Lipa throws a guilt-free solo disco party
DUA Lipa has been described as the Madonna of Generation Z. In May last year, when the state of Alabama was set to impose a near-total ban on abortion, Dua came out with all guns blazing, like a heyday Madge:
“F*** THE PATRIARCHY I AM DONE WITH THIS BULLSHIT HANDMAIDS TALE SHIT WHAT THE F***ING F***,” tweeted Lipa, who was born in Westminster in 1995; her parents had moved to London from Kosovo five years earlier after war broke out.
In 2018, GQ dubbed Lipa “the beguiling voice of screw-you love songs and sad-happy club tracks, pop’s new alpha seductress”. (The journalist added that she was wearing “the kind of red furry coat that makes her look like a cross between the Honey Monster and a stop sign”.)
Lipa’s first big hit was 2016’s Hotter Than Hell from her self-titled debut album, but it wasn’t until 2017’s single New Rules that she took off. That song was, as The Face put it, a “perfect storm of self-empowering affirmation, meme and pop chorus…[an] instructive anti-f***boy” anthem with lyrics setting out the new rules thus:
“One: Don’t pick up the phone/You know he’s only callin’ cos he’s drunk and alone.
‘Two: Don’t let him in/You’ll have to kick him out again.
‘Three: Don’t be his friend/You know you’re gonna wake up in his bed in the morning/And if you’re under him, you ain’t gettin’ over him.”
There is no getting over the infectiousness of her new album, Future Nostalgia. At a time when the world is starting to feel like a Leonard Cohen soundtrack to mass melancholia, Lipa has us wanting to get up and dance at a social distance with each other.
And, hey, let’s have the best fun of our lives to songs that sound like Giorgio Moroder channelling Rihanna or Kylie; or Olivia Newton-John. Physical references the latter’s cheese-tastic work-out tune from 1981. Boys Will Be Boys isa post-feminist classic you can dance to.
Future Nostalgia is giddily happy (and guilt-free) retro pop. On Break My Heart, she even samples INXS’s Need You Tonight. Rolling Stone magazine noted that Lipa’s special sauce is a “well-played mix of disco strings and funk bass in the vein of Chic and Donna Summer”.
“I know you’re dying trying to figure me out,” Lipa sings on the album’s title track. There is really no point in trying to figure her out. Just shut up and dance on your own in this nutsy time.
Chris Willman in Variety poses some apt but ultimately, ridiculous questions in his review of the album in Variety: ‘Is it wrong, right now, to be as happy as Dua Lipa’s second album makes you? Is this any time to celebrate pop music at its most ebullient, when we should be bullish on meditation?
“Shouldn’t we be focusing our attention on weightier matters than how to all guiltlessly throw ourselves a solo disco party?”
The answers, set to a Daft Punk bassline are, no, no and no.
‘There is no point in trying to figure her out. Just shut up and dance’