A 'humiliating and hurtful' meme made Dua Lipa a laughing stock but she finally proved everyone wrong

Dua Lipa's lengthy list of accolades includes multiple Grammy Awards, Guinness World Records, BRIT Awards and being named one of Time's 100 most influential people in the world in 2024.

So it wasn't a surprise that when her hit Houdini won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Choreography on September 11, she didn't take a break from her Radical Optimism Tour in Rio de Janeiro and fly to New York City to accept her Moon Man.

What would have been a surprise to her fans six years ago, however, was that the New Rules singer had won best choreography at any awards show altogether.

Watch the video above.

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How did Dua Lipa get discovered?

Born in London on August 22, 1995, to Kosovo Albanian parents Anesa and Dukagjin, Lipa started singing at the age of five – how could she not, when her father had been the lead singer and guitarist of Kosovan rock band Oda?

At the age of nine, Lipa started weekly singing lessons, and at 13, her family moved to Pristina when Kosovo declared independence.

Two years later, a 15-year-old Lipa moved back to London by herself, sharing a flat with a family friend in Camden. There, she started uploading covers and her own songs to YouTube and SoundCloud, and she also signed a modelling contract.

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By 2013, an 18-year-old Lipa had been signed to Tap Management while working as a waitress in a cocktail bar, with director Ben Mawson then offering her a monthly salary to leave her job and record music.

It was during one of those recording sessions that Lipa co-wrote the song Hotter than Hell, which saw her sign a record deal with Warner Bros. Records in 2014.

The rest, as they say, in history.

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'Humiliating and hurtful' meme ignited a fire in Dua Lipa

In 2018, 23-year-old Lipa was on top of the world.

She'd just released her self-titled debut album, which was a critical and commercial success – it was nominated for British Album of the Year at the 2018 BRIT Awards, and would also help Lipa secure the coveted Best New Artist award at the 2019 Grammys.

Even though Lipa would walk away from the 2018 BRIT Awards with two gongs – she and Stormzy were the only two artists who won multiple awards on the night – a performance at the event of her No. 1 single New Rules would haunt her for years afterwards.

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On the performance's YouTube video, a since-deleted comment sparked an internet movement that Lipa would later call "humiliating and hurtful".

A YouTube account with the name 'Tobias' wrote: "I love her lack of energy, go girl give us nothing!"

"Go girl give us nothing" became such a popular phrase to describe a low-energy performance, answer or event that it even has its own Know Your Meme page.

It also didn't help that, around the same time, another video of Lipa's dancing was doing the rounds – her "lazy" 'pencil sharpener' dance move during her song One Kiss' routine became so viral that another Know Your Meme entry was born.

If you Google 'Dua Lipa dance', it's likely her One Kiss hip twist will pop up first for you, rather than her later performances at more recent Grammy and BRIT Awards that had fans commenting on how well she dances.

And it was becoming the laughing stock of the internet that spurred Lipa – who is bringing her Radical Optimism Tour to Australia in March 2025 – to work harder than she ever had before.

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"I found it really painful because I was like, 'I'm finally getting to do something that I love to do, and I'm being shut down', that I just can't seem to do anything right," Lipa told Rolling Stone in January ahead of her third album's release.

"Not only that, but I was also being thrown around the world. Lots of promos, lots of rehearsing, lots of everything, and not having really time to perfect anything."

She also told NPR in April 2022 of the accusations she was a "lazy" performer: "There was this one little dance routine that I did when I was performing, and people took that one little snippet and decided to base my whole stage presence and who I was as a performer on stage."

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One month earlier, Lipa went on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and publicly "reclaimed" her One Kiss hip twist by poking fun of herself as she recreated it.

"It was kind of like, 'Oh, she looks like she's trying to put her shoe on in a rush or something'," Lipa joked of the world's reaction to clips of her dancing.

But she opened up about the meme's impact on her confidence as well.

"There was a moment where actually it caused me a lot of grief," Lipa told Jimmy Fallon. "Like, I was being bullied online, it wasn't very nice."

"But now I'm like, you know, I can look at it from a different perspective," she continued.

"I look back on it with such fondness 'cause it helped me grow into the artist I wanted to become. It made me work harder. I went in, I did more rehearsal, I just wanted to become a real performer, and I think that was kind of the thing that I needed to [do so]."

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In May 2024, ahead of her tour, Lipa again opened up about the negativity surrounding her dancing ability, telling The Guardian: "Those things were hurtful. It was humiliating. I had to take myself off Twitter."

"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," she continued.

"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."

She said it took her roughly two years to get over her feelings of humiliation, and, after teaming up with in-demand choreographer Charm La'Donna, and putting in the work with strength training regimes and many hours spent rehearsing, she finally had a moment of vindication.

It was November 2019, and Don't Start Now – the lead single off her sophomore album Future Nostalgia – had just come out. She was set to debut it at the MTV Europe Music Awards, and she grabbed the chance to silence her critics with both hands.

"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," she recalled five years later to The Guardian.

"And I went back, did that performance, and everyone was like, 'Oh, we were wrong.' I got a real kick out of that."

In the years following, Lipa has continued to prove her haters wrong. In fact, after performing at the Grammys in 2021 and again in 2024, many went back to the original "Go girl give us nothing" video and reflected on how far she'd come.

"She went from go girl give us nothing to giving us one of the best performances on the Grammys, that's artistic growth," one YouTube user commented in 2021.

"Comparing this dance performance to her incredible Grammy performance in 2024 leaves me speechless!! Dua really worked damn hard on her dancing skills," another YouTube user commented three years later.

It took her years, but Lipa did go from singer to multi-hyphenate – and dancer is now just one of the labels on her résumé's lengthy logline.

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Title: A 'humiliating and hurtful' meme made Dua Lipa a laughing stock but she finally proved everyone wrong
Sourced From: celebrity.nine.com.au/music/dua-lipa-who-is-she-rising-pop-star-ahead-of-australia-tour-explainer/fa19b40a-2644-420f-a1de-750e4f4e5934
Published Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2024 08:09:00 GMT