I don't look to celebrities for style anymore because I've learned the chain of command. They are being dressed by a stylist who's getting inspiration from a 16-year-old kid running the streets of Melbourne, Australia. Once I learned that chain of command, I just started taking it to the streets.
First Avenue is one of my favorite places to play. All along, they've treated me with respect.
I work on myself daily to be a better person. When I react in a negative way to somebody, I sit back and think about why I did it, so I'm always working on myself, and my music is the same.
Every time I rap about being a big girl in a small world, it's doing a couple things: it's empowering my self-awareness, my body image, and it's also making the statement that we are all bigger than this; we're a part of something bigger than this, and we should live in each moment knowing that.
When we're on stage doing a song about positive body image or another about female empowerment, everyone out there is super into it and right there with us. It's been awesome. I feel like we fit right in.
I love kimonos because you can just throw them on over anything. Ever since I got my first kimono from Lane Bryant in high school and thought, 'This is amazing; I can wear it with everything!'
Minneapolis just embraced me. There are a lot of weirdos here. It's awesome, because I'm a weirdo. Thankfully, the city embraced me with open arms. A lot about Minneapolis helped carve my musicality and open my eyes. The whole town is so open-minded compared to like, you know, Texas.
When I was born, my father named me Melissa, and I am still Melissa, but I got the nickname Lizzo around the time I was in the Cornrow Clique.
I spent a lot of time star-gazing, writing, and learning languages when the other kids were doing cooler things in Detroit.
Seeing people catch a feeling in their spirit and sprint the aisles of the church while my cousins played driving, uplifting gospel stuck with me. I let that same feeling wash over me when I experience and perform music.
I feel like I've started to create my own culture of being a voice for something, and that's what people want to know about. I love that because I am a woman and because I a rap, and I look the way I look, I can connect with the demographic of people who feel like they have a voice in me.
My formative years were in Houston. I was in middle school, and everyone was dropping the last half of their names and adding an 'o' to the end. My little crew that I had, we were an all-female rap group, and everyone had an 'o' at the end of their name. I was Lisso. Then this dude started getting lazy with it, saying Lizzo.
My mother and father taught me about black excellence and dynasty. They experienced racism personally, and when something like that happens to you and not around you, you develop a different perception than someone who has never experienced racism a day in their lives.
The fight still isn't people of colour versus white. It's the people versus the system built to keep us down. That's the first line of the Constitution. And the system is manmade but is made of no man. Everyone, regardless of class, creed, culture and ethnicity can fight the system and help to break it down.
I'm not a girl who started getting into music and using my femininity to get attention. When I was getting into it, it was all pure skill.
I was raised on gospel. I remember hip-hop and rock music were secular, so basically, for my first ten years living in Detroit, I was on gospel. But when I moved to Houston, that's when I got to open up my musical horizons.
When I was 19, I joined a rock band, and that's when I began to say, 'Okay, this is something that I could take seriously.' When I came to Minneapolis, it just refined everything.
There's a lot of influences that I have from Detroit that are subliminal. I mean, I spent the first 10 years of my life there. My mom and dad were born and raised there, so a lot of that rubbed off on me. When I get angry, sometimes a Detroit accent comes out.
