Lizzo Tells Us The Big-Budget Ideas She Didn't Get To Put In The 'Juice' Video

Throughout one segment in Lizzo's flashy, old television-mining music video for "Juice," the artist herself appears in a black dress opposite a late-night host, seemingly not having any of it. It's just one clip in the video's mirage of warm, fuzzy TV visions — among home-shopping and physical activity informercial sequences — that puts Lizzo herself front and center. As she revealed last week on Twitter, this one channeled one specific moment: Madonna's infamous 1994 appearance on Late Show with David Letterman.


She stopped by MTV News this week to explain why as well as the director, Quinn Wilson, she chose that distinct moment. The answer's pretty simple: "There was something really straightforward about how not with the shits Madonna was, and I feel like wanted to bring that alive." She contrasted Madonna's sedate, uncaring (and cool) energy to that of modern talk-show visitors, whose rehearsed answers don't routinely make for interesting television.


The "Juice" video, nevertheless, is fascinating television. As Lizzo herself makes a half-dozen costume changes, she also celebrates the history of the medium in what's both a nostalgia trip plus a contemporary comment. "There's such a nostalgia with channel-surfing that I had as a kid, like going through Nickelodeon and going to Cartoon Network," she mentioned. "And and then the late-night, like 3 a.M. Once you can't sleep, where it seemed like Mama's House was playing, or Seinfeld."


And what we visualize in the video isn't even all of what could've been.


"I wanted to be Mrs. Rogers from Mrs. Rogers' Neighborhood," Lizzo mentioned. "We was gonna do a Good Times scene. Like, we certainly were gonna go for it. We wanted to do a futuristic alien sci-fi show, yet, you know, we did not have the financial range. Or the time."


No matter, "Juice" ended up one of the opening truly good music videos (and songs) of 2019. As for what else we can expect from Lizzo this year, she called herself a "song leprechaun" who plans to drop "little songs at the end of little rainbows with a weed of gold for you to appreciate Sounds juicy.


Watch the whole MTV News interview with Lizzo in the video above.