she wants her legacy to look like.
Charts and controversy aside, Lizzo is planting things she expects to still matter in twenty years. That’s a different kind of ambition, and right now she is running toward all of it at once.
