Lizzo gets emotional talking about the origins of her song “My Skin” in a preview of the third season of David Letterman’s Netflix series My Next Guest Needs No Introduction. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the pair sit down to discuss the “other virus” that’s been with us for 400 years, as Letterman puts it: the brutal oppression of Black Americans.
“There was a lynching is what that was,” an upset Letterman says about the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May. “As a black citizen of this country I’ve been heartbroken by the way that we’ve been treated and seen my entire life,” responds Lizzo, recalling the murder of 24-year-old Black man Jamar Clark just down the street from her home in Minneapolis in 2015. She describes being fired up and writing the song “My Skin” for her Big GRRRL Small World album in response.
“It was very like, ‘we gotta make a change!,’ people were camping out in front of the precinct, we were getting shot at by God knows who,” she says, also mentioning unarmed 12-year-old child Tamir Rice’s killing by police in Cleveland in 2014. “People politicized it. How can you politicize the murder of a child?” she asks. “I was so numb that I lost all hope for any type of change in this country… Change is painful, and I think you have to sign yourself up for that.”
A sign of hope, she says, was the massive movement to protest the killing of Floyd and other Black and brown women by police that took root this year, with the singer acknowledging white allies who came out in the millions to support peace and call for reform. “I also saw people in the news realize that it was more than just a hashtag, a moment, a movement, and us complaining and that it’s a real systemic poison,” she says. “That got me, for the first time, a little hopeful. I can’t help but to be optimistic and hopeful.”
The upcoming season, which kicks off on Oct. 21, features Dave Chappelle, Roberts Downey Jr. and Kim Kardashian West.
Watch the preview below, as well as a previous one in which Lizzo teaches Dave how to play the flute and rap.