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Dua Lipa is fine and I am learning to hold my takes lightly

If you go girl give us nothing, nothing go girl gives also unto you

I like the new Dua Lipa song just fine. This reflects personal growth, as I subconsciously decided sometime circa 2018 that I didn’t like Dua Lipa, didn’t “get” Dua Lipa, and would actually enjoy myself less if I noticed her music was playing somewhere, reallocating a real share of my mental energy from whatever I’d been thinking about to thinking about that instead. This is dumb, obviously. I’m saying at the top that this is dumb. I hadn’t watched that video until just now and can't suppress the thought that the camera work is to choreography what the Catwoman basketball scene is to basketball, but it’s fun to look at, and the song goes. I had no good reason to avoid either of these conclusions.

Danceable pop music with a strong female lead is one of my major interests, and I love to talk about my major interests (current leaderboard includes poetry, long walks, radio, energy drinks, mysticism, socialism, the male nude in visual art, and the movie Broadcast News). So it’s not that I couldn’t have told you, at length, why Dua left me cold compared to her forebears and contemporaries. “Charisma void with zero VORP in her own songs” is a phrase I may have used.

It’s true that I’m drawn to soloists who bring real force of personality to the party, whether that manifests as extra to the point of borderline messy (Gaga, Lana, SZA), superhumanly self-possessed (Beyoncé, Rihanna, Robyn), or sort of an intense, deadpan “girl drawing a goth eye on her notebook in the back of the class” quality (Charli XCX and Kim Petras are here for me, though feeling like maybe Robyn should be too has me wondering if the vibe I’m responding to is just “European”). Carly Rae Jepsen only rates more and more highly over time; in my eyes she’s up there with Prince or Björk for tiny, ageless, fey gremlin geniuses who see colors most of us just don’t. Taylor is a weird one. I don’t know her mind, but it would line up with the hyper-managed life she’s led for so long that she often comes across like the way humans relate to each other in normal social contexts is something she’s studied more than experienced. I get people who find this a little stilted at times, but to me, it’s interestingly alien, and sort of poignant when it comes out in the songwriting. She sings about high school intrigue and waiting at the bus stop like Ariel sings about life on land. Meet me behind the — what’s that word again? — mall?

Dua, though? What was her story? What was her sound? A friend put “New Rules” on another friend’s smart speaker at a house party, and I kept waiting for the song to really get started until it was over. I saw performances here and there, and like YouTube user Tobias of meme immortality, didn’t see much. I was similarly underwhelmed by “Hotter than Hell” and, when it came out, “Don’t Start Now,” though maybe “underwhelmed” isn’t the right word. I was already figuratively crossing my arms, ostensibly waiting to be surprised by something, but really waiting to be validated when my previous assessment was unchanged. I guess I had a vague idea I was expected (unclear who by) to be into this artist, and that it proved something (unclear who to) about the strength of my critical faculties that I wasn’t — not that I was right and everyone else was wrong, even, more that a well-developed sensibility should produce a sharp “ugh, no thanks” every once in a while, just to prove you have it in you. I don’t actually think this is true, or at least, I don’t think that’s how a habit of having strong takes relates to a habit of sincerely interested engagement with the world. But I wasn’t thinking about any of it that explicitly, or I would have — I hope I would have — told myself to knock it off sooner.

If I had a lavishly overwritten paragraph about how I realized Future Nostalgia was the expressive triumph it was all along in ways to be illuminated to the reader, it would go here. I don’t, though. I didn't even have a transcendent experience where the night and the music and the larger themes going on in my life all lined up perfectly and I like, got it, spiritually speaking, and returned to the work with a more generous heart. In fact, I just walked around over the weekend with the songs in my headphones, and when I tried, experimentally, not bristling in advance, I didn’t bristle this time. “Houdini” is kind of a fun song. “Hotter than Hell” seems like kind of a fun song now, too. “Dance the Night,” obviously, a fun song, probably helped out by association with a movie I enjoyed, but you can’t hold that against it. “Levitating” still feels like a 10/10 song trapped in a 6.5/10 rendition, and I do hold that against it a little, but time has mellowed that reaction out from indignation to just sort of noticing and wondering if someone will cover it sometime.

My critical reappraisal, if you can even call it that, is this: where once I saw girl giving nothing, I now see something more like girl giving exactly sufficient. She gets in, she hits the notes, she hits the marks, she gets out, and the production does the same. She does her job and goes home. An icon for our times, actually? I won’t go that far, but it’s an angle from which I can find some affection for her whole deal. That changes how I experience the songs, even if the elements I’m observing are largely the same as they were years ago. And, I'll admit it, I have a better time.

I’m not against negativity, or even pointless, low-stakes hating for bonding and recreation. I’m definitely not against critical analysis — love a series of perceptions thoughtfully articulated, love to hear why people experience things how they do — and it’s a bummer that the market is so hostile right now to working critics' freedom to really get into that. Anyone interested in substantial conversations about art is worse off when the incentives are stacked against writing something measured in a public venue; it’s not a non-concern that anything other than praise might hurt a marginal artist who’s not getting much other press (or, alternatively, knifehand-strike the hornet’s nest of a bigger artist’s fanbase), and I’m more worried about the erosion of that space to be sincerely ambivalent than I am about the occasional genuinely stupid, mean review.

What I’m thinking about today, though, is what happens when your own strong take about something, whatever motivated that take in the first place, gets in the way of noticing the thing itself anymore. There’s a series of assumptions and reflexive postures about this kind of thing that’s been floating around the culture as long as I’ve been alive; I won’t assume you’re guilty, but I bet you’ll recognize the arc. It goes like this: if you’re passionate about something, and especially if your passion for something is sort of a persona-defining trait for you, you’re supposed to have expertise in it — expertise manifest not in only deep knowledge of the area, but in a well-developed sense for which instances of seemingly very similar things are actually good or bad, for reasons you can explain, knowledgably.

Everybody knows what it’s like when someone leans hard on that last part to establish dominance over others, whether by drilling people in a “well name five of their last albums” way or just... fuckin' always... having to have the biggest, most forceful take in the room on everything that matters. The culture has identified this type of person and what a pain they are to be around, and it’s up to them to listen and reflect or not. It’s wild, though, to notice how much the basic framework comes up wherever people bond over a shared enthusiasm. (Take it from an artsy literature degree haver who also used to work for a sports website — so many sports conversations are like this.) It’s not all awful; those riffs and debates can be fun if people go about them in a basically good-natured way. But when that kind of thing becomes part of the game people play to socialize and process their shared world, there’s some incentive to seem capable according to the rules of the space, and sometimes that comes out in a little anxiety to seem surer, more expert, than you are. Which can get in the way of your curiosity, which is never a good thing to obstruct or let fall to disuse, I don't think.

If you the reader, as a matter of personality, are not very susceptible to this, I think that’s great. I am, and I’ve definitely known people who are, with varying degrees of self-awareness about it. For anyone in the Take Formation professions (I include content biz and academia here, both of which I’ve spent time in), it can easily rise to something like a job hazard. When well-defined arguments, not misty, mutable experiences, are the product you’re supposed to hand in, it’s a challenge not to let the “what’s my argument about this going to be” cart get ahead of the horse. But I think the living, breathing horse of observation — open-minded curiosity, interest in what you’re even talking about — has to have room to lead. To mix ground transportation metaphors: much as the tires are the only part of the car that touch the road, that genuine attention to things is the only part of your thinking that touches the rest of the world, and the quality of that contact is awfully important to the quality of the ride.

I’ll put it another way. Once a person has formed a lot of takes — in college essays or newspaper columns or posts or podcasts or TV appearances or bullshit arguments with friends — they do, eventually, get used enough to the sound and shape of their own arguments that they can kind of do it on autopilot. At that point, it’s up to them to realize: shit, I could use these tools to convince myself of just about anything. Do I really believe this? Or am I just already in the middle of saying it? Stronger minds than mine have faltered here. I’d rather not be one of them. It's so much less fun out there that way, you know?

Poem: “South Texas Persephone” by Analicia Sotelo

Some day the ground will open up
and swallow me.

Some day I’ll be swept

through the sand, and the grass
will become my crown

of burnt paper.

And he will be there: tall,
steel-toed, eyes like ice in whiskey,

handing me my first drink.

In the bar, we’ll dance to a song I hate,
but I’ll cling to him anyway.

This is the darkness of marriage,

the burial of my preferences
before they can even be born […]

→ Continue reading at Missouri Review

The Rest

• I saw Stereophonic last night and oh my God, everybody, have you heard about theater? That was dope. I saved Lauren Theisen’s piece for afterward, and she nails what makes the format such an interesting (and, I think, hugely successful) approach for the kind of story that straight-ahead biopic tends to flatten out. For me, a person who does not go to many plays, watching the band’s songs emerge in real time from characters who are actually embodied in the room (real people! on a real stage! in the room, with me!) was magical. Do I go to plays now? I’m subscribing to not broadway and seeing what happens.

• More things I appreciated reading:

  • Elif Batuman on self-plagiarism
  • Doug Mack on RC Cola in Tajikstan
  • Jesse Coburn on New York’s broken clocks
  • Michelle Alexander at the Palestine Festival of Literature on MLK on Vietnam

• Sorry if this tossed-off thought ends up being foreshadowing for another big tech platform crisis, but do y'all ever worry about Spotify? The creator payment concerns speak for themselves (I’ve mostly tried to offset this by paying artists other ways when I can) but even on the consumer side, the whole short history of streaming media tells us that cheap, easy access to infinite good content never lasts. I’m trying to keep records of what’s in my library so I can find things again if the whole thing disappears or becomes unusable, at least. Damn, though, I really love making playlists and sharing them with my friends! Here are some I made recently, here while they're here:

  • Back In The Fight (processing various kinds of loss; not all heartbreakers, but contains some heartbreakers)
  • Some Enchanted Evening (torchy, croon-y, cozy-evening-in type songs)
  • Good-Looking Boys (frankly horny, occasionally exasperated songs about men)
  • At Least Two Emotions (do you ever think about how love and hate are kind of related emotions, sometimes? and that feeling wounded or upset sometimes means you care very much??)
  • Good Talk (songs I find encouraging or heartening in some way, but mostly not explicitly out to affirm the listener, because I hate that)

• And if you’re doing the winter music thing this week:

  • Christmas Grooves by Natalie Weiner
  • weird christmas! by Samantha Irby
  • My playlist from last year by me

I'm still figuring out what I want to do with this newsletter, but if you want, you can set up a monthly tip in the amount of your choosing here, or make a one-time tip through my Venmo.

I'm reading: Agents and Books | Anxiety Shark | Ask a Fuck Up | Bitches Gotta Eat | The Breakside | Bring Me Giants | Channel 6 | Craft Talk | Defector | The Ed’s Up | Garbage Day | Hell Gate | ¡Hola Papi! | Hung Up | Life Is a Sacred Text | The Lost Songs Project | Making It | The Melt | Ordinary Plots | Pome | Rax King | SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE | The Small Bow | Something New | Starting Out | To a Green Thought | Unsnackable | Walk It Off | Welcome to Hell World

Mags Colvett is a writer and editor mostly raised in east Tennessee and currently living in Queens. You can find them on Bluesky and Instagram. Subscribe free for more where this came from.