I was wrong about Dua Lipa in the summer of 2022 when I said that her music was bad, and I would like to sincerely apologise for that. Future Nostalgia(2020) was kinda the pop moment of that year, the album is fine, I might even say good, but it has some real bangers on it. For example: Future Nostalgia.
You want a timeless song
I wanna change the game
Like modern architecture
John Lautner coming your way
I know you like this beat
'Cause Jeff been doing the damn thing
You wanna turn it up loud
"Future Nostalgia" is the name (future nostalgia)
This girl fucking gets it.
This song fascinates me, because it is full of contradictions, all of which are present in the first verse, so I will spend a lot of time on this point. Dua opens this song(and album) with an explicit appeal towards timelessness, a theme that will permeate this analysis. Dua states her intention to be remembered, comparing herself to modernist architect John Lautner, who is one of those architects like Frank Lloyd Wright who made a bunch of futuristic concrete and steel houses in the Hollywood hills. The mention of modernism is noteable here because of its association with futurism, a sort of looking into the future that was present in both american culture and its counterculture throughout the 50s and 60s. The second half of this verse takes a turn and reveals the central contradiction, even if its not immediately obvious.
In the late 1960s, during the modernist era, jazz saw a bit of a rennaissance; Miles Davis and John Coltrane developed improvational techniques based around modes rather than chord progressions, as was typical for the bebop style that reached its peak in the 1950s, Charles Mingus was creating complex compositions that sounded like nothing that the world had heard before, and Sun Ra was doing the same but injecting narrative science fiction world-building elements accosiated with the afro-futurist movement. This experimentalism was not contained to jazz music, the beatles and the velvet underground were laying the groundwork for prog- and post rock and the filmmakers of the french and italian new wave(s) were revolutionising that form.
Many of these movements are very important in their own right and there are countless other art movements I could write about here, but for narrative convenience, I'll stick closely to the lineage of the jazz that came out of the modernist era. Miles Davis went on to experiement even more with jazz intrumentation in the late 60s and birthed "jazz fusion"(a term that I fucking hate), a genre closely related to the funk and disco music that was coming out at the same period in the late modernist era, then the furthering of music playback tools led to the creation of hiphop in the US and soundsystem in the UK which led to the proliferation of electronic music in the 90s. We are now in the post-modern(my favourite epistemological evil), a cultural milleu defined by reference and pastiche, one osessed with the past; think of how hip hop and soundsystem recycle existing melodies to create new ones. The exact point at which we transitioned between these two is unclear, there probably isn't even one singular point of transition, but this entire transition is relevant for discussion of Future Nostalgia. Dua Lipa draws from disco and funk sonically and her lyriscism resembles the bravado and barrage of references to both other genres and the producers of the song you are listening to that is so typical of hiphop music.
This albums production is postmodern to its core, it is a wholly retrospective project. This is even visible in its cover, an image that Rachel Hahn for Vogue describes as "remix[ing] some classic looks". She called the car "Googie-esque", Googie being an architectural style often associated with the afformentioned John Lautner. Hahn also says that it would fit perfectly in the Diner scene in Pulp Fiction, which I find to be a particularly interesting comment, seeing as Pulp Fiction is often considered the quintissential postmodern film, with Tarantino's retro sensibilities incorporating funk, surf rock and so many other genres from 20-30 years before the film came out in its soundtrack, and his lifting shots from inspirations as diverse as Fellinni and exploitation films.
I know you're dying trying to figure me out
My name's on the tip of your tongue, keep running your mouth
You want the recipe, but can't handle my sound
My sound, my sound (future)
(Future nostalgia)
No matter what you do, I'm gonna get it without ya (future nostalgia)
I know you ain't used to a female alpha (no way, no way, future nostalgia)
No matter what you do, I'm gonna get it without ya (future nostalgia)
I know you ain't used to a female alpha (no way, no way, future nostalgia)
These verses briefly touch on two phenomena that many people would consider core to postmodernism: namely parasociality and memes. The first of these verses start with a fourth wall break, which also makes clear the relationship between the audience and artist. In the second, Dua references the discredited theory of the "alpha wolf", the mimetic influence of this idea has spread it much farther than it probably should have. The mutation of the meme here is important, Dua tells us that she is a female alpha, this change to the dominant narrative of this bullshit concept demonstrates the mimetic process at work. While these concepts are by no means new, parasociality has existed for as long as mass media and memes as long as language itself, the discovery of these phenomena in the 80s makes them products of a postmodern society, and we talk of them as if they are such a thing. These verses would be incredibly forward thinking if they were released in the 50s/60s/70s, the time period this song aesthetically refers to. This dissonance further solidifies the contradiction at the centre of this song and creating anachronism.
Can't beat a Rolling Stone
If you live in a glass house (future nostalgia)
You keep on talking that talk
One day, you gonna blast out
You can't be bitter if I'm out here showing my face (future nostalgia)
You want what now looks like
Let me give you a taste
This verse is kind of more of the same, I don't feel the need to drive my point any further than I am just by including it. Music writer Mark Fisher(expect to hear more from me about Mark Fisher, he has said many things) talks in Ghosts of My Life of Lost Futures, and I think this is an idea that Dua Lipa is tapping into here. Future Nostalgia is an album that refers to the present, but instead of creating what the future will be nostalgic for, it recreates what the past thought the future would be, where past timelessness was forward thinking, think the designs of Dieter Rams or the bauhaus movements, current timelessness is defined by anachronism. Fisher writes in the opening to his book that he "will never be able to adjust to the paradoxes of this new situation.", referring to what he calls the slow cancellation of the future. I think that both mine and Dua's generations are the first to have adjusted, being born after the future was cancelled. Even while talking of the future, Dua Lipa cannot escape its cancellation. Millenials and gen z are often reffered to as "digital natives", but I think a language we are much more native in is that of nostalgia, in fact we are so fluent that we harbour some sort of perverse nostalgia for times from before we were born
For what its worth, I think the remix album(by the blessed madonna) is a much better album.