Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Friday Post on Trauma Response! This past week has been quite a slow news week, the only things anyone seems to be talking about are the hurricane and occasionally the war in Ukraine. I am neither meteorologist nor an expert on warfare, so I don’t find either of those things within “safe territory” for me to comment on in this newsletter. To combat this, I originally wrote an article of five different “newslets” in the style of my Sunday Listicles, but then I hopped on Twitter and realized one of my newslets had more legs to stand on than I initially thought. Without further ado, this is the tale of Lizzo and the crystal flute…
Everybody knows who Lizzo is, and, more often than not, everyone loves Lizzo. And what’s not to love? She’s a singer, songwriter, rapstress, recent Emmy-winner, and (if you don’t know Lizzo that well you might not know this) a proficient flutist. This past week Lizzo was given the go-ahead by the Library of Congress in DC to tickle the ivories of one of the oldest flutes in America’s history, James Madison’s 200-year-old crystal flute, at a concert she was holding in the area. It was a simple gesture, the librarians presented her with the flute onstage, she played it while twerking, and then she gave it back. Only the internet could blow something like this out of proportion.
Phony discourse started sprouting out of Twitter from both the left and the right. The left’s stance was that, by playing the flute owned by one of the Founding Fathers, Lizzo was engaging in an act of symbolic activism. Lizzo, flutist, activist, and patriot, stomped on the grave of James Madison by playing his prized crystal flute. The right’s stance was mostly reactive to the stance coming from the opposite side, with one user saying, “Desecrating the sacred symbols of the defeated enemy is a first priority of all victorious revolutionary regimes.” To me, both sides are definitely reaching, and one much harder than the other.
As I said before, Lizzo is an accomplished flutist, she studied the flute at the University of Houston and incorporates the instrument into much of her act as a performer. Why she likes the flute or the backstory behind her love for the flute, those things I can not tell you. Lizzo just likes the flute. Period. To say that Lizzo playing the flute owned by a Founding Father is an act of activism is a stretch. The flute in question is a 200-year-old instrument from the Library of Congress, and I doubt they would have lent it to her if they thought she was going to make some sort of political statement. Symbolic, perhaps it is, but a statement it is not. Lizzo is a flute lover, and I’m sure the chance to play any historically significant musical instrument titillated her, regardless of whose it was 200 years ago.
The stance taken by the right is even stupider than I could have ever thought of. While I don’t think Lizzo was trying to make a political statement by playing the flute owned by a dead president, I don’t really think that a crystal flute that no one’s ever heard of until now constitutes a “sacred symbol.” I’m not a “flute-head,” I don’t run in flutist circles, but I literally didn’t even know this flute exists, and I doubt any of the conservatives performatively whining on social media have ever heard of this flute either. If Lizzo was holding the Declaration of Independence with her bare hands, or, god forbid, drawing obscene images of the Prophet Muhammad then maybe I would understand if there was backlash. But she wasn’t doing either of those things, she was playing some dusty old glass flute that hasn’t seen the light of day in probably close to 200 years. Being owned by some famous dead guy does not a “sacred symbol” make.
And I’m not a “Lizzo stan” here, I’ve never been ride-or-die Lizzo. I’m not a huge fan of her music (it just isn’t for me, sowwy), and I know little of her personal life other than that she plays the flute. Lizzo is a famous, body-positive, black performer, and that means that both sides of the political spectrum will try to force things onto her that she never asked for. The left wants Lizzo to be their idol, their vision of the future, and spokesperson for liberal activism, the right wants to frame her as a usurper, a desecrator, and an albatross foreboding the future under liberalism. Believe it or not, she can be neither of those things. She can be, and she should be encouraged to be, Lizzo, Lizzo the flute player. She’s an artist, and if she wants to make political statements she’s more than allowed to do that, but don’t make political statements for her when she’s just trying to do her job.
At the end of the day, this discourse is all really stupid. Lizzo. Played. The flute. She just played a flute. An old flute, an expensive flute, a flute owned by a president, but a flute nonetheless. She is a flutist and should be allowed to play whatever flute is thrown her way. If Pope Francis were to give Lizzo a flute said to have grazed the lips of Jesus Christ himself I say she should be allowed to play it, play it to your heart’s content, Lizzo!
In two days everyone will forget that Lizzo played this flute because that’s how the media cycle goes. In two years people might even forget who Lizzo is entirely, I don’t know the trajectory of her career. In two hundred years people will forget that James Madison even had a crystal flute, and when some alien searches through the remnants of the Library of Congress and finds that flute they will play it, and not even they will know who owned that flute, the journey that it went on, or the conversations that it started.