Dua Lipa

One Liner:  Disco pop bubblegum somehow at the top of the ACL poster

Wikipedia Genre:  pop, disco, dance-pop, synth pop, R&B

Home: London

Poster Position: Headliner!
Both Weekends.
Saturday at 8:20.

AmEx Stage.

Thoughts:  I am actually thoroughly surprised that she has not been here before.  I truly believed that I had already written her up and would be able to just grab my old review for the majority of this year's entry.  I'm probably just thinking of one of the other generic pop singers who have started churning their way through the park.

Interestingly, this is even her real name.  Dua was her grandmother's suggestion and means "love" in Albanian.  Some fans call her Dula Peep because of a mispronunciation by American talk show host Wendy Williams in 2018.  I keep calling her Dual I.P.A. to my girls because it annoys them.

Ms. Lipa has amassed three Grammy Awards (2019 Best New Artist and Best Dance Recording; 2020 Best Pop Vocal Album) and a bunch of streams and chart topping tunes.  Find very little pleasure in it - which caused me to get into an argument with a friend the other day who thought I wasn't giving it enough credit.  I completely disagree with that premise, as I have tried to dig in to it and I just leave feeling empty about the value of this music.  I think poptimism has gone too far with infecting some people with the notion that all pop music must be respected, when really there is no requirement that every vapid entry into the pop canon must be elevated.

I will say that I reviewed one of her albums previously, and was won over by it.

Dua Lipa - Future Nostalgia.  What is happening to me?  I threw this album into my queue with the full expectation of a hate stream - I've tried her music out before and have never cared for it - but I read a good review of this disc and I thought I'd give it a shot.  And when the second song came on - "Don't Start Now"- I found myself bopping around to it.  Same with the third track - "Cool" - and the 80's heavy synth track "Physical," which sounds like it belongs on a Vice City radio station, perfect for hauling ass around the city in a stolen sports car.  Makes me think of that new Weeknd track, that also sounds like it was stolen straight from Olivia Newton John's composer.  Except that Wknd song annoys me, and these are making me want to dance.  Just as a by-the-way note, she has three songs with more than a billion streams, and "Don't Start Now" is about 50 million shy of that mark.  Which is always wild to me.

Sounds very much like Robyn - one of her self-empowerment jams meant to decimate the club dance floor.  "Love Again" inexplicably uses the weird little horn noise thing from White Town's "Your Woman," which is so very odd.  Why did she use that noise?  The pure disco queen power of "Break My Heart" also gets me ready to groove.  I'm actually annoyed at liking this album, but the ears love what they love, right?  Maybe I can use it to seem cool to my daughters who probably like it.

But after giving the new disc a few spins, I'm not there on the Radical Optimism. Before we get there, let's go back in time.

Several of her early tracks have huge streaming numbers now - "Hotter Than Hell" with 326.3 million. "Blow Your Mind (Mwah)" with 557.9 million, or "Be The One" with 629.5 million - but it was "New Rules" from her 2017 debut album that blew the doors off of everything.  2.1 freaking BILLION streams.

By the way, over 3 BILLION views of that video as well.  But also, here is the weird thing, that is not the song I thought it was going to be.  I have almost assuredly heard it before, but I was thinking about someone else entirely this whole time.  Tove Lo!  I thought Dua Lipa was the same person as Tove Lo this whole time, with that big debut song about being nasty ("Habits (Stay High)") but this is not the same person.  I don't like that "New Rules" song at all.  Fascinating.  "IDGAF" was also a big hit with over 1.6 billion streams.  And also nothing special to that one at all - she almost seems to be trying to do a Rhianna dancehall thing on these early songs.

Which is odd because she is a London gal, born of parents from Kosovo.  Her father was the lead singer and guitarist of a Kosovan rock band called Oda, and he would frequently play music at home.  Lipa started singing and taking lessons as a child in London.  In 2008, she and her family moved back to Kosovo after it declared independence from Serbia.  But at age 15, she moved back to London by herself to work on music and theater.  She started with cover videos, and then scored a spot modeling.  She signed with a manager, and he had this to saw after she got picked up by Warner: "Dua was really smart–she signed to Warner Bros. partly because they didn't have a big female pop artist and they needed one. They really wanted her, so she had the focus of the team from day one."  So, the huge popularity makes some sense - a model's looks and the focus of one of the biggest labels ever.  And so now we are stuck with her as the top headliner at a festival that used to eschew empty pop.

After that initial disc, she released 2020's Future Nostalgia and really took off.  In addition to that "Don't Start Now" track up there, "Levitating," which features Da Baby (and I can't ever remember which of the terrible mumble rappers from four years ago got cancelled, was it that one? Oh right, it was this one, with some homophobic comments at a show that got him dropped from ACL that year) is a massive track with 2.1 billion streams as well.

I definitely know that one, in part because youngest daughter has been doing dance through school and this song continues to be a frequent accompaniment to the little dances I have to watch.  I always thought that Da Baby had a nice tone to his flow, but his lyrics are always the dumbest possible shit you have ever heard.  "Don't Start Now" is a MUCH better song.

In the midst of this, she has continued doing modeling, and doing other strange things like being the global brand ambassador for Evian.  She's done SNL, appeared on many other tracks with other stars, and even had a role in Barbie (as Mermaid Barbie).

 

She also had the song that went along behind the biggest dance scene of the flick.  "Dance the Night."  She also starred in a movie called Argylle, but I never went there.  She also waded into the Gaza conflict and an Israeli music duo called Ness & Stilla released a song calling for her death.  So, that's neat.

Then the 2024 album, Radical Optimism, is just another dose of this same disco-fied pop that everyone has been doing for the past few years, without anything interesting to differentiate it from the other schlock out there.  It is like this felt new and fun and exciting back in 2020, when we were all locked inside and dreaming of going to a dance party where we could jam some old school disco and have fun.  But now it just sounds tired and same.  And the stream count reflects it - more than half of the songs on here don't crack 20 million streams.  Funny thing too, I remember when this was released and she claimed that it was inspired by Britpop like Oasis.  Which is the dumbest thing I have ever heard.  Unless someone switched her Oasis CD with an ABBA remix by Daft Punk and she didn't notice, because there is absolutely zero on here that has to do with Britpop.  "Houdini" is the hit, with 552.9 million streams.

Yep.  Not sold on it.  The sex appeal is off the charts, but the actual song being anything other than fluff that will disappear into the mass of other songs that sound just the same - strong and powerful voice, disco-fied track and incessantly thumping bass.  If you told me that was a disco remix of an old Katy Perry song, I would buy that in a heartbeat.

End of the day, I may just go see this because it isn't like Pretty Lights is just going to light up the world.  Just a weak night here at the Fest for me.  We'll see.