YouTube covers to YouTube record breaker, Dua Lipa has become the voice of confidence, like the characters she conjures up in her songs. “By shielding myself through music, I’ve been able to create this overly confident persona that can say anything and is not afraid of it. It’s made me feel empowered, and from the songs I’ve released, the fans have come back and told me that they feel empowered by it. If I’m able to use music as a shield, I’ll just keep doing that,” Dua has told The New York Times.
What’s her story?
Growing-up years: The Kosovar-Albanian was born in London and attended Sylvia Young Theatre School before moving to Pristina in Kosovo with her family in 2008. “I don’t have any significant memory of it being a massive culture shock. It’s much safer than London, so I was allowed to do a lot more things. I could go to the city centre with my friends,” she told Evening Standard. Dua returned to London a little over two years later, without her family at age 15, to do her GCSEs.
She realised London was the place to pursue a singing career. Living in Camden with a much older friend, she went on to finish A-levels in politics, psychology, English and media at Parliament Hill Girls’ School.
Finding her feet: During her time at school, Dua started putting out cover versions on YouTube, like Alicia Keys’s If I Ain’t Got You and Christina Aguilera’s Beautiful. Her efforts quickly paid off when she landed a management deal with TAP, which also had on its roster, Lana Del Rey. “My intention at the time wasn’t to get a record deal, it was more to find out what my sound was. I was telling people I wanted to sound like [US rapper] J. Cole and Nelly Furtado mixed together, and they were like, ‘What is this girl talking about?’ But then I wrote Hotter Than Hell. The production at that point was just a piano and a kick drum but I liked the darkness behind it, this pop chorus with a rappy flow to the verses, all sung in a lower register. That was the song that got me a record deal and where it all began,” she has said.
Music she is inspired by: Her father, Dukagjin Lipa, is a rock singer turned marketing executive. Her parents had exposed Dua to a mix of pop, hip-hop and rock during her teenage years. At first it was David Bowie, Bob Dylan and Radiohead and later came Nelly Furtado and Pink. Then arrived J. Cole, whose storytelling grabbed her.
No to modelling: Dua started modelling at age 16 to earn money but as soon as she was told to lose weight for the runway, she knew it was not her cup of tea. “It really messed up my body confidence, because I was so young,” she told NYT. And the experience resulted in the song, Blow Your Mind (Mwah) which is about “learning to love yourself every day a little bit more”.
The breakthrough: We liked her the day the promo single New Love hit streaming services in 2015. Accompanying the smoky voice was an amazing video of Dua bubble-blowing and dancing in grocery stores. The “tale of unrequited love” was also “a song about facing the fear of losing the only thing that matters to you”. But it was her song Be The One that cemented her status as a rising star to watch out for. Yet, she was hesitant while recording the track about “self-belief, perseverance and fighting for what you want”.
And the story continues: Not many can boast of having Chris Martin as collaborator on her debut album. Dua’s email to the Coldplay frontman turned into an invitation to Los Angeles to write their duet, Homesick, which closes out her self-titled debut album. Dua Lipa is here to stay, something she proved at this year’s BRIT Awards, where she won trophies for British Breakthrough Act and British Female Solo Artiste.
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CARDI B
Belcalis Almanzar went from stripping to becoming the star of the moment — rapper-songwriter Cardi B. With her bawdy lines and a huge collection of wigs, she even managed to knock Taylor Swift off the #1 spot on Billboard last year. How did that happen?
Making a decision early on: To please her mom, Cardi B studied at Borough of Manhattan Community College and thought of becoming a history teacher. At the same time, she worked at the deli Amish Market. Into the third semesters, she lost her job for giving too many discounts. By way of “career advice”, one of her managers suggested her next move: “He was like, ‘You’re so pretty, you got a nice body.’ He told me to go across the street to New York Dolls, the strip club. That’s when I started stripping,” she has told The Fader. She used some of her earnings from stripping to return to school but after missing many classes, she decided to quit.
After becoming a celebrity of sorts in NY, she took to social media to express herself and share her thoughts on stripping, relationship, sex, writing everything under the sun but with humour. Writing has been a passion as she used to rewrite songs by the likes of Beyonce while making them “waaay sluttier”.
Once Cardi B reached around 500,000 followers on Instagram, veteran music manager Shaft signed on with her and encouraged her to rap. And on her 23rd birthday — October 11, 2015 — she decided to quit stripping and start thinking of a career in music.
Early steps: Her fame at nightclubs landed her a role on the Vh1 reality show Love & Hip Hop, which follows the lives of those in the hip-hop industry. She went from being a supporting cast member to a reality show star: “Yo, it’s so crazy, like, them m***********s [the producers] really doubted me. It’s like, why would y’all doubt me? Like, I have seven hundred thousand bajillion followers. I’m telling them like, ‘Yo, I have a brand. I’m not even an artiste and I fill out clubs.... They just wanted to make me look as the stripper, a struggling stripper,” she told The Fader.
And to The Guardian, she said: “People want me to be so full of shame that I used to dance. I would never be ashamed of it. I made a lot of money, I had a good time and it showed me a lot — it made me open my eyes about how people are, how men are, about hunger and passion and ambition.”
She took on those who insulted her through music, like her 2016 track Trick. The men in her songs are “weak, soft, stupid, easily manipulated”.
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The big hit: Last June announced the arrival of the track Bodak Yellow, named in homage to Florida rapper Kodak Black. She raps ‘I don’t dance now, I make money moves’ and does so with a bigger picture in mind: “I’m so free-spirited.
Everyone has a me inside them, that loud girl that just wanna go ‘ayyyy!’ No matter if you a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, it comes out. Like, aha, I got you being yourself for a li’l two minutes or three, huh?” she told The Guardian. In September, it unseated Taylor Swift’s Look What You Made Me Do from the top spot on Billboard’s Hot 100. The New York Times went on to call the track “a valuable 3 minutes 44 seconds of frankness in a year of feminist pandering… Other anthems aim to please; Cardi’s conjures a world in which women don’t need to please anyone at all.”
And she’s a darling of the fashion world: At the New York Fashion Week last month, she made appearances at every top show, chatting with Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. Her stylist Kollin Carter has said: “Roberto Cavalli just started lending. Versace has been lending the past couple of times. Certain names are finally coming around.” She also has a partnership with Steve Madden.
Dua Lipa/Cardi B is my favourite because.... Tell t2@abp.in