Dua Lipa denies new allegations of plagiarism of her hit ‘Levitating’
The album “Future Nostalgia” song appears in two court cases.
Dua Lipa’s lawyers have demanded that her plagiarism lawsuit against her hit “Levitating” be dropped. Songwriters Lawrence Russell Brown and Sandy Linser claim that Dua Lipa borrowed the opening melody from Corey Day’s “Wiggle And Giggle All Night” and Miguel Bose’s “Don Diablo” they wrote.
Lipa’s representatives insist that she has never heard either the first or the second song. I must say that there are indeed similarities between the tracks.
Wiggle And Giggle All Night came out in 1979, and Don Diablo came out a year later in 1980. According to the plaintiffs, Dua Lipa “deliberately imitated previous eras” and copied the music without crediting the authors “in search of nostalgic inspiration”.
The song “Levitating” was released on the album “Future Nostalgia” (2020), whose title translates as “Future Nostalgia” . So the claims about “previous eras” are partly justified. However, Lipa’s lawyer Christine Lepera believes that there is no evidence in the lawsuit that the singer could have known these songs and that they were popular enough for her to hear them.
This is not the only plagiarism lawsuit related to Levitating. Then, in March, members of the Artikal Sound System group accused the singer of copying their track “Live Your Life”. “Live Your Life” was recorded in 2017, three years before the release of “Levitating”, but the plaintiffs were unable to explain how Dua Lipa was able to get to know their song.
The melody of the “Levitating” verse is actually used a lot in pop songs. A similar motif can be heard in “Asereje” by Las Ketchup and “Simarik” by Tarkan. It is highly likely that Lipe and her collaborators simply came up with a common sequence of notes.
“Levitating” has become one of the most successful songs of Dua Lipa’s career. The song topped the Billboard Hot 100 for 2021 and won the Billboard Music Awards as a top radio single. Now Lipa is working on the third album – in the spring she said that it was half ready.