Primping in the mirror, as a courtier (or Britney Spears in the “Circus” video) does, Dua Lipa establishes the intended—if not necessarily achieved—illicit tone of the video for “Demeanor,” the lead single from Pop Smoke’s second posthumous album, Faith.
As she continues her preening, a Black lady-in-waiting whispers into her ear, “Your secret’s safe with me.” Which one is that? Having ever worked with DaBaby? Choosing to favor his remix of “Levitating” over the far superior Madonna, Missy Elliott and Blessed Madonna one? Impossible. That cat’s well out of the bag. In any case, one only brings up the color of Lipa’s fellow courtier’s (or are they courtesans?) skin because we’re obviously supposed to be in Marie Antoinette times, when Black people were pretty much ostracized from all luxurious scenarios unless they were in service of it. Yet the addition of people of color (Lipa likely including herself in that mix) seems to connote a trend established by Bridgerton of rewriting history through a less white supremacist lens.
Director Nabil (who recently worked on Billie Eilish and Rosalía’s “Lo Vas a Olvidar“) then uses a tracking shot to give us a close-up on the castle where Lipa will soon reign over the rather petite dance floor. On the interior, a little boy (who sort of reminds one of young Cruella at that English cliffside castle crashing the party) stares in awe at something we don’t yet see until he alerts an adult (perhaps his mother, perhaps not). That something is Pop Smoke’s image coming alive in a painting. Since, yes, he’s dead. Shot down in L.A.—the ultimate insult to those who would deem themselves so “fiercely Brooklyn.”
As a lone dove sits atop the empty chair meant to indicate the place where Pop Smoke would sit if he were alive, the general scenes of merrymaking continue as he raps such sweet nothings as “I’m feelin’ on your baba treesha/Shorty said she like my demeanor/And she look like a eater.” Not an ass eater, but an “eater” (a.k.a. swallower) of cum. What a charming girl. Meant to be embodied by Lipa, seeming to conveniently swap out one Black man for another at the perfect moment, as she has all but shat on DaBaby for his non sequitur string of homophobic comments at Rolling Loud Miami. And, luckily for her, Pop Smoke can make no potentially “self-cancelling” comments in the future. Even though the phrase, “I’m off the Perky, geekin’” should be enough to ruin his legacy.
Speaking of DaBaby, he also once collaborated with Pop Smoke on the 2020 hit, “For the Night,” (also featuring another “baby”—Lil Baby). So it makes Lipa somehow still guilty by association in that she remains linked to DaBaby through Pop Smoke—himself inculpable regarding working with DaBaby ‘cause, well, he’s dead now. As for DaBaby, the “Levitating” remix he’s on feels certain to go the way of the dodo as he seems not to have taken a pro-LGBTQIA+ page from his former collaborator, Jack Harlow, who just appeared in the gayest music video of the past decade not performed by a gay female icon, Lil Nas X’s “Industry Baby.”
But back to seventeenth or eighteenth century wherever-the-fuck: “Demeanor.” Dua Lipa emerges from her room at around the one minute, forty second mark while Pop Smoke continues to mumble some bullshit about a girl being a baba treesha (thot, if you’d prefer a simpler term). Lipa starts to softly input her own verse about how, “My demeanor is meaner than yours.” One can safely say that the listener’s demeanor is about to get far meaner, especially since they keep expecting this song to get better. And yet, how could it when this combination of people makes absolutely no sense in a musical collaboration? Unfortunately, unlike Dua Lipa and Miley Cyrus—who also seemed an unlikely pair in many ways—this single simply doesn’t carry it off.
Still, Lipa tries her best as she walks into the main room and repurposes her line from “Future Nostalgia” by announcing, “Female alpha.” She even goes so far as to stretch hyperbole to its furthest lengths by noting, “You can’t say Pop without Smoke,” rounding out the bridge with, “So fill up your lungs, my diamonds’ll make you choke/You like the way I move, my demeanor is meaner than yours/So clap for the encore [that no one wants].” Not really her proudest lyrical moment, but, for whatever reason, she felt obliged to be a part of this project. Again, at a well-timed moment for her to ally herself with a different Black man.
The video continues with more dancing and eating as Lipa does her best imitation of Daphne Bridgerton. Everyone then raises a glass (presumably to Pop Smoke’s memory) as we’re given a concluding shot of another close-up on the painting. Needless to say, Annie Lennox’s “Walking on Broken Glass” video it is not. Nor Madonna’s Marie Antoinette-inspired “Vogue” performance from the 1990 VMAs. Hell, it’s not even Bridgerton, though that’s the vibe it seems to want to exude. It is, in short, throwaway. A pastiche of recycled pop culture visuals for the sake of capitalizing on a posthumous release. The producers cutting and pasting where they can to milk what will hopefully be the last record from Pop Smoke.
