Dua Lipa has opened up about a viral dance meme which threatened to derail her pop career.
The UK musician, 28, sang her breakout song New Rules at the prestigious Brit Awards in 2018, marking one of her most high-profile performances to date at the time.
But her “lacking energy” facial expression alongside a dance move dubbed the ‘pencil sharpener’ was widely mocked on social media afterwards, becoming a viral meme which still circulates today.
Speaking to The Guardian, Lipa revealed the brutal toll the criticism took on her at the time as a young woman in her early 20s.
“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 said.
“I had to take myself off Twitter.
“The thing that made me the happiest – performing and writing songs – was also making me really upset because people were picking everything apart that I’d been working on, and I had to learn all that in front of everyone.”
Lipa, who has just released her third album Radical Optimism, said she struggled with public opinion for at least “two years” following the performance.
“It never was like I couldn’t get out of bed because of what I thought people thought of me,” she said.
“I didn’t care to that degree. But that’s when it was most heightened for me.”
It wasn’t until the release of her hit single Don’t Start Now when she noticed a shift, after performing the song to critical acclaim at the MTV Europe Music Awards.
“It was November 2019 when Don’t Start Now came out, and it dawned on me that I’m finally going to get up and dance in front of people after what they have thought about me for so long,” Lipa said.
“And I went back, did that performance, and everyone was like, ‘Oh, we were wrong.’ I got a real kick out of that.”
Lipa’s popularity was further bolstered after she finished her 2020 album Future Nostalgia, which won Best Pop Vocal Album at the 2021 Grammys.
More recently, Lipa was included in Time magazine’s top 100 most influential people in the world for 2024.