Dua Lipa Reflects On Becoming A Humiliating Meme After Awards Show Fail

Dua Lipa is reflecting on the emotional trauma she endured after the internet poked fun at her dancing skills and immortalized her into a meme. 

The humiliating meme kicked off years ago after Lipa posted her 2018 BRIT Awards performance of New Rules on YouTube. In the comments section, a viewer chided her writing, I love her lack of energy, go girl give us nothing! which spawned the viral phrase. 

Fans quickly ran with the cheeky comment, subsequently using it to describe various low-energy performances from other musicians. 

Unfortunately for Lipa, the meme attached itself to her longer than she hoped after clips of her looking bored while doing an aggressive hip swivel during a separate performance sparked more online hate.

In a new interview with The Guardian , the Albanian singer opened up about how the hurtful incident left her in shambles. 

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, Shes not deserving of it, shes got no stage presence, shes not going to stick around, she explained. Those things were hurtful. It was humiliating.

Lipa said she even had to take myself off Twitter because she was devastated that people were picking everything apart that Id been working on, and I had to learn all that in front of everyone.

The pop star, now 28, said that being in her early 20s at the time of the failed performance required her to develop unshakable confidence. 

In the public eye, I was figuring out who I was as an artist, as a performer, she recalled. 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.

According to Lipa, it took her two years to get over the embarrassing ordeal. But she says she got a real kick out of eventually silencing her haters with a do-over performance. 

It was November 2019 when Dont Start Now came out, and it dawned on me that Im finally going to get up and dance in front of people after what they have thought about me for so long, she shared. And I went back, did that performance, and everyone was like, Oh, we were wrong. I got a real kick out of that.

Lipa previously defended her dance moves, telling Rolling Stone earlier this year that she was too busy to hone in on her dancing skills at the time.  

I was also being thrown around the world, she said in the story published in January. Lots of promos, lots of rehearsing, lots of everything, and not having really time to perfect anything.