The Coronation of Dua Lipa
A recent concert by the British popstar affirmed everything I admire about her. It was a massive attack of good vibes.
Dua Lipa is something of an outsider. Where today’s pop landscape is governed by the opposing poles of intense diarism and anonymous playlist fodder, Lipa’s musical output stands somewhere in between. She’s not one to inject intense amounts of personal troubles into her lyrics, which means that – in an age where the Taylor Swifts and Gracie Abrams of the world treat their records like big-budget diaries – the divorce of Lipa’s biography from her music is both refreshing and liberating. But her music isn’t devoid of personality, either. Quite the opposite; while the untouchable energy she exudes on social media is often matched with an effortlessly cool vocal delivery, she can at other points be giddy with excitement, lovestruck, dejected.
All this is to say that Lipa perhaps doesn’t get enough credit for her versatility. Where once she looked doomed for an eternity of Capital Radio-ready dance features (Martin Garrix’s ‘Scared to be Lonely’ among them), she’s since steadily become one of our strongest pop girls. The USP for Lipa, for me at least, is that she seems to understand the appeal of capital-P pop music more than most. Pop, as the sum of its parts, is about feeling; as I wrote in a recent article, pop is both mirror and escape; it tells us who we are and who we could be. It exists in worlds neither happy nor sad, merely emotional on a full and rich palette. Lipa’s songs exude broad feeling; where some artists require you to research their lore as a prerequisite to understanding any of their music, Lipa writes broadly about heartbreak, closure, new love, old flames – universal topics that serve as accessible canvas on which to sketch lushly produced, exceptionally danceable pop songs. If her lyrics aren’t usually as transgressive as the title of her most recent album, Radical Optimism, suggested, she’s still a prime candidate for our roster of pop girls.
As mentioned, though, we seem to underestimate Lipa. (Well, as much as one could underestimate a chart-topping multimillionaire popstar.) She’s agreeable, polite and has a decidedly unproblematic personal life, but her uncontroversial presence means that she – in contrast to her peers – frequently fails to stir substantial discourse. In fact, the scandal she might be best known for online (aside from the Instagram live that resulted in this wonderful clip) isn’t a media storm à la elevator incident, nor is it a love triangle in the vein of the ‘drivers licence’ saga. Lipa’s biggest controversy to date, instead, was ‘go girl give us nothing’.
The viral comment, left under an video of Lipa’s ‘One Kiss’ choreography (though ‘choreography’ is itself an ambitious descriptor for the admittedly comical moves), seemed to criticise her lack of stage presence and energy behind her performance. Though it had been seven years and one Future Nostalgia since said performance, I was a little wary when buying a ticket for one of Lipa’s Wembley Stadium shows this June. Having missed her previous tour, I was eager to experience Future Nostalgia, as well as her recent Radical Optimism, live for the first time, but this excitement was tempered with the fear that Lipa herself may not have been the most capable performer.
Whatever doubts I had going into the show were immediately quashed. As it transpires, Lipa’s stage presence and dancing have not only improved tenfold since ‘go girl give us nothing’, they coalesced with immaculate vocals to create an aptly raucous capper to Lipa’s whirlwind career thus far. It offered a redemption arc for Lipa’s sometime-maligned performance skills, and though it wasn’t quite the level of sheer excellence of other pop shows I’ve seen this year (namely, the tours supporting Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter and FKA twigs’ Eusexua), I also don’t think Lipa was aiming for excellence. Instead, she seemed to aim for something more sorely needed for our troubled times: a fucking great night out.
For Lipa, whose raison d'être is evidently joy, the show – which was the second of a pair of sold-out Wembley concerts – was as much a performance as it was a massive attack of good vibes, a relentless assault on the crowd’s dopamine receptors. It helped that Lipa seemed to be having the most fun out of anyone; across the near two-hour runtime that spanned her discography, her energy nor confidence never once waned. (This was true even when Lipa brought out Charli xcx as a surprise guest, with both having the giddy energy of karaoke singers without losing any of their vocal strength.)
Miraculously, the choreo-heavy numbers often proved the most compelling – a sentence I can’t imagine having written a few years ago. ‘End of an Era’ had gleefully vaudevillian feathers encircling Lipa; the similarly theatrical ‘Whatcha Doing’ made quick work of a prop chair. There was also ‘Physical’, the Olivia Newton-John inspired banger whose dancing was fittingly modelled on an ‘80s workout video. A favourite of mine was ‘New Rules’, which had Lipa and her array of dancers kicking down the catwalk. (That was before an interpolation of Bicep’s ‘Glue’, doubling as a dance break that sent the standing crowd surrounding me into a frenzy.) The cumulative effect was a dazzling one, as Lipa commanded the audience with a single hair-flip; there was a particular ‘Houdini’ dance break that was simply astonishing.
Much of the show also served as a reminder of the sheer strength of Lipa’s catalogue, from the neon house of ‘One Kiss’ to the sheer ecstasy of ‘Levitating’. I also appreciated ‘Falling Forever’, whose wonderfully Eurovision-esque hook allowed Lipa to belt toward the heavens. (On those vocals: we don’t often note Lipa for her singing abilities, but her range during this concert – from the seismic ‘Falling Forever’ and ‘Happy For You’ to the silky ‘Anything For Love’ – indicated that, again, she’s more versatile than we often give her credit for.) We were also treated to the surprise addition of ‘IDGAF’ from her first album, and though I longed to hear ‘Lost in Your Light’ and ‘Cool’ live, I was content nonetheless. Besides, even if I had a feasible qualm, the show’s relentless deployment of confetti cannons made it impossible not to have a wide grin across my face.
It was ‘Be The One’, the last song before the encore, that proved the show’s strongest moment. ‘Cool’ aside, I’ve long cited ‘Be The One’ as Lipa’s finest song: an entrancing cocktail of tropical synths and impassioned lyrics, which here seemed to double as a reinforcement of her connection to her fans (some of whom, as an earlier barricade interaction confirmed, had flown and/or camped just for a shot at a hug). For this song, Lipa stood at the edge of the crowd and got us to sing the refrain back to her, a chorus of voices bouncing around the stadium as the sun sank. It was simply glorious; Lipa looked like a giddy child as she listened to us. It was at that moment – not the choreo-heavy numbers, nor the Charli xcx cameo – where a suspicion of mine was finally affirmed: Dua Lipa is vibes-first, and where she might lack in the departments of lyrics or originality, she more than makes up in her ability to make her listener feel a certain way. Tonight felt like a belated coronation of our newest pop star – and for someone as underestimated as Lipa, that’s its own kind of radical.
Enjoyed this? Consider supporting GAY POP by buying me a coffee.
If dua lipa has no fans I am dead!!