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SONGFABLE · 2020

Levitating

DUA LIPA · 2020

Levitating - Dua Lipa (2020)

TL;DR — When Dua Lipa released "Levitating" in the spring of 2020, the world was locked inside. The song's funk-pop pulse and disco-revival sparkle became the soundtrack of bedroom dancing, of hope held in suspension. Behind its bubblegum surface lies a sharp piece of pop architecture — a deliberate blueprint borrowed from the late-1970s and early-1980s, rebuilt for the streaming age. This is the story of how a British-Albanian singer made the most-streamed song of 2021, and why a track about floating into outer space became an anthem for a planet that had stopped moving.

The hook: a disco ball in a quiet world

In late March 2020, as cities from London to Los Angeles shuttered and the global music industry braced for what looked like an extinction event, Dua Lipa made a decision that ran against every instinct of crisis management. Her second album, Future Nostalgia, was finished. The marketing campaign was built around touring, club premieres, the kind of in-person ecstasy that had just been outlawed by emergency decree. Her label suggested delay. She pushed forward.

The album dropped on March 27, 2020. Inside it, near the middle of the tracklist, sat a song titled "Levitating" — a four-on-the-floor confection co-written with the Norwegian songwriter Sarah Hudson, the producer Stephen Kozmeniuk, and the dance-pop architect Clarence Coffee Jr. Initially it was not even the lead single. That honor went to "Don't Start Now." But over the following eighteen months, "Levitating" did something almost no pop song does anymore. It grew slowly. It refused to die. By the end of 2021, Billboard would name it the song of the year, and it would log a record 41 consecutive weeks in the Hot 100 top ten.

What was it about this song — disposable on the surface, sticky as flypaper underneath — that turned a pandemic-era release into one of the defining pop artifacts of its decade?

Background: the long road to Future Nostalgia

Dua Lipa was born in London in 1995 to ethnic Albanian parents who had fled the unraveling of Yugoslavia. Her father, Dukagjin Lipa, had been a rock musician in Kosovo before the wars; her mother, Anesa, worked in tourism. The family returned to Pristina when Dua was eleven, then she came back to London alone at fifteen to chase music, living with friends and posting covers to YouTube while attending Sylvia Young Theatre School — the same drama academy that produced Amy Winehouse and members of All Saints.

Her self-titled 2017 debut was a competent but unremarkable showcase, anchored by the slow-burn ballad "New Rules." It made her a star but did not give her a sound. The problem, she told The Guardian in 2020, was that the album lacked a thesis. She wanted the next record to have one. The thesis she chose — the phrase she repeated to every collaborator who walked into the studio — was future nostalgia. Take the sonic DNA of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the era of Chic and Olivia Newton-John and the soft-rock-meets-disco crossover, and rebuild it with the resolution and rhythmic precision of contemporary production.

"Levitating" was the purest expression of that brief. Its bassline is a direct descendant of Bernard Edwards' work with Chic; its talkbox flourishes nod to Roger Troutman and Zapp; the spoken-word intro evokes the camp grandeur of late-period Donna Summer. Producer Koz has said the demo came together in a single afternoon, the team chasing the feeling of a roller disco — a feeling Lipa had grown up with secondhand, through her father's record collection.

What the song is actually about

Strip away the cosmic vocabulary and "Levitating" is, fundamentally, a love song about the chemical lift of new infatuation. The lyrics frame attraction as gravitational physics — the beloved as a celestial body, the singer pulled into orbit, the two of them rising together into a sugar-rush stratosphere. There are references to the Milky Way, to the disco zodiac, to flying without leaving the dance floor.

It is worth noting how unusual this framing is in 2020s pop. Most major-label hits of the era trafficked in melancholy: Billie Eilish's whispered dread, Olivia Rodrigo's diaristic wounds, The Weeknd's nihilist neon. Lipa, who is friends with several of these artists, made a deliberate choice to swim against that current. "Pop should be fun again," she told Rolling Stone in a 2020 cover story. The song's optimism was not naïve — it was, she insisted, a kind of resistance.

There is also a subtler layer worth attention. The version most listeners encountered after October 2020 was the remix featuring DaBaby, the Charlotte rapper whose contribution gave the song its American radio second life. When DaBaby was later dropped from major festivals over homophobic remarks, Lipa publicly distanced herself, and many streaming playlists quietly swapped the remix for the album cut. The song's history thus carries within it a small parable about the moral economy of contemporary pop — how a track can outgrow its own credits.

Cultural context: where this song fits in the disco lineage

For English-speaking listeners outside the UK and US, it helps to understand the specific cultural moment "Levitating" was reaching back toward. Disco — born in the basement clubs of early-1970s New York, codified at venues like The Loft and The Gallery and later commercialized at Studio 54 — was never just a genre. It was a sanctuary for Black, Latino, and queer communities who had been pushed out of rock's predominantly white, predominantly straight ecosystem. When the "Disco Demolition Night" riot detonated a crate of disco records at Chicago's Comiskey Park in July 1979, it was not just a musical backlash. It was, as critics like Vince Aletti and later Peter Shapiro have argued, a cultural one.

Disco never really died — it went underground, rebranded as house in Chicago and garage in New York, then resurfaced periodically. Daft Punk's 2013 Random Access Memories, Bruno Mars and Mark Ronson's "Uptown Funk," The Weeknd's "Blinding Lights" — each represented a wave of the revival. But "Levitating" arrived at a particular inflection point: a moment when nightlife itself was under threat, when the dance floor existed only in memory or in the corner of one's kitchen. The song became a stand-in for an experience nobody could have.

There is a specifically British sub-current too. Lipa is part of a lineage of UK pop artists — Kylie Minogue (Australian by birth, British by adoption), Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Róisín Murphy, Jessie Ware — who have kept disco's flame burning in a national pop culture that, since the late 1990s, has been more comfortable with dance music than its American counterpart. Future Nostalgia arrived in the same year as Ware's What's Your Pleasure? and Kylie's Disco, forming a kind of accidental trilogy. Critics began calling 2020 the year disco came back, even as the clubs sat dark.

Why it still resonates

Five years on, "Levitating" remains one of the most-streamed songs of the 2020s — a permanent fixture on wedding playlists, gym mixes, supermarket overhead systems, and the YouTube algorithms that decide what soundtracks a teenager's first slow dance. There are several reasons it has refused to age.

The first is structural. Pop scholars have noted that "Levitating" is unusually economical: every section earns its place, no bridge overstays its welcome, the chorus arrives on a cushion of horn-stab and falsetto background vocals that imprint after a single listen. It is a song built to survive the first three seconds of a TikTok scroll, but it also rewards repeat listening — the kind of layered production that reveals new details on a good pair of headphones.

The second is contextual. The song became attached to a specific cultural memory: the months when the world was suspended, when "going out" meant a walk around the block, when joy felt like a small act of defiance. For a generation that came of age in those years, "Levitating" carries the same proxy-nostalgia function that "Don't Stop Believin'" carries for late Gen X — a song that, regardless of its actual lyrical content, conjures a feeling of collective, slightly desperate optimism.

The third is broader. Future Nostalgia succeeded in part because it offered a thesis that the wider culture was hungry for: the past, refurbished. In an era of streaming abundance, when every song ever recorded sits one tap away, the artists who break through are often those who curate the archive with the most conviction. Lipa was not trying to invent a new sound. She was trying to remind people that an old one still worked.

That argument — that pop's job is not always to push forward, but sometimes to keep certain pleasures alive — has only grown more relevant. The disco revival did not end with Future Nostalgia. Beyoncé's Renaissance (2022), the global SZA wave, the continued dominance of artists like Doja Cat and Tate McRae — all of them owe something to the door Lipa kicked open in March 2020.

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Tags
20s ecstatic popdisco loveescape dua-lipafuture-nostalgiadisco-revival20s-poppandemic-eralondon
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