2024-05-03 08:20:11
The old ends, the new begins. You know what was, but not yet what will be: “End of an Era” is the perfection of the pop song. Dua Lipa begins her third album, “Radical Optimism,” with a sung riddle, a mock dream. In the video she dances through the streets over car roofs, up to her apartment and on to a club, she finds herself on a plane that turns into a flying wreck, lands among sleeping men in a kind of hostel and on a girls’ night at the bar. At the end she watches a hamster in the hamster wheel. “It could be the end of an era,” sings Dua Lipa: “Who knows, baby, it could be forever.” Plus music that is as cheerful as it is melancholic.
„End of an Era“ could be a hymn to the fact that everything flows and everyone is different in the next moment (“Another girl falls in love, another girl leaves the club”) or the exact opposite: a requiem to the time that has passed (“In the Clouds, that’s where she goes”). No one has mastered the fine art of open songs and free meaning in the pop of the new Roaring Twenties as virtuoso and prominently as Dua Lipa. The “Big Four” will release their new albums in spring 2024: Beyoncé, as a black American, gives her people a shout-out with “Cowboy Carter”. Taylor Swift outshines everything with “The Tortured Poets Department” simply because she is Taylor Swift. Billie Elish gets the world in the mood for “Hit Me Hard and Soft” by discussing her masturbation habits in interviews. Dua Lipa sings eleven songs on “Radical Optimism” that could mean anything or nothing – which makes the songs shine all the more beautifully and also makes the singer behind the songs, the videos and the Instafilters more interesting.
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The British woman from Kosovo became a global star during the corona pandemic. Three years after her first album, 2017’s Dua Lipa, Future Nostalgia, her second album, was finished when public life came to a standstill. Others postponed their records, she even moved hers forward by a week in March 2020: “I wanted to distract people from the world outside.” In „Physical“ she bowed to Olivia Newton-John’s 1981 hit “Physical” and celebrated what the children of social media were suddenly missing so much: physical closeness. “Hold me tighter, come on, tell me when you’re ready.” Dua Lipa’s “Physical” was number one all over the world and number 18 in Germany. She also had to cancel her world tour. She called her concert stream “Studio 2054” as one of the founders of the alternative live event. Millions watched her make music with guests including Kylie Minogue and Miley Cyrus, FKA Twigs and Elton John. She was the singer of the pandemic, on YouTube and Spotify.
Her story did not and does not appear in her hits, in “IDGAF”, “Be the One” and “New Rules” and now in “Houdini” on the new album or “Dance the Night” from the film “Barbie”. But of course this story resonates, after all it is not a secret, but rather its narrative: Born in London in 1995 as the daughter of war refugees from Kosovo, she moved home to Pristina with her parents when she was eleven. At 15, she returned to London alone to make music. Dua Lipa slept with friends, pretended to be older and made a living as a model, bartender and bouncer. “I grew up fast,” she sang on “Future Nostalgia” in “Boys Will Be Boys”: “Boys will be boys, girls will become women.”
Homesick for the future
If “Future Nostalgia”, the pandemic album, was their post-post-postmodern soundtrack to Sartre’s calendar saying about the youth’s homesickness for the future, “Radical Optimism” is their consequence of this. One song is called “Training Season”, it declares that training is over and the games have started. He is also illustrated in the video: It takes place in a hipster café full of men who actually have enough to do with their masculinity and harass them. Dua Lipa sits calmly between them and uses the men’s room. In the end her mailbox is full, she sings about “conversation overload”. While the men, her haters or followers, fight over her, she smiles.
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She once called social media a “breeding ground of hate,” and even with irritating ones Posts already contributed to it. On the other hand: They are their natural environment. Two years ago she founded Service95, her own medium for her podcast and for her own book club, for which she has already interviewed Patti Smith and Emma Cline, Brit Bennett and Khaled Hosseini and presented her books. Dua Lipa is one of the most influential BookTok influencers. The fact that more printed and bound literature is being sold in Great Britain today than ever before and that public libraries are lending out more books than in decades is demonstrably due to Generations Y and Z, Dua Lipa’s target groups. At the British Booker Prize 2022 she gave a speech in which she praised fiction as “soft” art in contrast to “hard” pop. She said she wouldn’t be who she was without the work of Kosovo Albanian Ismail Kadare: “Good writing tells the stories the world doesn’t want to know.”
Dua Lipa in the swimming pool
What: Tyrone Lebon
She meets the presidents of Albania and Kosovo, and with her father, Dugakijn Lipa, her manager, she organizes an annual charity festival in Pristina. She lectures in Cambridge on feminism in the music business. And she is her own industry with a fashion series for Versace and a perfume for Saint Laurent, a concert agency called Live LLP and as a model for brands like Gerrit Jacob and for magazines like Vogue.
Anyone who wants and who knows all this can find it in their songs and on their albums. Their humanism, their wisdom in life. But no one needs to hear it and see it in their videos and on stage. What you hear and see is a singer and dancer controlling her songs and images because in the era of social media, control is worth as much as attention, if not far more. No scandals, no crises and no experiments. Radical optimism, longing for the future. “Anything for Love” (half power pop and half piano ballad), “Happy for You” (light empathy).
„Illusion“ is the key song of the third album: “Yes, I just want to dance with the illusion!” In the video, the illusion is a swimming pool over Barcelona from the video for “Slow” 21 years ago by Kylie Minogue: eighties, nineties and noughties, Disco, synthpop, house and everything that has come since. Sung with a singing voice that was not at all made for great singing.
“It’s about knowing what you’re getting into, but sticking with it for the fun of it. It’s fun to see through other people’s games if you don’t fall for their illusion,” she says about her new songs, about the new album, not about herself.
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