Thursday 10/8: Dua Lipa—"Levitating" Feat. DaBaby
Today, we share our thoughts on a new version of Dua Lipa's "Levitating" that features North Carolina rapper DaBaby.
Welcome to Endless Scroll, the brainchild of Eli Enis (he/him) and Eric Bennett (they/them). Since Feb. 2019, we’ve been a weekly podcast about music, the internet, and where those two things intersect. Now we’re, also a M-F newsletter about songs. Our format is simple: a link to a song and a short take from each of us about what we think of it. Each day of the week has a corresponding genre: Monday is indie, Tuesday is punk, Wednesday is hip-hop, Thursday is pop, and Friday is misc.
Today, we share our thoughts on a new song by the English pop singer Dua Lipa.
Dua Lipa—“Levitating” Feat. DaBaby
Eric Bennett:
After kicking the year off with one of the year’s best pop albums, Dua Lipa has spent the rest of 2020 making questionable choices. Future Nostalgia deserves a remix album, particularly if it was going to be sidelined by a world where clubs remain shuttered. That said, it deserved one so much better than what it got. Club Future Nostalgia is a collaboration with The Blessed Madonna, an artist I remain stunned has a career after performing as The Black Madonna. For the white woman she is, that name has been inappropriate and cringe since she debuted, and it was only changed earlier this year. That aside, the remix album is a mixed bag. Fans rightly roasted much of it, especially the egregious remix of “Pretty Please”, which people pointed out sounded like Spongebob’s idea of club music due to its prominent use of bubble sounds. Somehow it gets Missy Elliott and actual Madonna on the same track, merely to give them a slightly sped-up version of “Levitating.”
It’s a time-honored tradition in pop music, particularly modern pop, to craft single versions of songs with an added rap verse, only to release them under the guise of a “remix.” Artists from Katy Perry to Taylor Swift have done this with varying success. For the release of “Levitating”, which is honestly one of the stronger cuts on Future Nostalgia, Lipa has called in the services of DaBaby. While his verse is strong, and his energetic delivery feels at home, it’s brief and doesn’t feel like it’s added anything to the song.
Perhaps the saddest part of this entire ordeal is how easy it should have been. While I give Lipa props for doing something experimental, and for choosing a rapper with similar energy to the track, I can’t help but wonder why this wasn't obvious. The track needed someone like Megan, Rico, or Saweetie. Hell, even a pre-cancellation Doja Cat would have been a better match. Someone who can feel like the friend Dua is levitating at the club with. This fan-made version, done by Twitter user @justice4glitter, uses Megan Thee Stallion’s verse in Phony Ppl’s “Fkn Around” It’s equally delightful and enraging how much better it is than both the original and its two official remixes. One of the top comments says that it’s “the Levitating remix we deserved.” I’m inclined to agree.
Eli Enis:
I generally agree with everything Eric said above, but just to keep things interesting, I’ll give DaBaby a little more credit from the Endless Scroll Take Center. I’ll be the first to admit that I was skeptical when I saw DaBaby was the feature on this track. I’ve had a bit of a complicated relationship with the North Carolina rapper since his back-to-back knockout albums in 2019. His record from earlier this year, Blame It On Baby, is incredibly popular, but it felt kind of canned and safe to me when I gave it a couple spins back when it dropped. DaBaby is a playful and funny rapper, but I was always a little wary of how his tough-shelled delivery and bumpy flow would translate in a sugary pop setting.
I must say, though, that I was pleasantly surprised by the contrast between his verse and Dua Lipa’s hook. DaBaby didn’t try to make the track his own or take the song in a definitively DaBaby direction, he just rapped some smiley bars about the club, gave some dance instructions, and glowed about how awesome it was that he and Dua Lipa were sharing a beat. I think a Megan Thee Stallion verse would have been great because a Megan Thee Stallion verse is always great. But my hunch is that the people who orchestrated this remix figured that there’d be more fruitful cross-promotion between DaBaby’s fans and Dua Lipa’s fans than a Lipa/Stallion pairing, which is probably a more similar audience (at least a post-“WAP” Stallion, i.e. a megastar Stallion). Anyways, my final thought is that I haven’t returned to Future Nostalgia since I gave it a cursory spin at the beginning of the pandemic when pop like this really sounded tone-deaf, but I think the “Levitating” melody is phenomenal.