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Abstract: This essay analyzes Lizzo's 2019 Tiny Desk Concert as an affective performance of call-and-response that provides insight into pleasurable transgressions of hegemonic boundaries to performatively spread love. Lizzo invites a transgression of these norms, eliciting a response from her physical and digital audiences to embrace the fat, Black, feminine abject as a means of self-love. Turning to the Black communicative technique of calland- response, the essay illustrates the contours of the choric self-love Lizzo establishes with her audiences that transformatively reimagines a self-love that centers Black women's joy. Keywords: affect, Black rhetorics; call-andresponse; choric communication; digital media
If you can love my big, Black ass at this tiny, tiny little desk,
you can love yourself. . . .
Can I get one more "Hallelujah!"?
[audience: Hallelujah!]
Can I get a "Ya-Ya-Yee"?
[Ya-Ya-Yee]
Can I get a (growling) "Ya-Ya-Yee-ee-ee"?
[Ya-Ya-Yeee]
Whoo! My name is Lizzo, thank you!
-Lizzo, Tiny Desk Concert
On August 5, 2019, National Public Radio (NPR) Music published the newest episode of the Tiny Desk Concert series to their YouTube channel featuring hip hop artist Lizzo (NPR Music 2019). The performance lasts just under seventeen minutes (16:59) and features three songs from Lizzo's acclaimed 2019 Cuz I Love You album: the title track, "Truth Hurts," and "Juice." Unlike most of her shows, Lizzo performed with a backing band, comprised of Devin Johnson (keyboard), Dana Hawkins (drums), Vernon Prout (bass), and Walter Williams (guitar), all of whom present as Black men (Thompson 2019). In just over two years, the video garnered over eleven million views, making it one of the "most popular" Tiny Desk Concerts (Tiny Desk hereafter) on the NPR Music YouTube channel (NPR Music n.d.). The affectivity of Lizzo's performance, "all charm, vibrant, and gracious" (Thompson 2019), quickly generated discussion among digital audiences, in the over twelve thousand comments on and over 338,000 reactions to the YouTube video (NPR Music 2019). Much of the discourse surrounding Lizzo's performance focuses on the above call-and-response quote and its themes: self-love and embracing her self-testimony as a means of spreading self-love for all through identification with her transgressions and joy (NPR Music 2019).
Born Melissa Viviane Jefferson, Lizzo notes her persona cohered in 2015 with the release of the single "My Skin." The...