A meme was making the rounds a few months ago wherein this or that musician / music professor / suburban dad / Gen-Xer points out that Dua Lipa’s melodies directly copy the melodies of half a dozen rock songs from their (oof, now doing the math… our) high-school years. The complaints, sadly, have even moved beyond bored Redditors and convinced some songwriters to take the issue to real-world courthouses.

Not to stick our fork too deep into that can of worms. but anyone sharing those TikToks as a *gotcha* against Dua Lipa likely missed out on the fact that her 2020 album, Future Nostalgia, intentionally sampled and copied melodies from past eras that pointed toward the “future” as they saw it (think: Back to the Future II) but refigured as contemporary engagement. This kind of sophisticated art disguised as and functioning simultaneously as catchy pop falls into the bucket of hauntological stuff dreamed of in the work of the late Mark Fisher.

Anyway. The point here is that Dua Lipa and Service95 have a book club. It is as deep and engaging as–and I mean this as a big compliment–a Tuesday afternoon in an Intro to Lit graduate course.

This month’s read is George Saunders’  Lincoln in the Bardo, a strange and poetic exploration of death featuring a Greek-chorus-like array of ghosts juxtaposed with historical documents, both real and fictional.

You can learn a lot about the book and a bit about craft from Dua Lipa’s interview below:

You can learn even more about craft from this essay George Saunders wrote for Service 95 describing how he wrote his first novel.

And for anyone intimidated by the strange structure and antiquated voices of Lincoln in the Bardo, check out the following video of George Saunders explaining how to read his masterwork: