BET Awards 2021: Charting Lizzo’s Meteoric Rise To Fame By The Numbers
If you don’t live in a cave, you probably know at least a little about Lizzo. Born Melissa Jefferson, she came up with the name Lissa when she was part of a rap group but changed to Lizzo after hearing Jay-Z’s “Izzo.” She has had the desire to make music since birth and taught herself to play the flute as a child. She moved from Houston to Minneapolis to start her music career, worked with Prince on his 2014 album Plectrumelectrum, and her career was on its way. Fast forward to 2021 and she’s released three studio albums, won Grammys and hosted “Saturday Night Live.”
Let’s take a closer look at her life and career by the numbers.
23 – number of singles Lizzo has released. That’s a pretty big number for someone who has only been signed to a major label since 2016. Her biggest song was “Truth Hurts,” which reached the number one spot on Billboard’s Top 100.
304,000 — That is the amount of people who follow the Instagram fan account for Lizzo’s flute. The flute is named Sasha Flute after Beyoncé’s Sasha Fierce.
1.6 Million – Number of Twitter followers she has. Earlier this year Lizzo announced that she was getting off of Twitter because of the trolls. Her account is still active, but it’s currently being run by her management..
3 –Number of Grammys Lizzo has won. In 2019, Lizzo was awarded Grammys for Best Pop Solo Performance for her song “Truth Hurts,” Best Traditional R&B Performance for “Jerome” and Best Urban Contemporary Album for Cuz I Love you (Deluxe).
61.6 million — Number of people who streamed Lizzo on Spotify in 2019, a breakout year for her. There were 1.1 billion streams across 79 different countries.
7 — Number of weeks “Truth Hurts” was at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. That put it ahead of Cardi B’s “Bodak Yellow” as the longest-running number one rap single by a solo female artist in the chart’s history.
157.6 million — The amount of money Hustlers, Lizzo’s film debut, grossed in box office sales. About her character in the film, a flute playing stripper, she told Cosmopolitan, “Her character is cool. She’s the loud one. She lets all the girls know what’s up. I’m celebrating this one girl’s new titties. I can get us riled up, you know? So it’s kind of like me in real life. Same outfits. It was a blast. It was really, really easy to get into that character.”
Watch the 20th BET Awards on Sunday, June 27, at 8/9c.
