Dua Lipa is a pop star who strongly resists personal disclosure in her work. That added an irresistible biographical quirk to “Houdini,” the gritty, crazy single from her third album. As she often does, Lipa challenged a man to impress her before giving him the ticket. Lipa herself is an elusive presence, which is not to say she is isolated. Although four years have passed since her second album Future Nostalgiathe 28-year-old British Albanian Kosovar has remained ubiquitous thanks to various luxury brand campaigns and contract magazine covers, roles in Barbie and Argyll, her podcast and book club, and her delayed album tour due to the pandemic. Despite this visibility, she appears bright, distant. It's quite admirable that she refuses to trade her private life for intrigue, especially when the subject of celebrity has never been a more powerful driver of pop success. At the same time, it's hard to decipher what he represents as an artist, and harder than ever for the confused Radical Optimism.
Lipa's 2017 self-titled album was the sound of a young pop star coming into the limelight. A longtime grab bag of powerful nightclub stuff channeled through her white voice, she finally took off when the sister video for “New Rules” turned an album track into a smash hit (and seemingly just in time alias to avoid sent to guest-vocalist purgatory). He bought her the right to be actor in focused Future Nostalgia, which transformed the sounds of Lipa's '90s youth, the playfulness of the Spice Girls and the funkiness of Jamiroquai into a weightless disco delight. Hers was the first major lockdown ad campaign, and you wonder if COVID shortened the lifespan of these charming bops, robbing them of their natural dancefloor dominance, or actually cultivated it, giving them a lasting power that no marketing team could to dream
Going through the odd opaque, even defensive type that led to Radical Optimism, you begin to suspect that the pandemic did some of the heavy lifting. For her new album, Lipa, er, revealed year recently, “I'm just a different person, so of course this record is going to be different. I have different thoughts, desires, needs and perspectives.” Go girl, give it to us something? She is divided on the perfectly accurate notion that “Houdini” has anything to do with disco. Elsewhere in the advertising word salad, he has often spoken of the inspiration of Britpop and the energy and experimentation he hears in the likes of Primal Scream and Oasis. But listening Radical Optimism with Britpop in mind can remember the Arrested Development piece in which Michael Bluth is forced to ask: “Has anyone in this family ever seen a chicken?”
