Dua Lipa has opened up about her “humiliating” experience becoming a viral dancing meme.
The 28-year-old who just released her third studio album Radical Optimism has spoken about the incident for the first time.
The singer revealed that she had to quit Twitter after fans likened her dancing to a “pencil in a pencil sharpener” in 2017.
In a candid chat with The Guardian, Dua highlighted some of the awful comments that stuck with her.
One user wrote: “I like her lack of energy, go girl give us nothing!”, below the YouTube clip of her New Rules live performance at the 2018 BRIT Awards.
“When people took that snippet of me dancing online and just turned it into a meme, and then when I won the best new artist Grammy and people were like, ‘She’s not deserving of it, she’s got no stage presence, she’s not going to stick around'”, she said.
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“Those things were hurtful. It was humiliating. I had to take myself off Twitter.”
“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 added.
The Grammy winner also confessed that she “couldn’t get out of bed” at times.
“Finally, I’m at a place in my career where I feel really confident. It took me so long to get to this place.”
“We’re doing the tell-all. This is my first time talking about anything, the album title, the record, the songs individually.”
“By writing these songs, it’s a form of therapy for me, it’s just such a vulnerable thing to do, to write your thoughts down into melody, and then have it be consumed by other people.”
The pop icon also revealed that she knew what the title of her album was going to be from the start.
“I knew the title for ‘Radical Optimism’. It was a term that my friend told me, I was doing an interview with him, and he was like, ‘You know what the world needs? Is radical optimism.'”
“And I lived with that thought for so long, and it just became more and more prevalent as time went on.”
