Selena Gomez recently revealed the cover art for her upcoming album, Revival , and the art’s revealing nature shows that Selena is paying no attention to the body shaming she had to endure earlier this year.
In an exclusive interview about the album with Ryan Seacrest, Gomez notes that she was not completely naked in the photo – she was actually wearing shorts – but she definitely bared enough skin to communicate she is proud of her body .
When Seacrest asked Selena specifically about the risque nature of the cover art, she did not point directly to the shamers.
The art “is stunning and a beautiful representation of where I’m at,” Gomez said.
In an interview with Los Angeles radio station Power 106 , however, Selena Gomez was a bit more obvious about the connection between the seductive art and the body-related haters.
“It’s not even about my weight. It’s just not that I’m not going to give a f*** what people, sorry, I’m not going to care. I’m not going to let them get to me. I can do what I want.”
In the same interview, Gomez conceded that the body shaming, which was especially vicious when she posted a slew of bikini pics from a trip Selena took to Mexico back in April, did hurt, but she didn’t let it slow her career down.
“You have to understand that I dealt with a lot of body shaming this year, and I’ve never experienced that before… that was really hurtful,” Selena admitted. “I’ve experienced people who have tried to control that stuff before… I don’t care about that stuff, but I did start gaining weight and I didn’t really mind it. I enjoyed it.”
Gomez also talked about how she felt she had dealt with problems too passively in the past, and she felt like she needed to make a real statement on Revival .
“I always ignore, I ignore, I ignore, and it just kind of got out of hand,” Gomez explains. “And so when I went into the new label, I was like ‘I have to say something.’ I need to say what I want to say… [the making of the album] was such a time for me to explore who I am, and that was really important, I think that’s why we called it Revival.
In other words, Selena says, Revival is an album on which she takes every opportunity, ranging from the cover art to the lyrics, to show audiences who she truly is as an artist.
“It was almost like therapy,” Selena muses. “It was so exhausting.”
The 23-year old Selena Gomez seems just as confident about the album’s music as she does about the self-image it portrays.
“At the end of the day,” Selena said, “[my body image] is not even going to be a subject once the album comes out. The music is going to take over because that’s how confident I am about it.”
Are you going to be downloading Revival when Selena Gomez releases it on October 9?
[Image via Christopher Polk/Getty Images for Sony Pictures Entertainment]
