Dua Lipa has given an interview in which she has said things, unlike so many mainstream artists today who avoid facing uncomfortable questions, who only give prepared interviews or who no longer give interviews at all. And Lipa has not given one of those insufferable interviews in which two artist friends praise each other for 40 endless paragraphs, but has sat down to talk to journalist Anderson Cooper on the program 60 Minutes, which is broadcast in the United States.
Among the questions raised is Dua Lipa’s impersonal lyrics. Dua is known for singing dance-pop hits, but not for opening up in her lyrics, and Cooper tells Dua that this fact worries her fans because they “don’t have a sense of who you are.”
The author of ‘Radical Optimism’ agrees with Cooper and answers: “I happen to be a private person. Some people are ruthless with their private lives and decide to pour everything into a song because they know that it will attract people’s attention. For me it has always been important to make music that people like, not because in a song I put someone in shame, or for sensationalism, or to do it at someone’s expense.”
Although Dua Lipa doesn’t name names – how contradictory that would be with her own statements – it’s inevitable to think that she could be referring to artists like Taylor Swift, Kanye West or, more recently, Charli xcx, who has made the phrase “work it out on the remix” fashionable after dedicating ‘Girl, so confusing’ to Lorde. Three artists – although there could be more and not those in particular – who have written very explicitly about their private lives in their songs. Dua Lipa knows that, within a musical ecosystem in which the personal and explicit is rewarded, she represents an anomaly, but she remains faithful to her ideas.
At other points in the interview, Lipa faces some not-so-comfortable questions about some of the controversies in her career. First, she talks about the viral video of “go girl, give us nothing,” which portrayed Dua dancing listlessly at a concert. Dua had already stated in a previous interview that giving such an image seemed “humiliating” to her, and in this conversation, she reaffirms this, although she assures that the viral video gave her the strength to “show the public what I am capable of doing” and above all to show the person who created that phrase that they were wrong.
The question of Palestine and Israel is also on the table. Dua Lipa has been one of the few mainstream artists to call for an end to the “genocide” against Gaza and, in her conversation with Anderson Cooper, she points out that the “bombs are coming from both sides” and that “children are dying” and describes the situation as “devastating.”
Dua Lipa already denounced the Palestinian situation in 2021 and the New York Times printed a full-page advertisement by the famous Rabbi Shmuley Boteach in which Dua Lipa – and other celebrities – were called “anti-Semites.” In the interview, Lipa says that she found it “unfair” that the New York Times responded in this way to her statements.