The meme of Dua Lipa dancing on stage in the earlier days of her career may have been a funny joke to those online, but the singer recently confessed that it was “hurtful” to go through.
In a wide-ranging interview with The Guardian published on May 4, the Grammy-winning pop star and hitmaker referred to a clip of her infamous Brit Awards performance in 2018 as one of her more “humiliating” moments. A snippet from that performance of her song New Rules showed Dua doing a dance move that was later called the “pencil sharpener." The video has been reposted and torn apart many times.
“When people took that snippet of me dancing online and just turned it into a meme, and then when I won the best new artist Grammy and people were like, ‘She’s not deserving of it, she’s got no stage presence, she’s not going to stick around,'” Dua said. “Those things were hurtful. It was humiliating.”
The experience forced Dua to remove herself from X (formerly Twitter) to avoid the harsh criticism of her performance abilities. She said performing and writing songs “made me the happiest” but it was also “making me really upset.”
“People were picking everything apart that I’d been working on, and I had to learn all that in front of everyone,” Dua continued. “In the public eye, I was figuring out who I was as an artist, as a performer. All that was happening while I was 22, 23 years old and still growing up. You have to build tough skin. You have to be resilient.”
Dua also said that the clip was “a small snippet of a much bigger performance” and that the criticism was a bit unfair. “I think people who had seen me play live on the first album tour would have thought a very different thing,” she said.
It wasn't until about two years later when Dua finished writing her critically acclaimed album Future Nostalgia and she subsequently performed Don't Start Now at the MTV Europe Music Awards that she finally felt less humiliated by the comments. Dua has since been vindicated, as the discourse online went from critiquing her dance moves to praising her for how much she has grown as a performer.
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“It was November 2019 when Don’t Start Now came out, and it dawned on me that I’m finally going to get up and dance in front of people after what they have thought about me for so long," she said. "And I went back, did that performance, and everyone was like, ‘Oh, we were wrong.’ I got a real kick out of that.”
Dua Lipa, who released her third studio album Radical Optimism this month, made sure to clarify that she would have always worked to improve her skills on stage, even if she hadn't become a meme.
“I was always going to work towards being a good performer. There was no way I was going to not let that happen, regardless.”
This article originally appeared in Teen Vogue.
