Dua Lipa opens up about the aftermath of her BRITs ‘New Rules’ meme
. @DUALIPA opens up about the aftermath of her BRITs ‘New Rules’ meme: “It was humiliating” https://t.co/U7FdqK9KU0
- NME (@NME) May 4, 2024
In 2018, Lipa sang the song at the BRITs awards show in a performance many deemed to be lacklustre. A video posted of the performance went on to spawn a comment, which is now a viral meme: “I love her lack of energy, go girl give us nothing!”
This was worsened by a clip of her infamous dance move in her Calvin Harris collaboration ‘One Kiss’, which was called the “pencil sharpener” dance.
“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.’ Those things were hurtful. It was humiliating.”
She had to take herself off Twitter as she was upset : “people were picking everything apart that I’d been working on, and I had to learn all that in front of everyone. 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.”
The humiliation over the meme lasted two years total “until I finished writing ‘Future Nostalgia’ and did my first performance of ‘Don’t Start Now’, at the MTV Europe Music awards. It never was like I couldn’t get out of bed because of what I thought people thought of me. I didn’t care to that degree. But that’s when it was most heightened for me.”
She got a positive audience reaction once ‘Don’t Start Now’ came out: “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. And I went back, did that performance, and everyone was like, ‘Oh, we were wrong.’ I got a real kick out of that.”
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