played a two-night stand at L.A.’s Forum this past week, with her U.S. tour just a few dates away from coming to a close, there was a sheet-cake bearing her image backstage in the VIP Forum Club area, a custom that’s de rigueur for headliners coming through the storied arena. But in our minds, if nowhere else, we should be baking a “happy anniversary” cake commemorating the two-year mark for “Future Nostalgia.
When it comes down to history being written, there will really be two albums remembered as the quintessential quarantine albums: “Future Nostalgia” and Taylor Swift’s “Folklore” . These two touchstone releases of 2020 barely seemed to exist in the same world, let alone genre, but they effectively captured a populace’s polarized reactions to the cessation of normal life as anyone knew it. The “Folklore” m.o.
Lipa does have a couple of moments in the performance that boil down to one-woman show: “We’re Good” , which, reflecting the underwater music video, had her sharing space with the one prop of the night, a giant lobster; and the penultimate “Future Nostalgia,” which took her away from the rest of the cast to let us focus a bit more squarely on the zebra-like stripes of her final outfit.
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