Dua Lipa found it “painful and humiliating” to see herself as a meme on the internet early in her career, ridiculing her attitude. The singer says this in an interview with The Guardian.
“People posted that clip of me online and turned it into a meme,” she says of a segment from her 2018 BRIT Awards performance, in which some people said she was dancing while bored. “Then I went on to win the Grammy for Best New Artist and people said ‘she doesn’t deserve it, she doesn’t have stage presence, she’s not going to make it’. Those things were painful. It was humiliating. It made me delete Twitter.”
Dua Lipa found the negative responses especially difficult because they were about what “made her happiest”: playing and writing songs. “Because people were analyzing everything I had worked on, I had to deal with that in front of everyone. In front of the public, I discovered who I was as an artist, as a performer. That all happened when I was 22, 23 years old and still grew up. You have to build a thick skin and be resilient.”
This feeling lasted two years, she also says. “Until I finished writing Future Nostalgia,” she says, referring to her second album from 2020. “It was never so bad that I couldn’t get out of bed because I was too concerned with what people thought of me, It didn’t concern me to that extent. But that was when it was the most intense for me.”
