When Dua Lipa played a two-night stand at L.A.’s Forum this past week, with her U.S. tour just a few dates away from coming to a close, there was a sheet-cake bearing her image backstage in the VIP Forum Club area, a custom that’s de rigueur for headliners coming through the storied arena. We should, in our minds, be baking, even if we aren’t. “happy anniversary”Two-year anniversary cake “Future Nostalgia.”Her second album, which was released on March 27, 2020, is set an example for others. AspirationalIf not the dominant mood, it is a sign that tough times are coming and will be long to come. Talking of “sugarboos,” it induced the kind of dopamine rush that made so many of us — across states, nations and continents — feel like the girl with the most cake.
It feels like the perfect moment to mark the official end of a quarantine period, and Lipa is just getting around to performing it live. It’s a symbolic reward, maybe, for doing good or doing what we had to do and limiting the discotheque to our living rooms for longer than we ever could have imagined socially possible. Nobody wants or needs their album to be a relic of the past. “lockdown album,”Lipa was the most vulnerable, as she wept publicly on Instagram in March 2020 about whether or not to release it. “Future Nostalgia”whether it was in the midst global funk, or not. What was the song John Lennon sang about God? “a concept by which we measure our pain”? Dua Lipa was, in the end, a concept that we use to measure our pandemic.
If history is written down, there will be two albums that will be remembered as the definitive quarantine albums. “Future Nostalgia” and Taylor Swift’s “Folklore”(With or without the worthy adjunct “Evermore”). These two touchstone releases of 2020 barely seemed to exist in the same world, let alone genre, but they effectively captured a populace’s polarized reactions to the cessation of normal life as anyone knew it. The “Folklore” m.o. was to lockdown was something not to endure but to embrace — go inward, brooding a little, balladeering a little and, most importantly, using the extra alone time to get shit done. Separate but equal “Nostalgia” aesthetic? Screw solitude — let’s embrace love and levity, and have a party in our heads till we can get in touch with our own bodies and each other’s again. Some of us might’ve even played these albums on alternate days, just to achieve balance in the Force.
“Future Nostalgia” would have been a great album no matter when it came out, of course… and with its purposeful mixture of late ’70s, ’80s and ’90s sounds, it could have come out almost any time in the last 25 or 30 years. At the time it was released, and it felt like a stone-cold pop classic, and two years of repeat listens have only confirmed that it wasn’t just a lockdown variant of Stockholm syndrome that made us feel that strongly in the moment. The nine first tracks of the eleven songs are a continuous string of songs that were either great singles or should have become hits. Is this possible? “Pretty Please”Or “Hallucinating” weren’t No. 1 smashes? That’s only because “Don’t Start Now” “Levitating” sucked up all the oxygen in the room, or ran out the clock — pick your metaphor; nearly any “album track”on “Nostalgia” would have been a lesser singer’s single-of-a-lifetime. (It’s easiest to think of the last two numbers on the original release as bonus tracks; “Good in Bed” “Boys Will Be Boys” aren’t any lesser, they just feel like they’re off a different, less disco-ey, cheekier album, like one of Lily Allen’s.)
One reason why “Future Nostalgia”It was a feeling-good effort because you could feel it. Group involved. It took a village of writers and producers to achieve this album done along with Lipa, and it’s the rare kitchen with that many cooks that feels utterly cohesive, miraculously, in its musical and lyrical goals. “Future Nostalgia”The best dance-pop album this century. And it’s interesting to consider whether that is in spite of or because of the fact that Lipa is a slightly more recessive personality, as the limelight goes, than Lady Gaga or Madonna, who straddle the line between dance music and a diva’s take on the confessional singer/songwriter tradition. She’s indisputably a “female alpha,” as she sings in the album’s title, but it’s by no means purely cult-of-personality stuff. “Future Nostalgia” is the very model of pop teamwork at its best, with every bit of phrasing and every deep bass lick feeling like it was ordained by a singular god rather than negotiated in a writers’ room.
Dua Lipa
Ellen Qbertplaya for Variety
That collaborative spirit was subliminally appealing in the midst of the pandemic. So it felt gratifying, in seeing Lipa’s show this week at the Forum, to see just how fully she, most of all, consciously realized that and wanted her tour to outrightly portray a kind of thrilling community spirit. It was evident right at the start, in the opening credits… yes, opening credits. Kacey Musgraves is one of a few arena performers who have begun to include closing credits in their shows. This is a gesture of generosity towards their team. Lipa made sure to show her 10 dancers, as well as her band members, a separate billing on the big-screen. This gave them a big visual appearance and gave them a co-star in a long-running television series. It felt promissory in a way that was completely delivered on — that what we were about to see was an ensemble piece, not just a superstar showcase.
Lipa has a few moments during the performance that can be described as a one-woman show. “We’re Good”(a bonus track taken from the deluxe “Nostalgia”edition), which, reflecting her underwater music video, saw her sharing space and the one prop of night, a giant crab; the penultimate “Future Nostalgia,”This allowed her to be away from the rest and let us concentrate more directly on her last outfit with zebra-like stripes.
Lipa was part of a larger group. That conception hasn’t come about because she hasn’t developed into a nearly phenomenal dancer on her own since her first tour — she has — but rather because God-Dang!, it’s fun to see nearly a dozen people moving around in a loose version of lock-step, or even lock-skip and lock-gallop, in time to the thick bottom end of neo-disco. (And wasn’t disco always the people’s medium, not a superstar’s?) The show began with the opening credits, Lipa lining up with the 10 dancers in a performance that almost looked like a line of treadmills for health, followed by a group-chant. “Let’s get physical!”The song was taken out of the realms of carnality and placed in the pure, joyful community a nightclub or spin class.
In a mid-show segment, she submerged herself in the crowd. The floating platform that she would later lower to become the roof at a rave party was the platform she used to subsume herself. She almost disappeared with the other revelers for the 10 minutes. Look, you can’t exactly call Dua Lipa an Everywoman… not when she is modeling something as alien-seeming as a fluorescent yellow-green one-piece that has her boots impossibly sewn right into the costume (and matching long gloves out of a Bob Fosse Day-Glo dream). She’s not “just like us,” but the effect of the tour is to weirdly make us feel like we’re marching down that same catwalk, or levitating above it in sympathetic fluidity.
Lipa ends her North American arena tour in Vancouver April 1st and begins her journey to liberate Europe. What felt for most of the past two years like music of aspiration has now become the sound of liberation. Hard times are not behind us (and clearly not behind the world), but as they recur, we may find ourselves reverting to the theme song of the young decade, and this generation’s “I Will Survive”: “Don’t Start Now.”The hit single features a charming little electronic cowbell sound. It is four bars into the chorus. For two years, fans imagined what it would feel like to actually see Lipa shake her can in person to that metallic sound effect. Sometimes dreams deferred do come true.