Dua Lipa opens up about the aftermath of her BRITs ‘New Rules’ meme: “It was humiliating”

nme.com:

Dua Lipa has opened up about the aftermath of her performance of ‘New Rules’ at the BRITs, which was made into a meme.In 2018, Lipa sang the song at the BRITs awards show in a performance many deemed to be lacklustre.

A video posted of the performance went on to spawn a comment, which is now a viral meme: “I love her lack of energy, go girl give us nothing!”This was worsened by a clip of her infamous dance move in her Calvin Harris collaboration ‘One Kiss’, which was called the “pencil sharpener” dance.Speaking to The Guardian, Lipa called the moment “hurtful” and “humiliating”: “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.’ Those things were hurtful.

It was humiliating.”She added that she had to “take myself off Twitter”, saying she was upset as “people were picking everything apart that I’d been working on, and I had to learn all that in front of everyone.”“In the public eye, I was figuring out who I was as an artist, as a performer,” she continued. “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.”Lipa also told The Guardian that the humiliation over the meme lasted “until I finished writing ‘Future Nostalgia’ and did my first performance of ‘Don’t Start Now’, at the MTV Europe Music awards,” estimating it was “two years” total.“It never was like I couldn’t get out of bed because of what I thought people thought of me,” she added. “I didn’t care to that degree.