In 2013, I suffered a depression so complete that for many months I considered a day productive if I got out of bed, put on a bra, washed a few dishes and answered a few emails.
One of the only things I was able to get myself to do was follow Jane Fonda’s beginner aerobics workout. I would force myself to stand in the middle of my shoebox studio and jog in place for thirty minutes a day, much to the chagrin (probably) of my downstairs neighbours.
Eventually, listening to the same high energy songs and Fonda’s encouraging voiceover on repeat became comforting to me. I knew the canned “good job”s were coming, but I still found them helpful to hear, and even to repeat myself.
The format for these workouts, in many ways codified by Fonda’s videos, is simple: Gymnasium flooring, energetic music, simple isolated movements, and a friendly, leotarded group of extras, accessible despite their rock hard abs. It’s a set of aesthetics so intrinsic to our understanding of the 80s that that familiarity is itself a comfort. It’s fun. It’s colourful. It is so very, very camp.
I eventually clawed my way out of that depression. And though it’s not an easy time to think back on, I have fond memories of Jane Fonda leading me through the set of repetitive motions so perfect for getting me out of my own head, if only for a few minutes.
Years have passed, and the same symptoms I associate with the worst year of my life have come creeping back. The despondency, the hopelessness, the inability to focus, they are as familiar to me as spandex and leg warmers. But this time, I’m not the only one feeling them.
We have all lost our footing. Whether we have been sick or not. Whether we have lost someone or not. This pandemic has exposed in an unprecedented way how little we are in control, and how little we have ever been in control. It’s no wonder we’re spiralling.
And in this state of hearing constant bad news followed by worse news, the music I have turned to for comfort hasn’t been Drake’s sad, shuffly attempt at TikTok dance virality, or the many quarantine-themed singles opportunistically dropped into the roil of our collective uncertainty. It hasn’t even been Fiona Apple’s emancipatory Fetch the Bolt Cutters, though it is excellent. The music I’ve turned to, and returned to, on loop, is Dua Lipa’s March album Future Nostalgia.
A heady mix of mostly disco and funk-driven dance tracks, it’s easy to think of the album as something from a different time, a time when it was possible to go out and dance and celebrate together. Celebrate being together.
But just because something reminds you of a different time does not mean that it is irrelevant. The title of both the album and its introductory track, Future Nostalgia, is a promise. It is as much Dua Lipa setting herself up as the artist you’ll one day think of fondly as it is a proclamation that these songs are the next, newest iteration of that for which you already feel nostalgic.
And it’s a promise that delivers. Sampling widely from Bing Crosby to INXS, Future Nostalgia’s songs explore the thrill of a new beginning (“Hallucinate,” “Cool”), but one informed by past experience (“Break My Heart,” “Don’t Start Now”).
But let’s talk about one of the most obvious nods to the past: “Physical,” the album’s second single and the spiritual successor to Olivia Newton-John’s 1981 song of the same name. (It’s exercise roots run even deeper: It samples chopped up strings from ABBA’s 1979 “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme,” a hit already sampled in Madonna’s aerobics-themed “Hung Up” in 2005.)
The song’s workout video (released in addition to an official video) takes all that is best from the aerobics VHS tradition—the winkingly eroticized neon aesthetic, the cutaway explanations of upcoming exercises, the high camp pretence of all these uniformed dancers having assembled organically—and has fun. The hypercompetent, poised Dua Lipa is rarely as smiling and silly as she is here.
Popular opinion has it that nostalgia operates in a thirty-year cycle. If this is true, then “Physical,” and all of Future Nostalgia, appeals not just to 80s nostalgia itself, but the 80s nostalgia of the 2010s, that decade so recently gone that now seems like another world.
But we cannot stay stuck in the past, and what is a workout video if not preparation? What viewers are preparing for may vary, and I do not wish to minimize the harm exercise culture can wreak in a diet-obsessed, fatphobic world, but there is something inherently anticipatory about the form. To take part in the workout video process is to look forward.
If this album is about anything, it is about the pull between past and future. The excitement of what could be tempered by what has been. There is hope. Perhaps it is a reckless hope, but it is at least self-aware. And maybe that’s what is needed in this moment: The comfort of the past, the known, (re)mixed with the acknowledgement that there will be a future, even if there is no way of knowing what that future will be.
It is now abundantly clear that there are no answers to be had. Dua Lipa has no way of knowing whether this new love will become yet another heartbreak. We cannot even begin to guess what a new world order will look like. The only prediction I have is that Future Nostalgia will stick with me, another bright spot from a dark moment. Like Dua Lipa urges me to, and like I did with her similarly spandexed predecessor, I’ll “keep on dancing like [I] ain’t got a choice.”
________________________________________________
First published as a Twitter thread in 2020.
Alyssa Favreau 