Events like “Studio 2054” should be the exception, but in the increasingly capital-desperate eyes of the music and events industries, they could end up being the rule - leaving artists with smaller platforms and tighter budgets few options when it comes to retaining visibility in a crowded market. But the HD glitz you get from an artist like Lipa might actually be an improvement on your typical view from the cheap seats of an arena. Many musicians who embraced livestreaming in 2020 did so in a stripped-down, functionally intimate sense - playing quietly from their own living rooms, or in empty venues, or even in the blocky, digital confines of the video game “Minecraft” - with results that were light years from the feeling of, say, watching them perform in a small, crowded club.
If livestreaming represents the immediate future of concerts in the continued absence of flesh-and-blood performances, we are faced with a huge problem: Lipa’s achievement is unreplicable for anyone who’s not a hugely famous pop star with considerable cash to burn. The concert represented not just a monumental feat, pulled off during a deadly pandemic, but also a discomfiting sign of what might lie ahead for the music industry. It cost more than $1.5 million to stage and drew a record-breaking five-million-plus paying viewers. The most stunning bid to stay in the front of your mind, though, was “Studio 2054,” from November - a flashy, over-the-top livestreamed concert, sponsored by American Express and packed with guests ranging from Miley Cyrus to Bad Bunny to Elton John. At press time, there exist three versions of “Future Nostalgia” on major streaming services, each one offering another chance to draw listeners back with more material: There was the original, and then there was the now-perfunctory “deluxe” edition afforded to every substantial pop release, and then came “Club Future Nostalgia,” a top-down remix of the entire album fashioned by the famed underground D.J. Lipa’s yearlong promo run was a master class in maintaining ubiquity. Handclaps and stray vocoder lines orbit Lipa’s voice as she urges listeners on, pressing them in the same manner of the fitness instructor she played in one recent video: “Come on/Dance with me.” The latest and possibly greatest, “Levitating,” features production work by the onetime Madonna collaborator Stuart Price and sounds practically like someone pulling the string on a party popper. (Taylor Swift, who commanded the masses’ quarantined attention with not one but two surprise releases, was a notable exception.) But Lipa and her party-hardy perspective had remarkable stamina “Future Nostalgia” owes its success to a seemingly never-ending stretch of incredible singles. Such circumstances would normally dictate that an album simply disappear - which is, in fact, what happened to a surprising number of 2020’s big pop albums. “Future Nostalgia” offered a soundtrack to precisely the type of wild night that had gone extinct by the time the record actually reached listeners. Right around the pandemic’s true kickoff moment in the United States, the British pop star released her second album, “Future Nostalgia,” a polished trip through several eras of dance music: disco’s groovy pulse, new wave’s punchy synths, the brash colors of the 1980s New York club-kid house music that Madonna spent her early years so cannily borrowing from. The candy-coated “Trolls World Tour” showed us a pulsing mass of cotton-haired creatures, all under one ridiculous roof, raving to Daft Punk’s eternally joyful “One More Time.” For once, there was a vague sense of disappointment that we were not Trolls, too.įew human artists stoked this phantom-limb FOMO (how can we fear missing out if there’s nothing to miss out on?) like Dua Lipa. Even children’s movies seemed to be rubbing it in. There was the British singer Jessie Ware’s fourth album, “What’s Your Pleasure?”: It evoked peak-era disco’s mirror-ball largess, all for listeners whose idea of a “night out” had most likely been reduced to an extra trip to the grocery store. There was Steve McQueen’s intimate and lovely film “Lovers Rock,” in which you could watch a packed room of West London revelers sway and sing to Janet Kay’s reggae single “Silly Games” - lost in the moment, no social distancing necessary. So many striking musical moments from the past months have reminded us that we cannot, at the moment, be together.
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