UK pop sensation Dua Lipa sat down with Anderson Cooper from 60 Minutes in an interview that aired on Sunday, opening up about her career trajectory and optimistic approach to pop. Describing her music as “pure pop”, Cooper asks if this was the music Dua always wanted to create.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10IJbRbuo78?si=WwusxIp23m2EGmB1]
“I think there’s a stigma around pop music – you’re always met with some kind of push back as a female artist if you’re not like, with a guitar or with a piano. Just like, oh she can’t sing, oh it’s all processed.” Dua explained her decision to focus on producing fun, club-inspired music. “I loved it – that’s the music that makes me get up and dance.”
Dua signed with Warner Brothers at age 18 and started working on her first album, whilst performing to crowds of sometimes ten people – she tells Cooper. This album featured the hit “New Rules”, which she then presented at the 2018 BRIT Awards. Her performance famously received the viral comment, “go girl, give us nothing” about her lack of stage presence – which Dua says inspired her to prove them wrong.
Her second album was released in March of 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. When Cooper asked if they had considered delaying it, Dua responded that she had spent so long working on it, she felt it had to come out. The album went on to become a huge success and earned her the ‘Quarantine Queen’ nickname.
Cooper also raised the fact that some writers have said they don’t get a sense of who Dua is in her songs. To that, her response was “it’s something that I just naturally hold back. For me, it was always important to make music that people really loved, not because I was putting someone on blast or not because I’m doing it for the clickbait.”
Dua Lipa’s third album, Radical Optimism, was released in May 2024. Tickets for the world tour go on sale this Friday via Live Nation, with pre-sale beginning on Thursday.
