Feel-good music for a feel-bad world
In popland, the ruling class continues to make album covers at sea. On the cover of Billie Eilish’s new offering, Hit Me Hard and Soft, the pop star is submerged in dark water, sinking into a liquid dream. As for the cover of Dua Lipa’s latest, Radical Optimism, it was photographed at the waterline, depicting the 28-year-old from the shoulders up in golden evening wear, staring down a shark’s dorsal fin. If this image isn’t trying to evoke a scene from an old James Bond movie, it’s a comment on optimism in an age of grievance and paranoia, right? The glass is half full, but the water is still teeming with stuff that wants to kill you.
Or maybe even that read is too cynical. Nobody’s out for blood on Radical Optimism, especially not the woman holding the microphone. Her melodic buoyancy and lyrical comity feel like stealth counterprogramming to all the sour grapes piling up inside today’s tower of song.
You know who I’m talking about. Taylor Swift is mad at her exes. Beyoncé is mad at awards shows. Drake and Kendrick Lamar are mad at each other. Blah-blah-blah, boo-hoo.
The songs on Radical Optimism have a pep that’s never goody-goody or tryhard, no matter how out of sync they might be with the dank mood currently filling pop charts. Also, watching someone jump too high over a low bar can be fun. “I don’t believe that every flame has to get colder,” Lipa sings in Falling Forever, the most heart-swollen moment on this otherwise collection of up-and-down love songs. Even the breakup tracks lean brisk and danceable.
A recent story in Rolling Stone recounts Lipa’s studio habits, but far more revealing was her explanation of how her parents fleeing Kosovo in the early 1990s instilled a solidarity with those displaced in Israel’s war on Gaza. “I feel for people who have to leave their home,” Lipa said. “From my experience being in Kosovo and understanding what war does, no one really wants to leave their home. They do it for protection, to save their family, to look after the people around them, that kind of thing, for a better life. So I feel close to it.”
She’s worldly. And empathetic. And aware. She has a position on the state of our messed-up, freaked-out society. But if Lipa doesn’t put those beliefs directly into her lyrics, are they still in her music somewhere? Maybe I’m too optimistic, but I say yes. There’s an inherent generosity in creating something reliable and well-crafted in a chaotic and careless world — a world in which the powerful disgrace us all through war and injustice, but also in which there are still karaoke machines, spin classes, Friday nights and strangers to dance with. Good pop music need not save the world, just improve it. Even a little.