Levitating — Dua Lipa (2020)

Why this song

Levitating came out in the last week of March 2020, days into lockdown. A dance record released at the exact moment nobody could go dancing. Billboard went on to name it the number one song of 2021.

So here is the question worth asking: how does a song with three chords and no harmonic surprises hold your attention for three and a half minutes? The answer is not in the chords. It is underneath them.

Historical context

Levitating was written and recorded in a single day, on 28 August 2018, in a London studio. It was the first finished track of Future Nostalgia, and it settled how the rest of the album would sound.

The starting point was not a tune. It was a machine. Producer Stephen Kozmeniuk had spent seven or eight years hunting for a Roland VP-330, a synthesiser from the late 1970s. He had it shipped from Tokyo to Toronto, plugged it in, and the first thing he played — a synthetic choir sound — is the line that opens the song.

The album title states the plan: Future Nostalgia. Disco sounds from the seventies, built with today's production. The idea was not new. Daft Punk had run the same operation in 2013 on Random Access Memories, bringing in musicians from that era — Nile Rodgers, the guitarist of Chic, among them — to play on the record. Critics compared Levitating to exactly those two: Chic and Daft Punk.

Daft Punk en Berkeley (California), 2007. Foto: Minyoung Choi, CC BY-SA 2.0, vía Wikimedia Commons

The album was due on 3 April 2020 and was moved a week forward, to 27 March, because the whole thing had leaked. Lipa said at the time that she was worried about releasing a dance album in that particular week.

Musical characteristics

The first thing you hear is that VP-330 choir: voices that are not voices, held with nobody breathing. It puts the song in a decade before the beat even starts.

Un Roland VP-330 Vocoder Plus, el sintetizador de finales de los setenta que abre la canción. Foto: ghostdad, CC BY-SA 2.0, vía Wikimedia Commons

Underneath, the drums do the simplest thing available: a kick on every one of the four beats, never missing one. It is the floor of almost all club music, and it has a name — four on the floor. It lets you dance without counting.

The harmony is just as plain. Three minor chords in the same order every time, and the same loop in the verse and in the chorus. No detour, no new section.

That is where the division of labour in this song shows up. If the harmony does not move and the drums do not move, somebody has to.

Instead of sitting on the root of each chord, the bass jumps to that same note an octave above and back. It puts many of those jumps between the beats rather than on them: that is syncopation, and it is where the bounce comes from.

Between notes it adds muted strokes with no pitch at all. Those are ghost notes: no melody, only rhythm.

Then, on the hook, when the "I'm levitating" line arrives, the bass stops accompanying. It runs a quick figure that is precisely the melody the voice is singing. For those bars there are two identical melodies, one on top and one underneath.

Here is the twist: nobody played that bass line. Producer Stuart Price programmed it, imitating what a person holding a bass would do. The octaves, the ghost notes and the odd slapped note are written in on purpose so that it sounds human.

One more strange sound: a voice that behaves like a keyboard. It is a talk box — a tube that carries an instrument's sound up to the player's mouth, where lips and tongue shape it without singing. Bosko Kante plays it here. It is a 1970s funk trick, and it is the source of the robot edge.

Hard facts: B minor, 4/4, 103 BPM, 3:23. Form: intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus. Lipa's vocal moves between F#3 and B4.

In class you will play it in A minor: Am, Em and Dm, the same three functions one tone lower. With a capo at the 2nd fret those three shapes sound in the album's original key. The JamZone chart runs at 110 BPM, slightly faster than the record.

Trivia and curiosities

• The middle eight is a rap, and Lipa leans into her British accent for it. She has said she added it to get her British side across, because people keep guessing wrong about where she is from. Critics have described the rap as Blondie-influenced.

• The bass line is programmed, not performed. What makes it sound like a person is a set of imperfections somebody wrote in one by one. "Sounds human" and "played by a human" are not the same claim.

• The song was sued twice for plagiarism and neither suit stuck. Reggae band Artikal Sound System filed in March 2022 over their 2017 track Live Your Life, then dropped it in June 2023 after a judge found no evidence Lipa's team had ever heard it.

• The second suit came from the writers of the 1979 disco track Wiggle and Giggle All Night, and was dismissed in March 2025. The judge held that the only resemblance lay in a descending scale, and a scale belongs to nobody. It marks the border neatly: shared raw material cannot be owned.

• On Songsterr the song has exactly two transcribed tracks: bass and drums. Nobody bothers transcribing three minor chords. What people want is the part underneath.

Classroom activities

• Play (everyone): the Am – Em – Dm loop, without stopping. Guitars and keyboards will have it in two minutes; with a capo at the 2nd fret it sounds in the album key. The Andy Guitar tutorial below uses those exact shapes.

• Play (bass), in three stages: start with the root of each chord, one per bar. Then root and octave, alternating. Finally, push those jumps half a beat early so they land between pulses. Same line three times, each one closer to the record.

• Analyse: a closed question. Listen to the chorus and name the exact word where the bass stops accompanying and starts playing the vocal melody. Check your answer against the bass transcription linked below.

• Create: take any three chords and write two different bass lines over the same loop. One that only hits the root on beat one; another with octaves and notes placed between the beats. Record both over the same backing and compare. The harmony does not change. Everything else does.

Key vocabulary

• Four on the floor — bombo en los cuatro tiempos
• Octave — octava: la misma nota, más aguda o más grave
• Syncopation — síncopa: el acento entre los tiempos, no encima
• Ghost note — nota fantasma: un golpe apagado, ritmo sin altura
• Talk box — talk box: el tubo que lleva el sonido a la boca del músico

Resources

In Year 3 — this song is also used in the unit ¿Quién pagaba por oír una historia cantada?, from the theory and history book.

Where it is explained — this song is studied in ¿Por qué no te aburre una canción de un solo acorde?, from the modern music history book.

Official music video (album version, animated)

Guitar tutorial — Andy Guitar. Three minor chords with a capo at the 2nd fret, which is exactly the classroom version.

Piano tutorial — PHianonize. Easy version, no talking, keyboard on screen.

Bass tutorial — channel 참치크래커 베이스. No talking: it builds the line in seven stages, from the bare root to slap, with the tab on screen. This is the one the exercise above follows.

Drum tutorial — Joe The Drummer. He assembles the groove ingredient by ingredient, starting with four on the floor, and gives away the sheet as a PDF.

Analysis: did Dua Lipa actually plagiarise this? — Adam Neely. Goes through the lawsuits and the earlier songs it resembles.

• JamZone chart (Music Will) — https://jamzone.musicwill.org/songs/levitating
• Harmonic analysis — https://www.hooktheory.com/theorytab/view/dua-lipa/levitating
• Bass transcription PDF — https://freebasstranscriptions.com/transcriptions/dua-lipa-levitating/
• Tab — Songsterr, bass and drum tracks: https://www.songsterr.com/a/wsa/dua-lipa-levitating-tab-s476682