Photo-Illustration: Vulture
There’s a studied quality to the questions Dua Lipa asks on her podcast, Dua Lipa: At Your Service. She tends to reach for gravitas while underscoring her own status as a global celebrity — someone whose life story you may already know. “You grew up in a South Asian family with parents who emigrated from Pakistan in the 1970s,” she says in the opening volley of her interview with Riz Ahmed. “I’m really interested in families that have what you call a hyphenated identity, coming from one myself.”
Dua Lipa is excellent at being a pop star. After leaving home at 15 to pursue a music career in London and willing herself into fame in part via SoundCloud and YouTube, the British and Kosovar Albanian artist ascended to megastar status with her 2020 sophomore album, Future Nostalgia, serving up dance-pop bangers you’re unlikely to escape no matter how deep underground your bunker may be: “Don’t Start Now,” “Levitating,” “Break My Heart.” But to be a celebrity is to diversify. An indie-music star is also a best-selling memoirist. A pro athlete is also a movie producer. Here, the pop star is something akin to a middlebrow public intellectual — with a podcast that aims to be a kind of “Fresh Air” for the jet set.
A media brand is par for the course, and in February 2022 Lipa launched hers, a lifestyle-media company called Service95. Now comprising a weekly newsletter, At Your Service, a website, and a book club, it aims to feel heftier than your garden-variety vanity project.
She places a heavy emphasis on politics and activism, which she’s made pillars of…
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