Dua Lipa - "These Walls"

Listen here.

Straight from the mouth of The Mother-In-Chief, or maybe from the mouth of the gift horse, whose ass you stared at for too long.

For all the alleged power and access and glory, I can imagine that being a pop star—especially a woman who works as a pop star, which is so often quite literally a job and a role and an assignment for women, and not the ownership or authorship or empowerment that men incorrectly assume—gets pretty tiring. 

After years spent interfacing with your public and touring the world—checking in and out of one hotel after another, each room under a different assumed identity than the last, just in case someone figures out the old one, as they inevitably will; always hoping the sunglasses are enough to keep their eyes away, as they inevitably won't be—sometimes you probably just want to stand still, certain that nobody is watching except maybe God herself, and that there’s no content to be extracted from your life, and there are no more recordings to be made of your memories, and there are no more masters that can make money for someone else.

There is just the sun, and the air, and your own skin, which no one else ever has to feel. 

Nothing will ever be choreographed again: you can just tread water for once in your life, without having to carry the weight of the whole world on your fairly ordinary shoulders.

Future Nostalgia existed between time periods; Radical Optimism exists between time zones, a perpetual non-place of French exits, Irish goodbyes, Albanian unifications, and American heartbreaks.

The liminal life of a touring pop star is not unlike the endless road schedule of professional wrestling: a form of entertainment, which, funny enough, I was paid to write about for a publication owned by Dua Lipa. I stand with Dua Lipa as a person but also as a persona, even aside from the music, because of the stands she has taken with so many people around the globe, whose existence she could so easily ignore.

But full disclosure, I also ride or die for Dua Lipa because of her publication Service 95, and because she sees the importance of actually sustaining the ecosystem and environment around her—whether cultural criticism or the world itself—beyond just filling her own pockets. 

(You can read that piece here. Yes, this is self-promo, and it is shameless, because women deserve to promote ourselves shamelessly for once. And I will shamelessly promote every woman and every bad bitch and every real motherfucker who deserves it, because your rules weren't written with us in mind to begin with. Dua Lipa included, even if she's rich, because she helped a bitch pay a sizable portion of her rent, and that's more than most of you have ever done. Shouts out to Dua Lipa.)

Dua Lipa tells us she has been known to put her lovers on a pedestal, which is not what I’m doing here: that’s what every man who has ever mocked her in public while lusting after her in private has ever done, as they do with every female pop star whose presence is a present they tried to steal, as they do with most women. 

This is me looking Dua Lipa dead in the eye, on equal ground, from one real ass fucking bitch who is finally learning to stand her ground—or how to swim, or whichever metaphor you feel like mixing—to another.

Dua Lipa is a perfect pop star precisely because she is a vessel, as every pop star is always a vessel for the producers who control them, and as every female pop star's art is a struggle to claim their voice and define their realities against that control. 

Not only that: Dua Lipa acknowledges she is a vessel, and wields that with intention and purpose. Her radical optimism is not one of word or of album title or even of song, but of actual action, and of materiality, and of putting fucking money in the pocket of marginalized people who need it, some of whom happen to be slightly crazy girls like me. 

Dua Lipa has grown, and she has worked, and she has trained. Magic doesn’t come naturally, even to Houdini; you learn the tricks of the trade once you’re allowed behind the curtain, which male music journalists force women to reveal in order to shatter your own illusions, which we are forced to wield as shields to protect ourselves in a hurtful world. Women have our own kayfabe too.

When she studies relentlessly at choreography and her craft, she’s gone too far, to the point you now call her robotic, when only a year ago you were lusting after compilations of her stroking the microphone, which is her way of reminding you that you will never get anywhere near that close to her beautiful self.

When she writes about feminism, it’s not good enough for the boys she’s criticizing, because boys will be boys, and girls will be women: she told you exactly how you were going to respond to that one.

When she gives money to actual legends like Larry Heard, it’s treated as an accesorizing treacle or passing fancy or maybe even appropriation.

When she also redistributes her own wealth to marginalized writers, it is treated as only a vanity project, only a newsletter, only a blog, and not an actual lifeline, to a woman like me who needs money to survive, more than I need a platform to express an opinion for a public that is always already harassing my ass just for daring to exist.

I feel myself in that, maybe a little bit too much, because when I presented my voice as meaningless album reviews to make value for Conde Nast, you complained about it. 

And when I tried to present it to you as literature or personal essay or Google Doc or radical politics or book report or video art or DJ mix or whatever I fucking could, you also complained. 

And when you read this, if you even get this far, you will also complain, just like you were going to find a reason to do anyway, just like you would have done with any Dua Lipa album, no matter what it sounded like, even if Pet Shop Boys produced it, as they probably should have done. 

Because this is what you do every time to every woman.

I will not let you forget that on the last album cycle you said she stole house music valor.

On the album cycle before that one, you called her an industry plant and a pretty face and you made fun of her dance moves, and now you try to tell me that you didn’t, and that you always saw something in her, like I did the first time I heard “One Kiss” in the back of a Lyft on the way home from La Guardia after another trip to visit my parents, trying and failing to convince them and myself that I was a good son, or even a son at all.

I saw myself in Dua Lipa, and maybe even a glimpse of the mother to the world that Dua Lipa herself has become, and maybe even a further-away glimpse of the mother to the world that I might become too. 

It's ok, though, girl. Even if nobody else sees you, or even listens to you, even when they all claim they do, just know that I will always see you and listen to you, because I see myself in you, and maybe if I listen close enough, I’ll hear my own voice too, as I have in so many women who I was scared to let myself see as my sisters. 

Even if we are separated by thousands of miles and millions of dollars, Dua Lipa and I have a sisterly bond that exists beyond words, because we have both suffered the same shit from many of the same men, who then denied it was their own shit they were making us eat. 

And I also happen to be a little biased because she put her money directly in my pocket, while women like Anna Wintour have only ever taken it. 

We have both been punished for good deeds that should have been praised, which we never even asked for in the first place: we just asked to be heard and seen, which is all any woman has ever wanted.

So thank you, Dua. And you’re welcome.

I listened to these walls, and they told me to break up with music journalism. So that’s what I did, and Proselyte Magazine is the break-up letter, but it’s also the diss track, but it’s also how I win. 

Though I’ll never know for sure unless I know her, I think that’s what Radical Optimism might be for Dua Lipa too, in the same way Solar Power was for Lorde, in the same way the post-Scandoval season of Vanderpump Rules seems to have been for Ariana, in the same way everything has ever been for Alanis.

In the same way Gangsta Boo did her entire career.

In the same way that I know in my heart Selena would have done, if she lived long enough to profit off her pain herself.

It was getting the fucking bag, and running off with it to your own private beachside paradise or maybe even just a VIP area in Coachella Valley, never to have your eyes blinded by the flashbulbs ever again, or to have pictures of your soul snapped and stolen by straight men who had ulterior motives and said they didn't, or to be discussed and dissected as whatever people say when they talk about “discourse,” which is just one uselessly hollow voice droning on after another.

And I'm here to remind you that none of those voices will ever be as powerful or as perfect as Dua Lipa’s voice, or as my voice, or as the voice of the girl reading this, or who I hope is reading it. 

Proselyte Magazine is also in the spirit of Service 95, as much as it is Rookie Mag, as much as it is a Riot Grrl zine, as much as it is one of the Gossip Girl books I hid under my mattress, as much as it is a banned book, as much as it is a DatPiff mixtape, as much as it is me overhearing Jagged Little Pill through the closet wall that separated my room from my sister’s, and my dull gray reality from the softer one I longed for, and that I am finally living now, thanks to the example of so many women like Dua Lipa, who have provided models for me, without either of us knowing I was even looking up to them.

Trust me: I’m not mad, I’m hurt, because you got everything you deserved. I’m happy for you.

But I’m happier for Dua Lipa, and I’m even happier for me, because I know this radical optimism shit is actually real, and everything you’ve ever said about any of us women has always been fake.

If I can make Dua Lipa aware of the existence of Bull Nakano, I can do fucking anything. That is my true power. 

That is radical. That is optimism in action.

And you're all talk, which means you're only as good as the words you speak, most of which aren't very good.