Why we need “Future Nostalgia” in a future dystopia: Dua Lipa and the revolutionary potential of dance music

Original image courtesy of @artsbyjimmy (IG)

Dua Lipa’s smash new record arrives at a time where the world needs it the most. I reflect about the volatility of time in the COVID-19 crisis, the space for dance music and growing up in Singapore’s nightlife culture.

Pop music and the world was at a bubbling point in 2016. 

I was at the beginning of my army service and things couldn’t be shittier. I felt incompetent, lost, and completely alone. Becoming “one of the boys” wasn’t as easy as I had expected. I lived a life in isolation, tucked behind the tall, barbed-wire gates of my army camp. Outside, the world was raging on. 

2016 saw the death of great musicians, horrific incidents of police brutality, Brexit, the Pulse nightclub shooting, the election of Donald Trump and the rise in global fascism. Social justice movements such as Black Lives Matter mobilized digitally and physically in an effort to resist the seismic shift towards the hard-right. There was a cultural reset, a new global consciousness, local solidarities. There was still hope, in isolation, I often thought. 

In the wake of all the mayhem, Beyonce and Solange released two of the most influential albums in recent memory. Lemonade and A Seat at the Table were not only monumental for their artistic metamorphoses, but also for how they reflected a changing cultural axis. I credit these albums for igniting my passion for social justice. 

While Beyonce and Solange’s political manifestos populated my Spotify playlists, there was also new artist, Dua Lipa, an undeniable bop machine. Her pop escapism might’ve felt arbitrary and shallow, but it provided a necessary outlet to the pipelines of mounting terror that were quickly leaking from their crevices. 

There are a few times in my life where I’ve perked up, looked at a rising pop star and felt like they had the potential to change everything. It was the end of 2015 when I first heard the iconic synth plucks that opened Lipa’s debut single “Be the One”. A deep, soulful, and almost androgynous voice poured through, an emulation of bygone eras. From that point, I laminated myself a stan-card for Dua Lipa. On the surface, Dua Lipa wasn’t anything wildly special or unique. Her music has remained relatively apolitical, devoid of the hyper-stylized alternative universes that her predecessors created, and her debut album isn’t particularly cohesive or boundary pushing. But there was a bubbling spark under Lipa’s stone-faced cool. It was an uncanny taste for brilliant pop that differentiated Lipa from her peers. 

There was something comforting in listening to the Knowles sisters and Lipa back-to-back: two sides of a coin, two planets orbiting the same sun. They felt like necessary counterparts to one and other at a time of cosmic polarity. 

I look back at 2016 with a shuddering dissonance. It was the exhilarating calm before the storm, a time of deep isolation and connectedness, of creative aridity and intellectual stimulation, the time everything changed. Exactly four years on, I laugh at my eighteen-year-old self. Little did I know what was in store.

Last Friday, I sat patiently at the foot of my bed waiting for the drop of Dua Lipa’s sophomore record Future Nostalgia. I couldn’t help but feel like I was only an older and more cynical iteration of my army-boy self, waiting to press play on another Dua Lipa record before my mandated “lights out”. Since the release of her debut, Lipa has skyrocketed into stardom, thanks to her breakout smash “New Rules”, which has currently amassed over 2 billion views on YouTube and peaked at number 1 in several countries. This was followed by a string of in-between-album hits and high-profile collaborations. Her debut album has become the most streamed album for a female artist on Spotify.

Dua Lipa was set up for a colossal victory and an equally colossal failure. Like her British-pop contemporaries, she could’ve returned with a watered-down retread of her previous work, an anonymous attempt at a hit, or a laughable cosplay of popular trends. Instead, Lipa returned to the pop scene late last year with an immaculate, sleek pop behemoth, “Don’t Start Now”. On paper, the single would seem like it’d be destined to flop. At a time where melancholy contemplations and low bpm beats have dominated pop music, a campy, nu-disco record with glittering synths, a funky-bass, and soaring strings might’ve been the last thing that would’ve worked. But it has now become one of the biggest hits in the world while ushering a return of upbeat pop tunes. Lipa is by no means the pioneer of disco-dance revival, with the likes of Lady Gaga, Pharrell, Daft Punk propelling iterations of this sound throughout the 2010s. Lipa’s interpretation of the genre, however, doesn’t feel derivative, but that of an artist who is determined in revering the past in a nebulous future. 

In the moments before I pressed play on Future Nostalgia, I was met with the phantom dissonance of 2016. The dissonance reverberated through me on my first listen: this album is about the dancefloor, so why am I dancing alone in my room? I am isolated from communities I would want to uplift so why do I feel more connected to my country more than ever before? And why do I feel so joyful? Joy has felt like a privilege, of late. And for many, joy is a luxury that isn’t remotely affordable. At times, I feel guilty for making space for joy when I could be making space for humanity. But momentarily, as I danced alone in my room like I was thirteen again, my joy felt justified. The term “future nostalgia” felt like the only way to describe our current predicament.

2020 feels like a sadistic older sibling to 2016, twisting your arm and manipulating you into not telling your parents. I’m sure we will all look back at these years viscerally. I was isolated against my will then, and I am isolated against my will now. Only now, the confines of my army camp have been replaced by the confines of my room. It’s funny how the past finds a way of nudging the future, the younger sibling quietly retaliating. I try to mirror my various timelines, fine-combing parallels, patterns, poetic repetitions. For a long time, I’ve tried to recreate the magic of the past (“Let’s make this like the Summer of 2016!”), but recently, accepting that things are just shit, plainly and irrevocably, has been comforting. I am able to look back at the past without a need to romanticize it and reproduce it. It exists in its immutable nostalgia, a hard-drive of unrecoverable files, a bell-jar of wilted butterfly wings. The future is as troublingly uncertain as the present is, and the past now seems like it was never certain to begin with. So do we troubleshoot the hard-drive? Jump-start the power supply? Disassemble the motherboard? Do we uncap the jar lid? Superglue the divorced wings back together? I don’t know, right now. I don’t think anyone does. So what does a “future nostalgia” mean when our temporalities untether? 

Future Nostalgia has made pop cool again. 

The same boys who had bullied me for my music taste being too “girly” in middle school are now posting screenshots of their favourite Dua Lipa album tracks on their Instagram stories. Basement-music-snobs who lurk the comment section of Pitchfork, credit the album for making them like pop again. Weren’t you the ones who’d demand to “change this pop shit” whenever a femme-driven song came on at the pre-game? Or curate playlists completely devoid of any female-identifying vocalist? 

I can’t help but feel slighted in this new wave of poptimism. With pop being “cool” again, I reminisce to a time where pop was so unequivocally uncool, when it was playing exclusively at dorm parties of 2, or clandestinely on the iPods of closeted teens, performed in locked bathrooms, lip-synced in drag, painted in eyeliner. Listening to pop when I was a young teenager felt urgent even in its deliberate uncoolness, in its marginalization, in its queerhood. Pop was uncool, and that felt like a form of resistance, too. It was a sign from the Pop Gods then when one of the introductory tracks on Future Nostalgia was titled “Cool”. 

The synthpop track, made for a summer on Mars, sees Lipa explore higher textures of her voice, an imitation of an antique-girliness. She squeaks, flits, coos and purrs, demonstrating the dynamic personality of her vocal tone. The song is a sunset-soaked makeout session in a Cadillac, an understated taste to a thesis in pop euphoria. “Physical”, the gargantuan Olivia Newton-John-sampling power-pop tune, follows. Lipa rides the menacing synth and bass line with her signature smoky vocals, before escalating into a chorus that is so unrelenting, so urgent, so earth-shattering. It’s as if she is belting for her lover at the edge of the universe, making a plea for pop, as if her life depends on it. The layers of escalation in the song crescendo in an explosive post-chorus where Lipa demands that her love “keep on dancing”. The gritty and industrial production of the song grinds under Lipa’s soaring vocals, catapulting to an inevitable orgasm. This is a song of the ages, the bop immaculate. 

If our wigs weren’t already snatched by the onslaught of the first four tracks, the album’s electric centerpiece, “Levitating” captures the imperative magic of Future Nostalgia. The most overtly disco-influenced song on the album, “Levitating” is a jukebox of influences, Jackson 5, Teena Marie, Elton John, CHIC and the Spice Girls. Carried by an instantly-catchy cascading verse melody, a caricatured bridge and a campy chorus, the song makes you long for a personal roller-rink. It grooves undeniably, with Lipa opting for more R&B-born melodies, before going into a delightfully cheek rap-sung middle-8, something that would’ve sounded a lot less cool had it come from, let’s say, S Club 7, twenty years ago. Lipa herself describes the track as the first song where she “had everyone on board with the concept of the album”. At its triumphant end, the song sounds like a planet celebrating its last day in its sun’s orbit. 

“Pretty Please”, a Julia Michaels penned love-making-jam comes next. Perhaps the most vulnerable moment on the album, it arrives perfectly in the tracklisting. Lipa pleads for her lover’s sexual satisfaction as a thumping bassline, stuttering synths and vocal chops simmer in the background. What “Pretty Please” demonstrates is Lipa’s ability to make every pop song a moment, even in its most tender. However, Lipa quickly abandons the delicacy for the poppers-o-clock banger, “Hallucinate”. As someone who grew up on dance music, with my parents being certified Kylie Minogue and Madonna stans, I was able to map the myriad of references on this track. A little bit of Sugababes, a little bit of Girls Aloud, a little bit of Rachel Stevens, a little bit of Lisa Scott-Lee, a little bit of Gina G, Lipa deep-dives into a pedagogy of British  girlbands and one-hit-wonders. The song is a lost #32-peaking record, sitting pretty on an early-2000s Eurodance Hits compilation CD, frequented by gays on their vacations to Mykonos, a song my parents probably would’ve played in the house when I was young. 

“Love Again” is ABBA-inspired summer anthem, flourished with cinematic strings and a looped White Town sample. The third single off the album, “Break My Heart” acts as a temporary end to the album and is a testament to how excellently researched and referenced Future Nostalgia is. It knows who it draws from, an unassailable dramaturgy in pop. 

The album is undeniable British too, camp and cool, melodic and percussive, retro and timeless. Throughout the tight 11-track record, Lipa channels the British singer-songwriters of her childhood. Husks of Winehouse, candidness from Lily Allen, sass and brass from Cher Lloyd, glitter from Sophie Ellis-Bextor, the album fits into the lexicon of great British female voices.The beauty of this record is how respectfully Lipa wears her influences without feeling like direct pastiches (except perhaps the polarizing “Good in Bed” which sounds like track 7 on Lily Allen’s iconic 2005 debut, Alright Still). Lipa salutes the greats, but punches forward with her own voice. 

I’ll look at this album as a capsule of an uncontainable history. A time where Dua Lipa self-assuredly reinvented her artistry, and a time where her artistry reinvented how music is consumed. Lipa gave us a much-needed sugar rush, a cathartic release of neglected euphoria. She allowed me to be joyful again, however momentary.

“Future Nostalgia” and “Boys Will Boys” are oxymoronic bookends to an oxymoronic album: the title track is bubbling with bravado, a personal mission statement on Lipa’s feminine autonomy, whereas the final track is the comedown after the disco-drunk night: the cold shower, the hangover concoction, the horizon of the inescapable Monday. The album is tailored for the houseparty, the discotheque, the dancefloor, but “Boys Will Be Boys” is a sobering reminder that these spaces of imagined euphoria are still unsafe for women, queer folk, communities of colour. 

Dance music cannot be separated from the dancefloors it pulsates in. The sexist architecture of club design has used rape culture and hyper-toxic masculinities as blueprints, further subjecting women and other marginalized groups to harm in “the name of capitalism”.

My friends and I grew up in Singapore’s nightlife, gaining an education in sneaking out of our houses, free-drink finessing, tactfully dancing in skin-hugging bodycon dresses, swindling taxi money home from men that were three times our age. We grew up on the dancefloor, for better or for worse, and saw all parts of the epileptic lights. Upon looking back on those years, one of my girl friends laughs, but then quickly pauses, “It was actually really fucked up”. And that, it was. 

From having to exchange a free entry to the club with the non-consensual caresses of an anonymous club promoter to being denied entry because you hadn’t dressed “sexy” enough, I watched as my friends were reduced to material tropes of femininity: their clothes, their sex appeal, their coyness, their straightness. 

Within the masculinist gaze of the disco, there was little room for them to be seen outside of a paradigm of capitalist consumption: they were rendered products of the club. As we’ve grown over, reclaiming the dancefloor is something we’ve done, rather unknowingly. 

As a young queer boy in a socially conservative country like Singapore, the clubs I attended with my friends presented a different kind of violence: an overstimulated reminder of an omnipotent heterosexuality. 

I recall several photos taken by club photographers with a familiar scene. The subject: three clusters of sweaty bodies devouring each other, their drinks fly above their heads, and the club lighting makes them look better than they actually do. Off centre, at the edge of focus is The Lone Gay Boy, eyes closed, hip-popped, arms resting on a phantom waist, imagining he was in the embrace of a partner they might never have. Though the club was a liberating form of rebellion in many ways, it was also one of the most isolating spaces. What was The Lone Gay Boy to do when his friends were experiencing their first kisses, first dry-humps, first free drinks? Where did the Lone Gay Boy fit into the social architecture of the nightclub? 

For a long time, the club made me long to have the oppressive gaze that my girl friends had endured. Didn’t I deserve to be desired too? I came to realize that I had internalized the misogyny of commercial clubs, dangerously side-stepping murders on the dancefloor. 

In Singapore, homosexuality is still criminalized by law, a law that has been a centripetal point in Singapore’s social policy. Local LGBTQIA activists have made vocal efforts in the past few years, urging the government to repeal the law, Section 377A. So far, these appeals have been met with like a steadfast parent; calm and unwaveringly in opposition. Just this week, all appeals to challenge the colonial-era law were dismissed by Singapore’s Supreme Court. 

Queer culture in Singapore has thus operated in a liminal space—a veneered modernity and a subversive resistance. Underneath the furnished canopies of Singapore’s gay clubs, Tantric, Taboo, Rainbow Bar, are repressed ecosystems of connection: gay friendships only made possible via Grindr, first kisses at 30, economies of autonomy, experimentations in drag, explorations into a deep unknown. The gay club is emerges from Singapore’s post-colonial condition, an axis of an ever-growing city-state caught between the indigenous, immigrant and imperial cultures that is is composed of. The gay club in Singapore could be a revolutionary propellant of social progression. For now, it acts as a vessel for a homonationalist agenda, while stifling the queer bodies that inhabit it. 

My first time at a gay club in Singapore was awkward (as most first-club goings are). I had never been in a queer-dominated space before, I didn’t even have any gay friends. The dancefloor felt like it had an untapped liberatory potential, as if the glittering synths, throbbing basses, saccharine choruses of my childhood were crystallizing into a reality. But both nightclubbing and self-isolated bedroom-dancing are privileged activities—the access and politics of the club are embedded with racist, sexist, and rigidly classist codes that segregate the “productive” and “unproductive” members of society. My foray into Singapore’s nightlife wouldn’t have been facilitated were it not for my privilege and only highlighted who was allowed in and who was kept out. 

Dancefloors and accompanying dance music were not conceived with the bourgeois iterations and nationalist aspirations of my upbringing, however. Dance music as we know it was birthed across communities and geographies, evolving from Motown records in basements, lofts and bars in various American cities. Dance and disco was unapologetically resistive, with the genres directly blooming from the black power movements of the Civil Rights era and the Stonewall uprisings of 1969. Black and Latinx people fashioned disco and proto-pop styles in an effort to battle the ongoing injustice against their communities. Disco was a political endeavour as much as it was a musical one-it opened up spaces for black and queer joy which was, and continues to be, radical and revolutionary. It is this joy, that is foraged in alternative spaces, that I want to keep with me as I listen to Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia. 

It is a joy that is not ahistorical, a joy that is not apolitical, a joy that was never meant to be accepted by a hegemonic mainstream. It is a joy that resists, a joy that exists perpetually in opposition, a joy that is boundless beyond binaries. Dua Lipa might’ve made the year’s best pop effort, but we must celebrate the radical joy that made her Future Nostalgia possible. The joy of the disenfranchised, the marginalized, the too gay, the too black, the too brown, the too poor. 

We must celebrate the triumph of Future Nostalgia and Dua’s poptimism while crediting the black genres that she owes its success to. In the past few months, stans have proclaimed Dua Lipa as the “saviour of pop”. An unsettling discourse emerges when we think about how hip-hop and trap have dominated the US Billboard Charts in the past two years. Hip-hop, in many ways, is the new “pop”. Why does pop need to be saved? And who does it need to be saved from? When Twitter calls for pop to be rescued and restored to its former glories, there is an underlying implication that hip-hop and other popular black genres require to be pushed back into the shadows.  

Since release, I have submerged myself in histories of dance music. Lost disco chanteuses of India, dance music under martial law in the Philippines, the catastrophic Disco Demolition Night. The latter, in particular, has stayed with me as I listened to Future Nostalgia and its parenting influences. 

Referred to as the night where disco “died”, the landmark event has largely been erased from music memory. On an evening in early July 1979 in Chicago, a crowd of predominantly white men filled the Comiskey Park stadium to destroy disco records. It was a culmination of a growing anti-disco  movement spear-headed by failed radio DJ Steve Dahl. The campaign developed in the late 70s, a time where disco began to dominate radio, nationally and internationally. Disco and its widespread success posed a threat to the masculinities of white America. In a symbolically and physically violent effort, Dahl and the “rock jocks” attempted to stamp the groove out of America. It was reported that records of other black genres--R&B, soul, funk--were also brought to the riot, a merciless attack on queer black music. This exertion of violence was carried out on a crusade of erasure. An act to render the safe space a permanently unsafe one. To remind marginalized peoples that they ain’t shit, even the shit they produce. 

Forty years on, similar manifestations of white masculinity sweep the US. So what does it mean then for dance music, a genre so deep-rooted in the struggle of marginalized folk, to be revitalized by straight white female pop stars? Why are Dua Lipa, Lady Gaga, Kylie Minogue, Madonna canonized as the queens of dance music? Can we be a part of a “future nostalgia” that is so indebted to a silenced past? 

Future Nostalgia wouldn’t have “saved pop” were it not for the androgynous vocal stylings of Grace Jones, the flamboyance and bombast of Donna Summer, the indelible swag of Janet Jackson, the soaring choruses of Gloria Gaynor. What “Future Nostalgia” should make apparent is that the Dua Lipas, Carly Rae Jepsens, Katy Perrys, Kylie Minogues, Madonnas and Lady Gagas are indebted to the black voices of dance music that seemed to have been culturally-smudged (a term coined by rapper Azealia Banks) in the contemporary imaginations of pop. Pop never needed saving as it was already a lifeline, a lifeline for people whose act of living was defiant in and of itself. 

We have to keep in mind that commercial dance music is deeply incongruent to the spaces it is played. We need to understand the lineages of radical joy and revolutionary love that allow us to dance. 

A week with Future Nostalgia and it still feels fresher than ever. A week in quarantine and I am still brimming with the intercalating dissonances of a future nostalgia in a future dystopia. I ask myself what relevance does nightclubbing have to do when people are displaced from their homes and families? A time where the bedroom has substituted the disco? 

My future nostalgia is disturbed and rattled: it’s a growing distrust in the institutions that claim to protect me, but expose the vulnerable in the process, it’s my fear that this is just the beginning of an unfurling history, it’s a perpetual state of “idk”. But my future nostalgia is also my friends, mainly femmes of colour, disenfranchised and tired, who are uplifting their communities, it’s the uncapitalist forms of care that I see born from my elderly grandparents, it’s realizing the times have never not been changing. And it’s finding time, however brief, to keep on dancing.