Dua Lipa is speaking out about those viral dancing memes.
The British singer, 28, admitted that she wasn’t thrilled with the internet’s commentary on her early performances. “I did find that really hurtful, and I found it really painful because I was like, ‘I’m finally getting to do something that I love to do, and I’m being shut down, that I just can’t seem to do anything right,’” she told Rolling Stone in an interview published on Tuesday, January 16.
“I was also being thrown around the world,” she added. “Lots of promos, lots of rehearsing, lots of everything, and not having really time to perfect anything.”
The original meme was born from Lipa’s performance of her hit song “New Rules” at the 2018 BRIT Awards, which prompted one viewer to comment, “I love her lack of energy, go girl give us nothing!” The sentiment struck a chord with fans and was applied to other similarly lackluster performances from the singer, including Lipa’s hip swivel dance move at her 2018 Lollapalooza set in Berlin and her low-energy performance at 2018’s Jingle Ball show in Philadelphia.
“It’s always so easy with social media to get caught up in a negative spiral or people being mean, telling you what they think about you without really knowing you at all,” she reflected in her interview with Rolling Stone. “For me, I think it’s just important to be able to take things with a pinch of salt.”
Lipa previously opened up about being “bullied” online during a 2022 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “Some haters got online and said, ‘This is a lazy dance. It’s uninspired,’” host Jimmy Fallon said, while Lipa joked that many social media users said that she looked “like she’s trying to put her shoe on in a rush.”
The singer continued, “There was a moment where it actually caused me a lot of grief, like, I was being bullied online. It wasn’t very nice.”
During the 2022 tour for her Grammy-winning sophomore album, Future Nostalgia, Lipa reclaimed the dance moves she had once been made fun of for by incorporating them into her performance — and making them better than ever.
“I can look at it from a different perspective,” the singer told Fallon, 49. “I look back at it with such fondness because it helped me grow into the artist that I wanted to become, it made me work harder.”
