British pop sensation Dua Lipa is set to contend with a lawsuit that claims her chart-topping 2021 hit “Levitating” borrowed compositional elements from the 1979 disco track “Wiggle and Giggle All Night.”
US District Judge Katherine Polk Failla ruled that the songwriters of “Wiggle and Giggle All Night,” L. Russell Brown and Sandy Linzer, have grounds to pursue their case alleging “substantial similarity” between the two songs.
The lawsuit, filed in March 2022, alleges that “Levitating” shares distinct “compositional elements,” including the opening melody, with the disco hit. While defence attorneys argued that it’s implausible for Lipa to have heard the disco song before creating “Levitating,” Judge Failla acknowledged that the plaintiffs presented enough evidence to support their claim that the songs’ striking resemblance merits further examination.
Dua Lipa’s “Levitating,” featured in her album “Future Nostalgia,” achieved tremendous success, spending 77 weeks on Billboard’s Hot 100 U.S. singles chart and securing the top spot on Billboard’s 2021 year-end chart.
This is not Lipa’s first legal challenge over alleged song similarities. In June, a Los Angeles judge dismissed a lawsuit asserting that “Levitating” copied a 2017 track by the Florida reggae group Artikal Sound System. Another lawsuit, filed in July, claims that Lipa used musician Bosko Kante’s “talk box” recording in remixes of “Levitating” without obtaining permission.
