Dua Lipa released her new album Radical Optimism last Friday. Here's a picture of her performing at a surprise show in NYC's Times Square last night to celebrate:
She also hosted and performed on SNL. Here's her opening monologue...
So, if you're pretty familiar with Dua Lipa as a pop cultural figure — and if you spend a decent amount of time on the internet — you probably know about the "Go girl, give us nothing" meme, which originated from this clip of her performing "New Rules" at the BRIT Awards in 2018.
On the video's YouTube page, a commenter (who apparently since took down their comment) infamously replied to the performance, "I love her lack of energy, go girl give us nothing!"
The rest was meme history. "Go girl give us nothing" went viral as a catch-all phrase for a certain type of stage presence, and six years later, it's basically shorthand for low-energy performances.
Would you be happy about such a meme being attached to your career as a performer? Because according to a new interview from the Guardian, Dua sure wasn't.
Dua referred to the meme as "hurtful" and "humiliating." "I had to take myself off Twitter," she admitted.
"The thing that made me the happiest — performing and writing songs — was also making me really upset because 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.”
Dua also claimed that she felt humiliated for "two years" after the meme's origin — specifically, until she finished writing her second album Future Nostalgia from 2020 and performed its debut single "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," she explained. "I didn’t care to that degree. But that’s when it was most heightened for me.”
