Dua Lipa’s domination: understanding a specious superstar

2025 marks a decade of Dua Lipa’s presence in the pop market. Ten years in, she's fulfilled every metric of industry success: she’s headlined Glastonbury, Grammy adorned, radio-rotated, and a mother to many, yet she’s still a relatively non-descript star. Who is Dua Lipa?

With broad banger tunes, glamour for days, and an amiable personality, Lipa is inarguably appealing; but by never demonstrating any frisson of scandal or bite, giving sprezzatura in street style, but never on stage, she presents a kind of pacifist pop presence; bankable, but with zero brio. Despite this, Lipa is not short on institutional veneration, enjoying disproportionate honours such as duetting with Cher at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, her star being hymned by Rolling Stone and TIME, and becoming the most nominated female artist in BRITs history. I fear the elders have been misinformed a piety about this great British export. The Dua doxa needs to be debunked.

Lipa is not self-serious, so much as just sterile. Both the art and celebrity profile suffer from this guarded MO. Tellingly, we’ve not had a Dua Lipa documentary yet – there’s nothing to reveal, no parabolic arc to compel an audience on a humanist level. I believe Lipa is missing an essential passion – her ultra-poised, urbane disposition is a handicap in her artistry. With her immaculate elocution and grace, Dua Lipa’s composure is more of a First Lady than that of a pop star. In public-facing engagements, this politesse translates a fatal chasteness, smoothing over the inclination for friction all interesting artists possess (the reticent Apollonian antidote to the Dionysian brat).

If we proctor Lipa’s performances, we see her only approximating a commanding power. I want to hear her scream, to let out a visceral war cry – over what I don’t know, I just want to know what it sounds like. Lipa forgoes all theatricality, thus betraying the animating project of the pop star. Pop stars should not inspire a soft fondness, they should thrill you, intimidate you. I don’t think you’ll ever hear Lipa’s name introduced the way, say, an emcee would intone Rihanna’s; Lipa prompts more of a warm maternal nod from a tenured BBC Radio 2 presenter (like she’s the lovely girl who works the front desk and everyone is sad to see go now she’s got a new job). Beyond musical ability, stage presence is the final resin that seals a star, puts them in amber. Lady Gaga all but exposes viscera on stage. Beyoncé would continue performing at the same intensity if the ground opened up – and never lose balance. How can you headline Glastonbury with no stage presence? This is the central Dua dialectic.

In HOMECOMING (2019), the concert film that documents Beyoncé's totemic Coachella headline show, Beyoncé notes that “a lot of the choreography is about feeling, so it's not as technical. It’s your own personality that brings it to life.” That final sublimation never happens with Lipa. After footage of her lacklustre 2018 BRITs performance went viral, the masses sarcastically whooped: ‘go girl give us nothing’. In another action shot relentlessly derided, Lipa stood, expressionless, bouncing her hip in the most detached manner possible, resembling a PEZ sweet dispenser. In one frame, the stiff display captured her characteristic indolence on stage. In the years since, Lipa has gamely referenced this inflection point with good-natured humility but has incorrectly claimed a completed transformation. Tougher, salutary dance rehearsals have clearly taken place in the interim period, but no fully convincing conversion has occurred.

Lipa now delivers more serviceable execution than before, clearly achieved through iterative drilling, but it’s still only just occupationally sufficient. Her 2021 Grammys performance was a mere course correction, confused with meaningful evolution and masterclass. Now, Lipa is conspicuously more focused on stage, but she’s not free. In her procedural-rather-than-porous bearing, the complex persists: a specious dance ability of disembodied spirit and sensuality. Anyone who has ever performed in a show involving dance will be familiar with the concept of ‘marking’ (a rehearsal mode which involves running through a routine with the music so as to consolidate it, but not going all out with your energy). Lipa is perennially a professional marker, that is her frontier, and not in the way of the spare elegance of the late, laidback Aaliyah. 

This leads to the issue of IT factor, and Lipa’s burning lack of it. There is no radiating charm. No dynamic fury. Lipa responds to stimulus, rather than being it. She is not what Zane Lowe once described Camila Cabello as being: a “charismatron”, lit from within. Compounding this frustrating deficiency, she does not play with artifice to supplement this lack of animation; there is no alter ego to elevate the pallid natural state.

Like Lipa, Taylor Swift is no consummate dancer but she does maintain a specific look in her eye, an undeniable internal fire that communicates 'I want this' – she grips her microphone like someone’s going to steal it. She possesses the artist’s binding glue: the je ne sais quoi, and that is what makes her a convincing pop star beyond musical prowess. 

Accordingly, it’s hard not to compare Lipa to her full-package, out-pacing contemporaries who have that ineffable spark. In various expressions, they are delimiting exciting new horizons: Doja, Chappell, Sabrina, Tyla, Charli, Doechii, and, slowly but surely, Tate and Addison. Every artist – excluding Gracie Abrams! – has a USP: Ariana Grande is an unparalleled vocalist and self-sufficient producer, Olivia Rodrigo is a prodigious young lyricist; Miley Cyrus is an empress of reinvention. I struggle to place Dua Lipa in the pop continuum with any determinative traits.

In the jurisprudence of pop stardom, the star subject is a phenomenon. Consider these pictures of Rihanna drawing crowds in Cuba and a recent parallel of Doechii during Paris Fashion Week. Lipa has spoken of her relative freedom; how she can move through the world without aggressive or even frequent intrusion. To that I say, good for her – invasive fame is an abusive prison after all – but how telling that she doesn’t occasion any comparable kind of feverish awe.

Lipa’s body language and clean visual worlds take on the agreeable aesthetics of a conventional magazine editorial. There’s a limited commitment to a weird vibe, to risky distortion; there’s no chance of stink, chaos, grotesquerie or abandon (like Natalie Portman’s stunted ballerina, unable to access the darker sensibilities and potency of the Black Swan). A few beads of sweat and a plum hair dye job is not the stuff of artistic transcendence. An edifying comment I always return to is Rihanna expanding on how she selected the artwork for her sixth studio album Talk That Talk: "This to me is the most unpretty cover I've ever done, and that's why I like it…It's not about what I look like, how smooth and perfect it is – it's what my eyes say. My eyes say everything. I don't even care that it's not cute, I have something to say.” She advocates for a purposeful deviation, a run towards the untypical. Lipa does not present any such rougher, renegade instinct. It's exactly this inability to leap that keeps Lipa forever eluding the next rung on the superstar ladder. 

In Burlesque (2010), Christina Aguilera instructively lays out the constitutive spark of a real star: 'She’s a whole lotta glam, sweat, sugar, sex, spice'. The pop star should be a provocateur. Pop stardom is not a vocation that calls the monastic. Are you even a real pop star if you’ve not been accused of corrupting the youth at least once? Lipa’s music videos, like her interviews, like her Instagram profile, comprise fun tableaus; cute, suggestive and bright, but never cross over into the untamed or subversive. Lipa never dances in the macabre, the eccentric, the fucked-up (I wonder sometimes if this is the same world in which Madonna released the ‘Sex’ book).

Image: Dua Lipa by Tyrone Lebon

For the pop formalist, Lipa’s wholesale inoffensiveness is arguably in itself an offence. Where there is no transgression, there is no excitement; to do a great right do a little wrong. Notably, Lipa has never endured a public scandal. Where Ariana Grande pissed off both sides of the aisle in her “I hate America” proclamation, and Sabrina Carpenter’s Dioceses debacle resulted in a priest getting demoted and Eric Adams indicted, Lipa has no relationship to mischief. Niccolo Machiavelli said “Politics have no relation to morals” and I say pop has no relation to morals; show people don’t need to be classy and upright, they need to be dangerous entertainers. (A courtroom portrait of Lipa would be far more enthralling than another Vogue one.) Charli xcx, always a faithful champion of more raw, enfant terrible behaviour, in brat deluxe track Spring Breakers, sings: 'Every time, I make it so outrageous / Always gonna lose to people playin' it safer' – presumably nodding to one specific peer who pulls her punches but still profits.

I want to hear an entire life in a voice. Lipa, in her evasive, unspecific hooks, doesn’t let us in on any shade of her real experience. Lady Gaga once said that more than discipline or talent, perspective is what is most important as an artist. Lipa presents no distinct point of view as she prizes impersonal lyrics. Even her most signature (now predictable) notation of breakup sentiments don’t land with any real forceful, authorial punch. She’s publicly defended her refusal to share personal stories, to kill her curiosity in an autoclave, but it’s to everyone’s detriment that she stays on the surface. As she willingly dives into an artistic void, her PR-safe, impassive pen fails her deep vocal range.

The success of sophomore album Future Nostalgia conferred on Lipa new cachet. Released in late March 2020, the album was vaunted, breaking Spotify records as it was received as telemedicine during the COVID-19 lockdown (a healthy, if bland, dose of nu-Disco lite to brighten a bleak time). With right-place-right-time alignment, Lipa became de facto pop queen as there was no one to unseat her during an interregnum of star output: the old guard were on a hiatus or in transitional states, and 2024’s ‘holy trinity’ had not yet been canonised by the mainstream. Lipa’s diluted disco was sufficient for a thirsty audience who had lost their sense of taste; allowing them to cosplay a club night from their bedrooms. Her accolades suggested she was the vanguard who revitalised the pop imaginary for the new decade. Lipa was a nebulous avatar for a limbo period; a populist star to settle for. Neither totally fraudulent nor formidable. 

Lasting stars have iconic definitions: in style (a recognisable costume a tribute act could don: see Gaga’s meat dress, Britney’s red catsuit, Kylie’s gold hotpants) and in signature sonics (Olivia Rodrigo’s pop-rock debut was so distinct, copycat ciphers that emerged in the following year were instantly identified and mocked). I still don’t know what the definitive Dua Lipa sound or style is. What is her reference?

Image: Dua Lipa's Radical Optimism album artwork

In elevated high street looks, Lipa’s debut era cut the silhouettes and diamante of mid-to-late 2010s trendy ASOS; in her sophomore cycle she was radiant in Versace chainmail (a style already sported by tens of other famous faces over the previous 20 years); and in her third album cycle she flexed black fishnet tights and fitted leather, totally incongruous with the beachy mise-en-scène of Radical Optimism's artwork. All of these were perfectly flattering and in proportion; all of them devoid of creative intention, totally divorced from her own imprint. On Lipa’s ongoing Radical Optimism tour, cohesion is a foreign concept as cover performances have aimlessly hitchhiked between Kylie, ACDC, and, mystifyingly, Vance Joy. I don’t think Lipa is going through an artistic identity crisis so much as not ever having properly defined one to begin with. 

Most emblematic of Lipa’s lack of star conviction is the art itself ceding import. Her primary craft of music now appears like a clock-in job, rather than a calling that demands every part of herself. Consider her tabloid-resistant extracurriculars, namely, reading: Lipa has helmed a book club since 2023 through her lifestyle newsletter Service95 (I wish she could parlay some of the prosodic insight gleaned from her reading into more compelling lyricism). Now a fully staffed, competitive journalistic operation, it is a serious venture beyond the average singer’s dalliance with a fragrance launch. She hosts a podcast and interviews prestigious voices in contemporary literature; she delivered the keynote speech at the 2022 Booker Prize ceremony for God’s sake. (Do you think Beyoncé's read Shuggie Bain?!)

Statuesque with a face card that inspires poetry, Lipa’s fashion campaigns seemed inevitable: Pepe Jeans, Adidas, Puma, a co-designed collection with Donatella Versace herself. She is also the global face of Yves Saint Lauren cosmetics, an Evian water ambassador, and a budding actress (see Barbie and Argylle). More power to her for having multiple avenues of endeavour and such a well-adjusted balance in her life, but how boring for the listening audience. I like my musicians as monomaniacal beasts! I believe the most significant pop stars have vowed an artistic equivalent of the hippocratic oath; committed to a monotheistic worship of their genre and to continually dig into its prismatic potential.

In Lipa’s eclectic pool of girlboss accomplishment, the music threatens to become a parenthetical, the next album but an elective course. Indeed, Lipa’s varied enterprising prematurely anticipates being aged-out of her job. Lipa, still only 29, is wary of the north-of-30 pop star shelf life (of course sexist industry structures prevail but we have seen triumphant pushback in Beyoncé and Lady Gaga’s continued breakthroughs as they approach middle age). Where is the defiant spirit? To endure for her craft? A resignation to expiration is an insult to creativity.

Ultimately there is a vexing lack of reward in Dua Lipa’s artistry. Perhaps I was spoiled by absorbing so many virtuosic greats in my formative years (watching the Telephone music video at the age of nine does open up a third eye). I pray album four finally indemnifies us with striking style, sound, personality, and an attendant cause célèbre, after a decade of flat impact. She who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command.

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Dua Lipa's Radical Optimism tour continues in the EU and the UK this spring, kicking off in Madrid, Spain, 11 May