Singer Dua Lipa. – Hugo Comte
- Dua Lipa, 24, is a British popstar who sold 4 million of her self-titled debut album released in 2017 and some 60 million copies of her singles.
- The artist is releasing his second album, “Future Nostalgia” this Friday. The eleven titles mix contemporary sounds while drawing from the musical landscape of the 1970s to the early 2000s.
- This dancing album contains, among other themes, songs evoking the feminine condition, in perfect coherence with the public positions of Dua Lipa.
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There are songs and records that, when we listen to them, instantly immerse us in more or less happy moments of our lives. Future nostalgia Dua Lipa is very likely to be one of them. The second album of the British singer will be online from midnight on the night of Thursday to Friday. It should punctuate the daily newspapers confined all around the planet in the weeks to come and become the soundtrack of the memories of
containment due to pandemic of
Covid-19.
“I hope that in this period it will bring people a little joy, comfort, that it will change their ideas compared to everything that happens outside,” slips the 24-year-old artist that 20 minutes was able to reach the phone on Wednesday. “The most important thing is that everyone stays safe,” she insists.
Consciousness
For Dua Lipa, the release of this album was all about conscience. The marketing, slated for April 3, was brought forward a week after the previously unreleased songs leaked onto the Internet. The damage had to be limited. She announced the news during a live on Instagram, Monday. She appeared there in tears. “I wonder if this is the right thing to do during this time because a lot of people are suffering,” she said. I’m not sure it is the right thing (…) but we need joy and we have to try to see the light. “
Words that may seem presumptuous for those who do not know Dua Lipa. However, the singer was not born from the last rain of pop stars. Since her appearance on the media scene in 2015, this Kosovar Albanian girl has sold 4 million of her first album released in 2017 and some 60 million singles. In 2018, she became the youngest solo artist to reach the billion views on YouTube with the clip of New rules. The same year, she also made history in the prestigious Brit Awards with five nominations, unheard of until now for a solo singer. She left the ceremony with the trophies for the best British revelation and the best British solo artist.
INXS and White Town…
In other words, with her second album, she is expected at the turn. She worked on it by trying to ward off the “pressure and sources of anxiety” inherent in the exercise of the second installment because it is about transforming the essay. To do this, as she entrusted to 20 minutes, she put a lot of “love and fun” into it. She says she had the idea of Future nostalgia while listening, headphones screwed in the ears, tubes of Outkast and No Doubt, while strolling in Las Vegas. She wondered why these songs from the past made her vibrate so much and why they didn’t seem dated to her.
The oxymoron-shaped title clearly announces the musical color: vintage tones, for nostalgia, and current electro vibrations, for the future. The rule was followed throughout the eleven pieces. The single released this Thursday, Break My Heart, for example, is built around a sample of Need You Tonight from INXS, tube from 1987. Physical, the previous extract, sounds like an echo to the song of the same title sung by Olivia Newton John in 1981. Love again, she draws the emblematic chords of the Your woman from White Town, box from the year 1997 … which themselves consisted of a sample of trumpets from My woman, from Al Bowlly dating back to 1932.
Commitments
The whole is extremely coherent, in addition to being dancing and, at times, engaged. Dua Lipa sums up: “Some songs are about love, others about being vulnerable, others about inequality or empowerment [«empouvoirement»] women. “
This is the case of Boys Will Be Boys which closes the album. A ballad whose sweetness contrasts with the harshness of the lyrics. “This song talks about the difficulty of being a woman. She starts a conversation on the case of a young woman but by listening to it, others can find it because the same things have been repeated for years, “said the singer. The text discusses street harassment as well as the defense and protection mechanisms that women use to try to protect themselves from it. “Boys will always be boys, girls will be women,” says the disillusioned refrain in the face of the indulgence granted to the behavior of the former and the maturity that the latter are forced to acquire prematurely.
Dua Lipa remains optimistic, however. “I am confident that things will change in a positive way,” she said at 20 Minutes. If she recognizes that the “older” generations have “a more fixed mentality”, she defers to the younger ones. “We can try to do pedagogy to change things and make a difference,” she says. The more we talk about these subjects, the brighter the future for human rights in general, for the fight against inequality and oppression. “
“Alpha woman”
In “girl power”, the leitmotif of the Spice Girls – who arose when Dua Lipa was one year old – she seems to prefer the expression “female alpha” (“female alpha”, as she uses it in her song Future nostalgia). Because she is one? “It’s not necessarily how I feel,” she says. I have more confidence in myself on some days than others. But this word [“alpha”] was mainly used for men and I think in terms of equality, we can share. These are the kinds of things I put in my songs to give strength to the people who listen to them. “
Dua Lipa’s feminist engagement goes beyond her songs. ” This is who I am. This is one of the most important things for me besides music. I’m trying to mix the two, “she says. It has proven this repeatedly, through public statements. In a speech to the highly respected Cambridge Union, the world’s oldest debating society, at the university, she presented a plan for gender equality in the music industry. Let it be said, Dua Lipa is a pop star who wants to make us dance. And to think.
