“Houdini” by Dua Lipa, Monday, September 23, 2024

 

I remember writing about Dua Lipa’s collaboration with Elton John  "Cold, Cold Heart" several years ago At the time, I was barely familiar with the singer and found her to be unoriginal. The songs “New Rules” and “Levitating” were inescapable but I never listened to them voluntarily. They just happened to litter the gym stereo and the streets outside the phone stores in the shopping areas. As I’ve become more fluent in pop music over the last ten years, I still argue that the late ‘10s were the nadir of the genre, maybe the music industry in general. I realize that I’m often wrong about new artists and that a bad first impression can be undone with maturity. And sometimes, I was wrong about those early hits and they weren’t as cringey as I thought. I’ve been laying the criticism pretty thick. To be fair, these days when pop music isn't light and airy, it can get rather dark.

I COME AND I GO. Dua Lipa released her third studio album this year, Radical Optimism. The album’s title contrasts the negativity in pop music and culture in general. A singer who has at times described her sound as “dark pop” for her sultry tones, Duo Lipa’s third record is anything but dark. Building on the ‘80s dance hall template of her previous album Future Nostalgia, Lipa continues to create infectious music. For her third album, Dua Lipa tells Zane Lowe on his Apple Music interview series that she started with the title and began writing songs in a notebook she bought at a CVS drugstore.  In total Lipa wrote 97 songs. Eleven of them made the album. In many of her interviews, Dua Lipa talks about writing down her goals to manifest her future success. In the interview cycle for Radical Optimism, the singer talks about two goals that she wrote down at the beginning of her career when thinking about her third album. One was headlining Glastonbury, specifically the Friday night set on the main stage. The other dream was collaborating with the Alternative band Tame Impala. Both of these dreams came true with the Australian band’s lead singer Kevin Parker producing many tracks on Radical Optimism.

CATCH ME OR I GO HOUDINI. Dua Lipa released “Houdini” as the lead single of Radical Optimism. The track was produced by Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker who also wrote the intro to the song. The funky electronic grind of the intro and many of the ‘70s sounds on Radical Optimism sound connected to some of the work of Parker’s band. The Hungarian-American illusionist’s namesake was also the name of Emimen’s lead single from his album this summer, though the songs are in no way related. Still, this didn’t stop the citizens of the Internet and even the band Foster the People from mashing up the two songs.  The Dua Lipa song is perhaps the simpler of the songs. It’s a club anthem about being free and uses the reputation of the escape artist Harry Houdini as the speaker who has no time for a lackadaisical lover. She hopes “maybe you could be the one who makes a girl change her ways.” And while the song has elements of a dark club, the lyrics are centered on hope. The next move is up to the song’s subject.

Read “Houdini” by Dua Lipa on Genius