Dua Lipa Is Just Here for a Good Time

"Walking into this week likeee," read the caption.

There was just one thing. It was 3 p.m. ET on a Tuesday. Quickly, the amused—and desk-bound—were popping off in the QRTs.

But what's a Monday to the Vacanza Queen? Like the Dowager Countess of Grantham, international pop stars don't operate in accordance with normal business hours. Comrade Dua said, "Abolish the five-day workweek!"

As Lipa loyalists know, our girl does love a holiday. Last year, she had candlelit dinners in Paris and spritzes on the French Riviera, partied in Ibiza, and sailed around the Greek islands. Other stops included Madrid, Barcelona, New York City, Jamaica, Kosovo, Albania, Denmark, and India. Lipa's jet-setting lifestyle is perhaps in fact the dominant thread of the public conversation about her. In January, New York magazine tried to calculate just how often she goes abroad (answer: about once per month). Last May, she codesigned a Versace collection dubbed "La Vacanza," a reference to the "Vacanza Queen" nickname fans have given her. "Does dua lipa have a house like she is always somewhere," X user @giawclits tweeted, to viral response, that same month. Earlier this year, in a Rolling Stone cover story, the grabbiest quote wasn't about her music, but Lipa's defense of her right to vacation.

"Of course, I was going to fucking holiday and chill [during] the year that I was just going in the studio and had some time off," she said. "As long as I'm doing my job, hitting my deadlines, and getting my shit done, then I will find a way to relax, too. It's really, work hard and play hard. Why not?"

Why not indeed!! Let's make a few things clear. One, Dua Lipa obviously works hard. She is a multiple-award-winning artist, with Grammys, BRITs, and a zillion other kinds of awards; she's scored five top-10 Billboard Hot 100 hits with songs like "Levitating" and "Don't Start Now." She's toured the world, and she's been in two movies in the past 10 months. She's incorporated her love of travel into her lifestyle media company, Service95: a blog, newsletter, and podcast suite that's a bit like a globally focused, more middlebrow Goop with an activist bent. The website runs features on the best bookstores in Paris and fashion from Yemen alongside skincare recommendations. The articles seem well-researched! Two, vacations are good, and Dua Lipa should go on as many as possible. If I had that kind of money to burn and a British passport? You simply would not see me anywhere but a beach! Vacanza Queen is aspirational. You get the sense Lipa knows this on some level, both because she's co-opted the name for projects such as the Versace collection and perhaps also because it's hard to imagine Dua Lipa being terribly bothered by much at all.

Still, it's more than a little amusing that "People say you go on vacation a lot" is the narrative backbone of a major pop star profile ahead of an album release. And rather unusual, given the modern pop star modus operandi.

Let's face it: We are drowning in discourse! There has been a heavy-handedness to this jam-packed spring of pop releases that has inspired a lot of extra-musical debate. The two biggest albums of the season, Taylor Swift's The Tortured Poets Department and Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter, are 31 and 27 songs in length, respectively, and each has asked listeners to understand a fair amount of context before pressing play.

These narratives are intricately woven and fairly serious: Beyoncé positioned Cowboy Carter, for instance, as a reclamation of Black musical lineage, placing the album within the context of American history. Swift's aims on The Tortured Poets Department were less grand and less political but no less evident—the album was a diaristic window into a period of time when she lost two loves while hitting the current peak of her fame and visibility. The stakes of the album were framed as nearly existential: Swift called it a "lifeline" from all that dark chaos. Both albums were packed with references, samples, and Easter eggs. Those details informed the stories of those albums and often enriched them, though only if listeners were up to hunting for them; the word "homework" has been conspicuously present in the public conversation about three-minute pop songs lately.

And if the richness of texts like Cowboy Carter and Tortured Poets has implied a request for close reads, the conversation surrounding both has delivered. Beyoncé inspired discussions of genre, music industry gatekeeping, and the politics of the frontier; Swift did the same for the parasociality of modern fandom, the value of music criticism, and the relationship between capitalism and artistic output. There is debate about the debate. Writing about both albums is readily available in places such as the New York Times opinion pages, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic.

Even outside the Beyoncé-Swift zone, the pop ecosystem remains plenty discursive. Olivia Rodrigo has stitched plenty of lore into her songs; she's also inspired commentary on the transition from Disney kid to adult pop star and the derivative nature of hitmaking. Ariana Grande's eternal sunshine was framed as a divorce album; plenty of the buzz around that record involved her lyrical reference to her marriage as a "situationship." JoJo Siwa's "gay pop" narrative may have flopped, but she still gave it a go. Even Vampire Weekend is doing Easter eggs these days! You could look at the current pop landscape and easily conclude that an extra-musical identity that informs—and sometimes engulfs—the music itself is a necessary component.

And then there's Dua Lipa.

In these discursive times, Lipa offers an alternative. She is a pop star almost wholly unburdened by narrative. I have been a fan of Lipa's since her first album; I have seen her in concert, and she has featured heavily in my Spotify Wrapped for several years running—yet I know almost nothing about her. I know that Wendy Williams called her "Dula Peep." I know there was a meme about her dancing. I know she's chic and European, and she travels. Dua Lipa's narrative is vacation!

To an almost shocking degree for a pop star of her ilk, Lipa doesn't really bother with lore. Perhaps it's a function of the types of pop songs she makes; Lipa has primarily released dance music, which is characteristically unburdened, or at least serves as a release of whatever burdens may exist.

"All dua lipa songs are about how she's been dancing for a while now and how she wants to continue to dance and ohhh noooO she's been hurt by a Man who doesn't know what he's doing but WAIT wait wait guys it's ok she's totally over it because she's going to dance tonight," went a viral post from April.

Radical Optimism promises a similar touch. The Rolling Stone story described it as "confident dance pop" and "straightforward pop bliss." Lipa spends a lot more time in the profile talking about making the album than she does about her personal life, but the touchstones of her past few years include her pandemic-delayed Future Nostalgia tour, time with family, and travel. She has gone through two breakups and is in a new relationship but hasn't leaned into heartbreak in her promotion of the album. To the extent that she goes there lyrically, the Rolling Stone profile describes one relationship-coded song as being about the realization that you can be happy for an ex. "All Too Well," this is not.

This style was once much more typical. Pop songs are often written by producers and hitmakers and shopped around to labels who retrofit the songs to the artists who record them. But in the social media age, the parasocial nature of fandom emphasizes personal storytelling. Fans love the musician even more than they love the music, so they tend to want products that reflect the object of their affection.

Lipa is not necessarily an obvious figure to go against this grain. She is involved in writing her own songs. She also seems incredibly personable—I'd have a hard time naming many artists I'd rather have a drink with. Still, she suggests a persona more than a specific story. I'm chic and European, the songs say. Listen and feel chic and European, too! Is it a little wild to consider this a radical strategy? Yes! But here we are.

If Lipa is testing the theory that it's still possible to be a major pop girl without emphasizing personal narrative, the evidence may turn out not to support the thesis. Days before the album drops, the three singles from Radical Optimism are lingering in the 70s and 80s of the Spotify global chart, and only "Illusion" is still on the Billboard Hot 100, though "Houdini" peaked at no. 11 back in November, when it was released.

But don't count a dance record out as the temperatures start to rise, and don't count out an album that asks listeners for nothing more than to listen to it. If Dua Lipa can pull off another hit record, we should celebrate her willingness to let the songs speak for themselves. Future Nostalgia, the album that made Lipa the kind of star who could open the Grammys, as she did in February, is beloved as a dance record that offered enthusiasm and cheer in the early quarantine days of the COVID-19 pandemic. It's really not a given that an album gets remembered for what it sounds like. None of this is to say that thought- and conversation-provoking albums aren't wonderful and necessary, but we're not exactly short on those right now. All hail our Vacanza Queen, the antidote to pop music's conversant times.