A nostalgia do futuro: uma análise do retorno ao passado na música pop de Dua Lipa

Abstract

This monography aims to study the phenomenon of nostalgia within pop culture through the relationship between the individual and the past. Through the analysis of the album “Future Nostalgia” (2020) and the music video for “Levitating” (2020), both by the singer Dua Lipa, it tries to explain how nostalgia morphed into a cultural product throughout the decade of 2010. It uses the writings of Gary Cross and Svetlana Boym to discuss nostalgia from a contemporary perspective and how it relates to the individual taking into account social and political contexts. Identity and the postmodern individual are discussed in Stuart Hall’s views to explain how nostalgia has become important in the construction of the self and its relations with the society in which it’s inserted. For the analysis of the chosen works, the video analysis method proposed by Jeder Janotti Júnior and Thiago Soares (2008) and the notions of architext elaborated by the literature theorist Gerard Genette are used to understand how the references are organized in the text. The study concludes that nostalgia while this great phenomenon that guides popular culture today is a natural trend, but amplified by the political and social instability that worsened throughout the course of the 2010’s. Reinserting the past in everyday life is not something unusual or pertinent only to the current generations, but it is observed that the constant return and “recreation” of trends from other decades is a way of escape through art and consumption, characteristics that are presented in Future Nostalgia as a product of its time.