Welcome to the first edition of Laughing Stock, a brand new music writing newsletter designed to give writers space to explore topics that mainstream music publications don’t any more. This week, Rich Walker (@dickiewalker) takes a look at Dua Lipa’s modern pop masterpiece Future Nostalgia, and considers why pop music, particularly that made by women, doesn’t seem to get the props it so richly deserves.
‘You want a timeless song, I want to change the game; like modern architecture, John Lautner coming your way’.
As opening statements go, it’s pretty bold. Comparing yourself to the guy who helped sweep away Art Deco and bring Modernism to the world, and claiming you’re going to ‘change the game’ at the start of a ‘pop’ album, is very fucking bold indeed. Yet here we are, at the top of Dua Lipa’s colossal Future Nostalgia LP, and judging by the playful conviction she sing-says these lines with, you wouldn’t put it past her. Dua, along with other female pop visionaries from the UK including the likes of Charlie XCX, Let’s Eat Grandma, Roisin Murphy, Rina Sawayama, and Shygirl, are taking ‘pop’ music by the scruff of the neck and turning out some of the best music coming from these shores regardless of genre. That they’re doing it with an element of critical and commercial success is even more extraordinary; it’s no longer ok to say this is just ‘good pop music’ - it’s just good music full stop.
All these artists are putting out music with one foot firmly rooted in the past, but crucially with both eyes laser focused on the future. Hauntology this is not; there isn’t a longing for a future that never materialised through the lens of pilfering eerily from the past. It’s much more about taking the best of the golden 90s and 00s pop templates and twisting them into new and frequently thrilling shapes, creating a sound that will be stolen and watered down by less adventurous acts a year or so down the line. Yet this movement, these brilliant artists, don’t seem to get the praise they deserve over and above ‘it’s just good pop music’. And it’s time for this to change.
Calling an album ‘Future Nostalgia’ is a stroke of genius. It absolutely evokes the aesthetic of the sound, in that most of these songs could have come out in 2007, yet sounds thoroughly modern and future facing. It’s bold, pretty much claiming it’s going to be a classic album that others will take from in the future, and it surely will be. Dua Lipa has not made some seismic, earth shattering album that will change the face of pop music, she hasn’t quite John Lautner’d her way to that (yet). What she has done, alongside her producers and co-writers, is manage to make a pop album in 2020 that sounds both instantly familiar and sufficiently forward facing to really make a mark on the future pop landscape. The result is more akin to a line further into the song ‘Future Nostalgia’ where Dua sings ‘you want what now looks like, let me give you a taste’. This is the post-trap-beat mainstream pop album that the world needs, the album that moves away from that lazy American hi-hat indebted sound (seriously, try and make it through any of Future’s or Ty Dolla $ign’s recent efforts, it’s almost impossible as they are so tediously one note, so templated from a sound that last sounded fresh in about 2017) and brings fun back to pop.
American pop music has gone stale. An entire generation of still incredibly popular artists are creatively bankrupt, recycling old ideas or hanging on the coattails of more interesting acts and sounds. Ariana Grande, riding high on the success of the brilliant Sweetener and the nearly as good thank u next, has just released an album heavy on the aforementioned ubiquitous, tedious trap beat; Gaga made a, well Gaga made a Gaga album but considerably less interesting than her Fame Monster peak, chasing that particular high with diminishing returns (I will die on the ‘Bad Romance’ being one of the best songs of the last 20 years’ hill); Taylor Swift started hanging out with The National bros and turned out two albums of sleep inducing folk that went down inexplicably well with the indie crowd...that’s The National bros for you; Katy Perry hasn’t been an ongoing concern for at least three albums now. Really, outside of Beyoncé, still slap bang in the middle of her imperial phase but missing in action outside of her Disney commitments, their one other hope Rihanna appears to have retired (say it ain’t so!). Miley Cyrus, that pop magpie who still isn’t quite sure what she should sound like, has recognised and latched on to Dua’s new found future-of-pop crown and has duetted with her on her new album, giving us ‘Prisoner’, which is a decent Future Nostalgia b-side at best - here comes the stealing, the watering down, not even a year after release (the ultimate compliment will be when Drake collaborates with A.G. Cook).
There are some glimmers of hope in the US, artists applying to fill that Bey-Riri shaped hole: Megan Thee Stallion released a fun and wild as fuck throwback rap album; Lizzo, lawsuits aside, is just getting properly going; Billie Eilish is maybe on the cusp of something huge, which gives me some hope, but her detractors almost seem to balance out her fervent fans. The good pop music in the US is being made by the outsiders and the weirdos, like Yves Tumor (I long for a world where ‘Kerosene!’ is a huge number 1), Channel Tres and serpentwithfeet, people who have a singular vision and are not tied to the same roster of producers and songwriters who can’t escape the hits of the near past. They will never be allowed into the mainstream in the way someone like Charli XCX or even Let’s Eat Grandma might be in the UK, and American pop will continue to suffer because of it. Instead, another Future collab will be on the next album. And the next.
Future Nostalgia is made for sweaty nights in gay bars and queer nights, in arenas jam packed with all sorts of pop lovers shouting ‘goddamn, you got me in love again!’ right back at her and each other. The main disappointment about this album is that it’s been released into a world where the above aren’t possible, so the joy of the collective experience of pop ecstasy has so far been denied to us. This will change though, and the songs will take on new significance in the post-covid era, morphing into the soundtrack for an elated release towards freedom and communal hedonism that is sorely missing from the present.
The songs on Future Nostalgia climb and climb as they go on, usually peaking after the use of pop’s most sneaky trick, the false break, that sounds like an ending but actually heralds the peak of the track. There are no ballads here, save those for Adele, thank you very much, just bangers. Dua is always in complete control, guiding you on this journey to pop nirvana with the confidence of a woman who knows she’s got something good going on. Take ‘Pretty Please’, one of the slightly more chilled tracks on Future Nostalgia. At the end of the bridge leading into the chorus she sings ‘when my mind is running wild could you help me slow it down?’, the music and beat emulate the lyrics, just shifting down the bpm nearly imperceptibly and it’s an absolute delight. The album is stuffed full of little details like this, you can tell it’s been laboured over in the best possible way to make it sound so slick, so polished, so now. Yet this detail, this hive mind of pop-gold production, is part of the problem as to why Future Nostalgia can’t be taken seriously as a piece of art by critics and part time musos.
Some of the tracks on Future Nostalgia have upwards of 5 or 6 people listed in the ‘composer’ credit. For some people this is an issue, despite Dua Lipa being listed as a writer on every single one. Some of those credits go to people whose music has been sampled (Michael Hutchence is listed on ‘Break My Heart’ for instance, a track that takes from INXS’ 1987 hit ‘Need You Tonight’), others to song writers for hire or the producer of the track. Why does this matter so much to people who claim it can’t be ‘authentic’ music if the title artist hasn’t personally written every song alone and contributed playing at least 3 instruments on each track? How is it different from a band, say Arctic Monkeys, who’s composer credits are attributed to ‘Arctic Monkeys’ (four of them!) and also includes at least one producer (5 people!) contributing to the sound that ends up on an album. Yet no one calls this music made by committee, it’s just proper lads making proper music with proper instruments. Kanye West’s magnum opus My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, widely held up as one of the 2010’s finest albums, has 64 (sixty-four!) writers credited to it; Future Nostalgia a mere 35 by comparison, yet critics lined up to praise these ‘rap camps’ described as ‘a dream team working around the clock to bring Kanye’s grandiose vision to life’. The pop camps around Dua and others don’t seem to get quite the fetishisation.
DJ Annie Mac recently tweeted her frustration that it’s always women who get accused of not making their own music, and it’s impossible to argue with her. In the world of music, pop (the most loved, mass medium in music, under appreciated and looked down on), women (frequently the most loved, often very under appreciated) seem to be seen as puppets of their writers and producers, where as men are lauded as visionaries and masters of their craft if they pull together an expensively assembled army of helpers. It’s a genre and gender imbalance in the minds of people who can’t equate a woman making an outstanding pop album without the outside help doing the heavy lifting. Why can’t a Future Nostalgia be seen as an achievement on par with a bloated double LP rap album? It’s a frustration that it is still impossible to read about Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black without Mark Ronson being mentioned as an architect of the album, despite Winehouse having sole writing credit on each and every track. We know Ronson helped shape the sound with Winehouse, but it was her who wanted to work with him to help realise the vision she had for the songs, not the other way round. Ed Sheeran’s monster album (in every sense of the word) divide was mainly produced by Benny Blanco, but you’ll struggle to find an article that extols his influence over Sheeran’s sound.
This dismissal of brilliant pop will continue into award ceremonies across 2021; Future Nostalgia or how i’m feeling now (probably never both) may have appeared at the lower end of a top 20 list ‘best of 2020’ list, and they may get a token nod in the Best Album category at the Brits and the Grammys, but they won’t top those lists, they won’t win those awards, because pop music isn’t serious music, it doesn’t use real instruments, it isn’t written by a singular entity, and therefore it doesn’t have the same artist merit assigned to it. Which is, to say the least, a bit patronising. It’s already happened at the Mercury prize, where to many peoples eternal surprise both Dua and Charli were nominated, but the prize was eventually bestowed upon the tedious and very serious Michael Kiwanuka album, described by the judges as ‘classic yet contemporary, drawing on the history of music while remaining an intensely personal work of self-expression, this is an album that will stand the test of time.’ Future Nostalgia is exactly an example of this, but in a way that’s actually, you know, fun to listen to.
George Michael once said ‘I never minded being thought of as a pop star. People have always thought I wanted to be seen as a serious musician, but I didn’t, I just wanted people to know I was absolutely serious about pop music’. This is exactly the craft that Dua, Charli and Rina bring to their music. The most important thing about Future Nostalgia is that Dua is already part of the mainstream, she’s a big star, she gets ample radio play and is a massive touring artist, so her sound will start to permeate through the pop world, inevitably yielding diminishing returns but at least bringing us some pop banger fun along the way. Let’s hope it brings us another golden era of UK pop, when Xenomania were writing tracks with Girls Aloud that had 4 choruses per song (Biology remains the absolutely, possibly insurmountable peak of this), and Sugababes were taking samples from the 70s and fashioning them into new pop behemoths. Then you have the Charli’s and the Rina’s, sitting more on the fringe of the mainstream, more likely to fill an Academy venue than the city’s uber arena, allowed to push pop music to new and exciting places whilst still sneaking the odd track onto the Radio 1 playlist, or more likely, the Spotify daily discover playlist.
It is here that Dua and her producers will themselves magpie their way to a true new pop sound, picking the more mainstream palatable sounds from something like ‘Comme Des Garçons (Like The Boys)’ or ‘pink diamond’ and turning them into solid gold pop hits. This is the future nostalgia I’m excited about, the Trojan horse of bringing thrilling new pop music into the mainstream via an established artist with an eye on the pop fringe. In Dua we trust.
Each week we will share some tracks that the contributers to Laughing Stock currently have on heavy rotation. You can follow the rolling playlist on Apple or Spotify.