Lizzo

'Truth Hurts' came out in September 2017 and went nowhere. Two years later, a Netflix rom-com used it on the soundtrack, streaming found it, and it hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, staying there for seven weeks. Lizzo became only the third solo female rapper to top the chart. The 2020 Grammys gave her eight nominations, most of any artist that year, and she won three. A song that failed on release became the one she'll always be known for.

Three former dancers filed suit in August 2023, alleging she pressured them to touch nude performers at an Amsterdam strip club and fired one over weight complaints. The irony was hard to miss: her entire public career ran on body positivity. She called the suit a 'fabricated sob story.' A judge dismissed some claims but let the core case proceed. She announced a gap year in 2024 and tried a comeback in 2025. The music landscape had moved on, and the goodwill hadn't waited around.

Before pop stardom, she was a classical flute performance major at the University of Houston on a music scholarship, having studied privately with the Houston Ballet's principal flautist during high school. Her father died in 2009 during her junior year. She dropped out, was briefly homeless, and eventually landed in Minneapolis where she started rapping. Her named flute, Sasha, has its own following: a British Flute Society study found 1 in 5 flute players cited her as an influence. In 2023, she endowed a $50,000 scholarship for Black music students at UH, which suggests she always knew the flute was the more interesting part of the story.