Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | June 29, 2026
The new Lizzo album, B*tch, dropped to little hype and middling reviews. Sales estimates put its first week numbers somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000. According to Luminate, it dropped to 650 copies in its second week. This is a major fall for an artist whose last album debuted at number two on the Billboard chart and earned her a Grammy. In a recent interview with Zachary Hourihane, a music critic also known as The Swiftologist, she was asked to her face whether or not she was in the Khia Asylum. Essentially, is she now in her flop era?
In the terminology of perennially online pop standom, the Khia Asylum is the unofficial holding pen of the flop. Named after the rapper Khia of "My Neck, My Back (Lick It)" fame, the term refers to pop artists who are perceived to have experienced a massive dip in fame and acclaim, thus placing them in a prison of sorts from which they can hopefully one day escape. Current, uh, residents include Bebe Rexha, Lizzo, Katy Perry, and Meghan Trainor. Zara Larsson got out after her fifth album, Midnight Sun, got great reviews and a collaboration with PinkPantheress was used by ice skater Alysa Liu during her Olympics gala.
Pop nerds argue over who technically qualifies for the asylum. If you've never had a number one hit but the album sales are strong, is that enough to stay out? The reviews got better but the sales worse, how about that? And what if they've put music aside in favour of another field? The concept has gotten mainstream enough that singers like Rexha and Charli XCX joking about their time behind bars.
There's nothing social media-driven fandoms love more than turning everything into a numbers game. Everything is boiled down to data and used as evidence of victory over one's perceived enemies. My fave has more streams than yours. Your idol doesn't have as many Grammy nods as mine, case closed. I've written before about how tedious and unsatisfying I find this entire rigmarole. What a boring lens through which to view an artform you claim to love. But it's also the one that the artists themselves are often forced to deal with, forever trying to chase trends and choose between artistic integrity and a commercial foothold, as their management breathes down their necks. It's natural for fans to want their favourites to do well. That way, you get more of them. Yet the competition of the Khia Asylum seems less concerned with earnest support and more with a fundamental misunderstanding of the pop ecosystem.
It's perfectly normal for a celebrity, especially a pop star seeking mainstream success, to have rises and falls in their career. It's also far more likely that such a singer will have a brief run in the spotlight rather than a decades-long run of cultural effect. We've been spoiled by the omnipresence of icons like Bowie, Madonna, Springsteen and Beyoncé, generational talents of impeccable hustle who had the talent and awareness to rise above the times and lead the zeitgeist. But even they've had their downs. Even Bowie had to make Tin Machine. And throughout it all, there were countless musicians that offered us some top songs, a great album or two, then moved on. It does not make their impact lesser because it didn't go on for their lifetime. This is simply how the ecosystem works. Some stars are of the moment, not for all time. For every Janet Jackson, you get ten Paula Abduls.
As with so much twisted fan discourse, there's a hunger in some corners to decry flopping as a symbol of moral failing. If only that was how the industry works. Have you seen Kanye and Chris Brown's fanbases? It's hardly a coincidence that so much of the Khia Asylum chit-chat is focused on women, and of mocking their supposed desperation to be famous, as though people become popstars out of a desire for a quiet life. The labour of stardom is one dependent on shamelessness, from Kim Petras doing ads for Scrub Daddy to Beyoncé performing at a New Year's Eve concert for the family of the former Libyan dictator. Doing the former is no more embarrassing than the latter, just because one earned far more money than the other and the product wasn't seen as prestigious. It's a matter of optics. Getting your bag when you're already a hit is a sign of business savvy; otherwise, it's desperation.
Lizzo's downturn does seem rather drastic, but it is not unprecedented. Many megastars experienced sharp drops in sales and acclaim from one album to the next. Robin Thicke went from an R&B favourite to a major chart topper with "Blurred Lines" to his follow-up album only selling 530 copies in its first week of release in the UK. Christina Aguilera's Bionic sold about a third of its predecessor's first-week numbers. Cher has had about five or six instances of this boom and bust, depending on your metrics. Some of these artists withstood the flameout and others didn't.
There are many factors at play in the creation and defining of a flop. Certainly, Lizzo's commercial slump indicates a major change in a few areas. Audiences' tastes can change on a dime, and the modern pop landscape is quite different in 2026 compared to only five years ago. There's a lot of ground to cover in terms of her image shift, with the lawsuit putting a dent in her standing as a figure of uniting positivity, and the fact that many were already gunning for her with the inevitable "I now hate this person we all over" backlash every celebrity faces. But ultimately, I think the core truth of the matter is a simple one: you either have the hits or you don't, and unless you're an artist with a zealously committed fandom, once the bangers disappear, so do most of your listeners.
The corporate systems that have hijacked art make it difficult to fail well. Many great albums were commercial disappointments on release, and a lot of artists didn't find their personal peaks until they were outside of the chart system cycle. The streaming business has killed off so many careers below the line of the ultra-A-List, along with drastically increased touring costs. You can hardly be shocked when those pop singers, with such heavy expectations on their shoulders, start to seem flop-sweaty in their hunt for a hit (one that'll net them next to no profit once Live Nation intervenes.) Fans and the press have always been oddly cold towards those who dare to confess their ambitions, or talk about the pressure to stay on top. Now, it's smarmily called being Khia-ed.
Everyone's a failure on some level. It's part of that whole being human mess. The eagerness, however, with which stan culture waits for the women they dislike (and it is largely women, shockingly) to be "Khia-ed" is rather telling. Look at what happened to Chappell Roan during that entire non-story in Brazil and how many social media users claimed this was her getting committed to the asylum rather than being the subject of a sexist smear campaign.
Pop is a fast-moving genre that isn't kind to its pioneers or middle classes. Most fall from their pedestals, even those who were at record-breaking highs. But anything can happen. Charli XCX was a ferociously anti-trend indie star until Brat. Trends come and go, and TikTok can make anything go viral. Still, there is something to be said about maintaining a middle ground of musical stardom: the mid-sized venue sellers with $40 tickets and mid-chart singles that you bop along to in the car. They don't need to change the world and that's great. Having to keep up with the exhausting commercial chase of profit above all else in a world of Ticketmaster, Spotify, and AI "music" is no fun, for artist or fan alike. The asylum walls only exist for those who see them. Everyone else just gets to dance.
