![]() ![]() When the broadcast opened with the recent album’s statement-of-purpose title song, and for a couple of numbers after that, it was actually going out in the old-school 1.33:1 Academy aspect ratio, all the better to approximate something that looked a little like it was out of the classic “Soul Train” or “Solid Gold” era. (How throwback did it ultimately get? Two words: roller disco.) ![]() If anything, the show tried to throw off a low-tech vibe, especially at the beginning, with a determined initial intent to look like something that could have been done in the ’70s, ’80s or ’90s, in keeping with the motifs Lipa goes back to with the sounds of her Grammy-nominated “Future Nostalgia” album. Her Black Friday show had exactly zero special effects, other than the ones that were arrived at in-camera, as it were, taking place in a few different connected spaces of the multipurpose Printworks venue in London. But would it be an FX-filled spectacle, a la the recent state-of-the-art livestream from Billie Eilish that was performed on one tiny set but used high technology to give every number a different, often animated setting? Not much was revealed about the content of the streamed event ahead of time, other than a growing guest list, some of whom were recent collaborators on remixes or side duets ( Miley Cyrus, the Blessed Madonna), some of whom were not ( Kylie Minogue, Elton John), and the promise that it would be elaborate. Her performance of that and a host of other songs from her two albums Friday in “Studio 2054,” a pay-per-view event, felt like a happy dispatch from another galaxy, where dancing and dopamine both still occur, and joy is a thing of the present, not past or future nostalgia. “I like it better when we’re intertwined,” Dua Lipa sings in her song “Cool,” maybe speaking for all of us who are doing Thanksgiving weekend and pretty much every other weekend of 2020 unentangled from most human beings. ![]()
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