There’s something pinning me to my seat, on the ground, in front of my record player as I listen to Dua Lipa’s 2020 album Future Nostalgia. It’s the bass notes.
The bass was surprising because the record begins ho-hum with some underwhelming rapping. Women do rap, but Lipa isn’t of the same class as M.I.A. or Missy Elliot. Despite the record’s forgettable first track, Lipa’s bass line has hooked me. I’m anchored to this patch of rug, ears wide open. It’s time to embark on this nostalgic trip, sitting up front in a retro convertible, with my best friend Dua Lipa and her glam white gloves.
Earlier this week, Lipa won a second lawsuit against her track “Levitating” and is currently on tour for her 2024 album Radical Optimism. She is a darker, yet slightly less famous, version of Taylor Swift. My Google Home adores her.
But this week’s events don’t really relate to why I’m listening to Future Nostalgia now. You see, I’ve been struggling with record purchases over the last few years. My husband bought me Lipa’s 2020 record as a kind of early birthday present, to help me out of my strife.
There was a time where I would buy two CDs per month, based on new music I would hear and a rolling list I kept on my phone. When records started to come back into fashion, I reduced my purchasing habit to about one album per month until I eventually stopped completely. Records are expensive! I also had a toddler and a baby to worry about. Those weren’t the types of companions to bring into a record store for serious album shopping.
My newest struggle with record-buying became apparent when we were browsing the record section of a French FNAC in December. (FNAC browsing has become a common past time when my American-European family visits French relatives.) When faced with an opportunity to buy an album, I looked around the store’s record alcove expecting to buy something new.
Instead, my mind discovered a novel musical black hole. Here’s a snippet of what went through my mind:
Should I buy an album that’s come out recently?
Well, I haven’t put anything new on my list in a very long time. Right, but I have a list! Let’s see what I have on there.
::: Looking :::
OK, they don’t have Trampled by Turtles. Then, maybe something old?
The Rolling Stones box set is 480 euros?!
I ended up settling on The Queen is Dead (The Smiths) because it had been missing in my collection up until now, and people have always said it is an essential building block to today’s music. The problem with The Queen is Dead is that it is as equally pretentious as it is classic. And Morrissey isn’t singing to me. He’s singing to Mr. Shankly and all the other dudes out there. I’m still kicking myself for spending 28 euros on it to this day. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad album. It’s just not my anthem.
So I was thrilled when I opened the Dua Lipa record. I needed more female artists in my life. She could help me rediscover what it’s like to be a woman in the world. Because if not her, than who else? Honestly, I hadn’t heard any new female music except for Dua Lipa in the last few years.
That’s not to say there haven’t been any other notable, female artists to emerge onto the music scene. But I had rather regretfully whittled done my music sources from two to one in the last ten years, mainly because my devices made that choice easier. I had let go of my favorite streamed radio station and pivoted to comfortable requests on my kitchen’s Google Home.
So strange, these AI bubbles. Google Home had been recommending Lipa’s songs to me for years, even as I continued to rely on my trusted standbys from the 1990s and early aughts. There are at least two explanations for it: I had gone on a Feist binge one day, and Dua Lipa simply emanated from the feed. But it’s probably more likely because the algorithm suggested Ed Sheeran to me once, and I had never contradicted it. Dua Lipa was the natural successor to Ed Sheeran in this bubble.
Dua Lipa is a young woman who was not alive in the 1980s. She was born in London, attended school there, moved to Kosovo with her family after it declared independence and then high-tailed it back to London when she was 15 to get discovered. Her dad was a rock musician in Kosovo, too. That’s all I know about Dua Lipa’s past.
Future Nostalgia segues from its nondescript first track into “Don’t Start Now”, where you really start to listen. Yes, this was on the radio more than a few times. The background orchestra arrangement made me wonder if it had ever been performed live with a full orchestra. The album was released during Covid after all, so it’s a valid question. Wait, the orchestra motif disappears as soon as you notice it, but there’s that bass line again. Good ol’ bass notes, can a live bassist ever keep up with you?
“Cool” for sure brings back the nostalgia of Michael Jackson. Lipa imitates the Ah! Ack! Ha! Ooh! of the King of Pop. I kept listening for any hints of inauthenticity. I couldn’t find a single one. These anxiety tics were the sounds that made Michael so distinct. Yet Lipa turns them into artistic props that she owns completely, proving that those quirky sound bytes endure as musical canon – that maybe only Lipa can today deliver.
The next one confused me. “Physical” started hopeful to me, its intro leading me to think there were overtones of The Killers’s “Mr. Brightside”. I was misled. The song is a doppelgänger of Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical”. I found no personal connection to Lipa’s song, only a marching-band tempo that seemed intentionally fabricated as a soundtrack to accompany Soul Cycle classes. Was there a reason to write a song containing the same spirit as Newton-John’s song and with the same exact title?
Then “Levitating” comes on, and I am reminded of why this record was such a pleasant present. It’s just fun music, and I needed to stop being so cerebral about the music part of it. I gave into the fact that Lipa’s music is more about the lyrics than about the music. Still, the “crazy bass” isn’t going anywhere. It’s going to keep me dancing, soul cycling, doing pilates and whatever it is that pop music is supposed to do.
Later, the physical exhaustion sets in, even though I’m still sitting on the floor. How long did the album’s designer intend this heart-pumping escapade to continue for? By chance, “Pretty Place” provided a short respite from the 4-4 rhythm, as Lipa slows through an unexpected left turn. “Put my mind at ease,” she slowly sings. My mind clears for a brief moment, and I search for some depth to this 2020s singer.
As I inspect the liner notes for more insight into Future Nostalgia‘s emotional journey, I found no lyrics. There are no lyrics in the liner notes. No lyrics. in. the. liner. notes. What a letdown. Is that how record labels increase margins these days? Records are more expensive than CDs, and they have no decency to print on both sides of the one-page liner notes?
It was time to flip the record over, and I was ready for a ballad. But “Hallucinate” kept up the running pace. My head is pounding. The throat-clearing bass line is making me question how people listen to albums at all these days.
Isn’t it a music industry convention that you must include a ballad at around song number seven on an album? Isn’t that a part of the emotional journey? Every album needs that teddy bear moment to bring you down from the momentum that built up in the first two thirds of the album. You need a time to chill out with the band and reflect on what’s past and ponder what might come to pass.
Edging toward the end of the album, I realized I wasn’t going to learn anything multidimensional about Lipa at all. Nothing about her immigrant family, her life in Kosovo, her identity between two cultures, none of that. All of her songs are about her experience as a young woman in western society, in, I guess, London and wherever she’s travelled for recording and tours. She’s an “alpha woman” and needs her man.
The thing Future Nostalgia tells me is that she has fulfilled her ultimate childhood dream of becoming a singer. She mixes incredibly familiar melodies and beats into a collection of songs that, one by one, become radio repeats, forever echoed with AI algorithms and propagated by Gen Z pilates instructors. Today, these are good metrics, and Lipa has succeeded with all three.
Rather than adhering to the pop formula that I had expected, Lipa delays any semblance of a slower track until “Boys Will Be Boys” at the end. I had wanted pacing and an emotional arc. Instead, I endured eleven heart-elevating tracks that should never get heard in their entirety, in one sitting.
The album’s aggressive and persistent bass lines, described by me here as “crazy bass” and “throat-clearing bass,” dominate tracks like “Don’t Start Now,” “Levitating,” and “Hallucinate.” The constant energy shifts the focus from storytelling to a visceral, workout-like experience. This album is meant for listening while doing other things.
When I asked my 10-year-old son what Dua Lipa can teach me about women, he said, “She puts on her makeup, looks in the mirror and does her hair like all the girls that I know.” It doesn’t sound very deep or even that responsible for that matter. But what Lipa has delivered is a collection of “singing songs” for little girls everywhere who sing into the mirror, their own musical aspirations in tow.