Piercing Through the Surface with Dua Lipa's "Radical Optimism"
With her third album, Dua Lipa soars above the 'optimistic pop' current with surprising levity.
Back in 2005, Shakira released what I think is one of the best heartbreak songs ever.
“No,” a slow, dense, arabesque and haunting ballad—featuring her then-rumoured lover, the great Gustavo Cerati—that describes the profound heaviness of carrying resentment over the shoulders, of not reaching closure after a bad breakup, pierces through rock with lines so sharp as:
“Voy a pedirte que no vuelvas más. Siento que me dueles todavía aquí adentro”. / “No se puede dedicar el alma a acumular intentos. Pesa más la rabia que el cemento”. (“I’ll ask you to never come back. You still hurt very bad here inside” / “The soul cannot take any more trying. Anger weights heavier than concrete.”)
Curiously, this was the first song that came to mind after listening to Dua Lipa’s new album, Radical Optimism, because it succeeds at the exact opposite of Shakira and soars above the pop music current with surprising weightlessness, leaving behind a refreshing trail of confidence, self-assurance and maturity.
Someone Else’s Game
Not gonna lie, I was feeling very skeptical about Dua Lipa from the beginning.
Her first, 2017 eponymous album felt too constrained by what the market asked from a pop star: a little bit of EDM, a couple of features that would respond accordingly to the increasing Latin American audience within the North American market, and vapid feminist empowerment lyrics—”New Rules,” I’m looking at you. And even though I still danced to them, I couldn’t help but feel that the music felt a little bit reductive, and part of someone else’s game.
Then came along Future Nostalgia, an album that energized the pandemic exhaustion of so many—the peak of my days during that 2020 spring and summer came every morning after jumping rope through the whole album, non-stop—with high-power bangers like “Physical,” “Hallucinating” and the exquisite “Love Again,” a song carried by a Nile Rodgers bass that speaks about coming to terms with the fact that you’ve fallen, once again—perhaps willingly—into the claws of love.
Along came a procession of remixes, and features with the likes of Madonna, Elton John, Miley Cyrus, among others that, in my opinion, created a lore around Dua and helped her reach global stature at the same time it established her as a maverick who could take any challenge and turn it into supremely distilled, sophisticated pop.
But, after all the euphoria, when it was time to sit down and pay attention to the music, I still couldn’t find a hint of her potential.
To me, she was a great vocalist, yes, a sharp lyricist, a mannequin, but, a completely rounded performance artist and musician? That was yet for me to confirm.
That was until Radical Optimism grew on me.
Let Yourself Go. This’ll Be an Easy Ride.
With the fluffy synthesized trumpets of a Pet Shop Boys anthem, “Watcha Doing” immediately sets the listener in clouds of stupor—announced gloriously in the gates of heaven by choral touch-ups—only to be interrupted and dropped back onto earth by Dua’s dusky contralto, and a relentlessly delicious and sumptuous bass that reminded me of Rod Stewarts’s 1978 “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”—add some of TOTO’s “Africa” flute arrangements and baby, you got me.
There’s a predominant theme in the album, which is control and the decision to unfasten yourself from it.
You could argue this is a logical reflection of jet-setting the world, living life like a ray of light. The first single, “Houdini,” is a clear example of this: a song about moving forward with your self-worth as your flag; “I’m not here for long. Catch me or I go Houdini.” Produced by Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, the single is musically powered, mainly, by funky Van Halen synths that immediately make you feel as if you’re on a Mario Kart lap through Bowser’s castle and you just got the star boost.
Released on November 2023, the single took a while to rise in the charts—perhaps clouded by the Barbie press whirlwind and Argylle, a movie I don’t think many cared about. But finally, in February, it reached No. 1 on the Billboard Dance Mix Airplay chart. And, as of writing this, it’s amounted to more than 400 million streams on Spotify. (Between us, I realized the song had officially made it into the mainstream when I came across a Grindr profile in caps lock, “HOUDINI”—smiley emoji with the tongue out. In the bio, simply, “I cum and I go.”)
The third single, “Illusion,” a voluminous thesis on Kylie Minogue-ism that has already been added to my playlist, “Run, Bitch, Run,” is followed by “Falling Forever,” one of those spinning-class bangers that leave you lightheaded, breathless and all flustered. It kicks off with a vertiginous vocal ascent that reaches its highest and then plunges on a free fall of galloping Kate-Bush percussion, left victim to the gravity of your own dancing.
Soaring Above
Certainly, there has been a trend of ‘optimistic pop.’
We got Lorde’s 2021 Solar Power, a full-perspective album in collaboration with her long-time collaborator, Jack Antonoff, that was primarily influenced by Lorde’s decision to rescind from social media. A sonically sensory album whose depiction, in “Oceanic Feeling,” of that summer buzz you get after spending too much time under the sun is both reassuringly psychedelic and musically impressive.
There was also Miley’s 2023 Endless Summer Vacation, and, more recently, Ariana Grande’s Eternal Sunshine.
After a global pandemic, wanting to move on from what’s caused you stress with your chin held up high sounds like a healthy step forward.
In the larger picture, I find a valid reference in what Black feminist theorists Stanlie James and Abena Busia call visionary pragmatism:
“A theory of revolutionary cooptation that, in part, selectively employs practices and strategies of the dominant order to radically alter the coordinates of power and possibility. Underscoring the potential, vitality, and power of emerging democratic practices to change the world.”
The album’s dictum is spoken the loudest in the last two tracks.
“Maria,” a Mediterranean adventure that rides the wave of Moloko’s 2000 “The Time is Now” all while playing with the lyrical foundations of Sondheim’s 1961 West Side Story eulogy of the same title sings about a current love’s ex-girlfriend—the so-called Maria. But, distancing from the old, boring, tired trope of the “other woman”—we need to give Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” a break—Dua Lipa gives it a contemporary touch by acknowledging and even appreciating Maria’s influence in the man she now loves. A level of confidence I don’t even consider myself capable of.
Behind a curtain of promise-land chirps and flutters awaits the closing track “Happy For You”—my ultimate favourite. Recently performed in SNL, the song tells a beautiful story of accepting the happiness of somebody you love, even if you’re not included in the narrative. Backed up by a ska-groove drumset, Lipa sets her flag, humbly, on the top of the hill called Heartbreak.
“And I didn’t even want to cry. Couldn’t believe it, had to ask myself why. I must’ve loved you more than I ever knew. I’m happy for you.”
Romance, what a complicated subject to reinvent. Far from the Club Future Nostalgia days, with Radical Optimism, Dua Lipa unfurls 36 minutes of revitalizing zephyr. The kind that wakes you up as the sun rises while going downhill on the bike—with speakers, not earphones, of course!—jet-skying through the vast summer blue or hitting a new PR during your run.
That kind of satisfaction, elation, even so, that toasts in your name when you finally walk back from that situationship that’s been bugging you for the last two years. That gratification that smiles on your face after telling him that, yes, you’re better off alone.
The only condition to reach the summit is to do it with confidence, self-assertiveness and awareness, and, most importantly, the humble honesty required to look at danger, dead in the eye, and respond, unfussed, “I choose myself.”
Call it however you like: wellness routine, visionary pragmatism, or simply reaching your thirties in full pieces; there’s nothing like walking down the street shoulders back, released from any anger or resentment, rising above the tide.
It’s stayed with me, I swear, that silly thing called ‘radical optimism.’
