Thursday 2/25: Dua Lipa—"If It Ain't Me"
Today, we share our thoughts on a song from Dua Lipa’s Moonlight Edition of Future Nostalgia.
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. Three days of the week are free but you can get access to all five weekly posts by subscribing for $5/month via Substack or $2/month via our Patreon.
Today, we share our thoughts on a song from Dua Lipa’s Moonlight Edition of Future Nostalgia.
Dua Lipa—"If It Ain't Me"
Eric Bennett:
We’ve written about Dua Lipa in this newsletter before, but the material we were supplied then was a subpar remix. While that very remix rears its ugly head here on Future Nostalgia (The Moonlight Edition), I can only applaud the perseverance. But, that aside, I want a chance to finally praise Dua Lipa as a popstar. She, maybe more than anyone in mainstream pop, has been making the best of things. Even before COVID-19 threw a wrench in her release plans, Future Nostalgia was leaked. Gone was the prospect of delaying it, a move many artists used in late March, to no clear benefit. It managed to become the album we danced to in our apartments, because we still don’t know when we’ll hear it in its intended environment.
Fast forward nearly a year, and Lipa has doled out a new crop of what are likely B-sides being given a more creatively titled vessel. The Moonlight Edition is a pretty mixed bag overall, but boasts a few tracks that rival the work on its original incarnation. One such track is the pulsing and slinky “If It Ain’t Me.” It, like “Hallucinate” is a song that finds Lipa in a fugue state on an imaginary dancefloor, grinding herself into the floor, unable to cope with seeing the object of affection with anyone else. Also like “Hallucinate,” this track boasts an incredibly catchy hook and mesmerizing chorus. It's the kind of chorus that truly feels like it controls you, a phenomenon I've found in a few of the standouts from Future Nostalgia.
Eli Enis:
Well I definitely didn’t hate the remix with DaBaby as much as Eric did, but that’s probably not surprising. That said, this song is also a complete banger with a thwomping synth pulse that could’ve arrived any time in the last 20 years and had the same impact. I wonder when critics will stop the obligatory dancefloor yearning when they write about songs like this, which was expressly written for packed clubs. The longer this thing drags on, the less I think about hearing a song in any environment other than my bedroom or my car. Someone’s probably already written this, but I’d love to read a feature about how the last year of the pandemic has changed people’s relationship with dance music.
I wonder if songs that are intrinsically physical, sweaty, and communal in nature—songs that are intentionally simple because they’re designed to evoke synchronous crowd reactions—will become “challenging” and/or “avant-garde” when we’re no longer conditioned to immediately imagine their implicit contexts (dancefloors). I’m past the point of stinging nostalgia for bars and dance parties, I just don’t even consider them or think about them as an option anymore. They feel like a past life. And as people spend more and more time apart from one another, I wonder if we’ll get to a point where a song like “If It Ain’t Me” doesn’t trigger the urge to gather, but a different emotion entirely?