There was a sheet-cake with Dua Lipaโs image backstage in the VIP Forum Club area when she played a two-night stand at L.A.โs Forum this past week, with her U.S. tour just a few dates away from wrapping up, a habit thatโs de rigueur for headliners going through the legendary stadium. But, if nothing else, we should be creating a โhappy anniversaryโ cake to commemorate โFuture Nostalgiaโsโ two-year anniversary. Her sophomore album, which was released on March 27, 2020, set an aspirational tone, if not the dominating one, for the next and long-awaited difficult times. It generated the kind of dopamine high that made so many of us โ across states, nations, and continents โ ecstatic.
The fact that Lipa is only now getting around to performing this music live feels like the perfect way to all but officially commemorate the end of a quarantine era (knock on wood). Maybe itโs a symbolic prize for doing the right thing or doing what we had to do by confining the discotheque to our living rooms for longer than we ever dreamed socially possible. Nobody wanted, and probably still doesnโt want, their album to be regarded as a โlockdown album,โ least of all Lipa, who publicly sobbed on Instagram in mid-March 2020 about whether or not to release โFuture Nostalgiaโ in the midst of a worldwide funk.
When it comes to quarantine albums, โFuture Nostalgiaโ and Taylor Swiftโs โFolkloreโ (with or without its worthy adjunct, โEvermoreโ) will be recognized as the archetypal quarantine albums. These two landmark releases of 2020 barely shared a planet, let alone a genre, yet they brilliantly depicted a populaceโs split emotions to the end of normal life as we knew it. The โFolkloreโ approach was to go within, brood a bit, ballade a little, and, most crucially, use the extra alone time to get things done. And what about the distinct but equal โNostalgiaโ aesthetic?
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Of course, โFuture Nostalgiaโ would have been a fantastic record regardless of when it was releasedโฆ It might have come out at any moment in the last 25 or 30 years, thanks to its deliberate mix of late โ70s, โ80s, and โ90s sounds. It felt like a stone-cold pop classic when it was released, and two years of repeat listens have only proven that it wasnโt just a lockdown variation of Stockholm syndrome that made us feel that strongly at the time. The first nine songs on the album are an unbroken string of songs that were or should have been hit singles. Is it really conceivable that โPretty Pleaseโ and โHallucinatingโ didnโt chart at number one? Thatโs only because โDonโt Start Nowโ and โLevitatingโ sucked up all the oxygen in the room, or ran out the clock, or whatever metaphor you want to use; practically any โalbum trackโ on โNostalgiaโ would have been a lesser singerโs single-of-a-lifetime. (Think of the last two songs on the original CD as extra tracks; โGood in Bedโ and โBoys Will Be Boysโ arenโt any less good; they just seem like they belong on a different, less disco-ey, cheekier album, like one by Lily Allen.)
You could feel the groupโs involvement in โFuture Nostalgia,โ which was one of the reasons it was such a feel-good effort. It took a village of writers and producers to put this album together with Lipa, and itโs a rare kitchen with so many cooks that seems entirely coherent in its musical and lyrical ambitions, miraculously. โFuture Nostalgiaโ is the best dance-pop album released so far this century. And itโs worth pondering if this is due to or because Lipa is a bit more reclusive personality in terms of the spotlight than Lady Gaga or Madonna, who straddle the line between dance music and a divaโs take on the confessional singer/songwriter tradition.
Although she is undeniably a โfemale alpha,โ as she sings in the albumโs title, she is far from a cult-of-personality figure. Every element of phrasing and every deep bass lick feels like it was ordained by a single god rather than bargained in a writersโ room on โFuture Nostalgia,โ which is the exact model of pop cooperation at its best.
Dua Lipa
Ellen Qbertplaya for Variety
During the pandemic, there was something about that collaborative atmosphere that felt subliminally alluring. So it was amazing to witness Lipaโs show at the Forum this week and see just how thoroughly she clearly grasped that and wanted her tour to express a kind of exhilarating community feeling upfront. It was clear from the beginning, in the opening creditsโฆ yeah, opening credits. A few of prominent arena singers, such as Kacey Musgraves, have begun to include closing credits in their shows as a gesture of gratitude to their teams.
Lipa, on the other hand, used the huge screen to give each of her ten dancers, as well as her singers and band members, their own billing and a major visual look, as if they were co-stars in a long-running network TV show. It felt promising in a sense that was totally fulfilled โ that what we were about to watch was an ensemble piece rather than a star-studded performance.
Lipa does have a couple of solo moments in the show: โWeโre Goodโ (a bonus track from the deluxe โNostalgiaโ edition), which had her sharing space with the only prop of the night, a giant lobster, reflecting the underwater music video; and the penultimate โFuture Nostalgia,โ which took her away from the rest of the cast to let us focus a bit more squarely on the zebra-like stripes of her final outfit.
Lipa was primarily involved as part of a wider gang. That idea came about not because she hasnโt progressed into a near-phenomenal dancer on her own since her first tour โ she has โ but because itโs a lot of fun to see nearly a dozen people moving around in a loose version of lock-step, or even lock-skip and lock-gallop, to the thick bottom end of neo-disco. (Wasnโt disco always the peopleโs medium, rather than a celebrityโs?) After that opening credits sequence, the show kicked off properly with Lipa lined up alongside the 10 dancers in what almost looked like a line of health-club treadmills, with a group chant of โLetโs get physical!โ that lifted the song out of the realm of carnality and into the pure, joyful community of a nightclub, or a spinning class, depending on your preference.
In a mid-show portion, the floating platform she would later hover upon lowered itself to become the roof of a rave party, and she nearly vanished among the others in the dark, just another reveler in the club, for those 10 minutes or so. Dua Lipa isnโt exactly an Everywoman, to be sureโฆ not when sheโs wearing an alien-looking fluorescent yellow-green one-piece with her boots improbably sewed right into the outfit (and matching long gloves out of a Bob Fosse Day-Glo dream).
Although she isnโt โjust like us,โ the tour has the strange effect of making us feel as though weโre marching down the same catwalk or levitating above it in sympathetic fluidity.
Lipaโs music, which has seemed like the sound of desire for the better part of two years, is now the sound of liberation, as she wraps off her North American arena tour on April 1 in Vancouver and moves on to liberate Europe. Hard times are not behind us (or the world), but if they resurface, we may find ourselves singing โDonโt Start Now,โ the theme song of the new decade and this generationโs โI Will Survive.โ That breakout single features a charming little artificial cowbell sound four bars into the chorus, and for two years, some fans fantasized what it would be like to watch Lipa physically shake her can to that metallic sound effect. Dreams that have been postponed might sometimes come true.
