

The record was meteorically successful: a pristine collection of electro-pop with many of its singles amassing over half a billion streams, including “Your Song” and her collaboration with Avicii, “Lonely Together”. It took six years for Ora to reassemble herself and her team, to claw back what she had built, eventually inking a deal with Atlantic to release her second album, Phoenix. The company countersued her for $2.3 million, and eventually, they settled the dispute privately out of court. In 2015, she filed a lawsuit against Roc Nation accusing the label of neglect, holding her to a five-contract deal while allegedly refusing to release the multiple albums she claimed to have recorded. A slew of chart-dominating collaborations emerged with Iggy Azalea and Charli XCX, but it seemed that Ora’s momentum had started to fizzle beyond her reputation as a hired gun. “There’s just too much anonymity”, The Guardian’s Michael Cragg wrote, as was the critical consensus, but the strength of its hits and Ora as a star-in-ascent marked a voice that was poised to dominate the airwaves for a long time to come.īut if her debut left us wondering who Rita Ora was, then the subsequent years brought us no closer to her.


Having been raised to sky-scraping heights at 18-years-old by signing to Jay Z’s Roc Nation, her 2012 debut album Ora charted immediately at number one. She collaborated with rapper Tinie Tempah and DJ Fresh, zeitgeist-defining artists for the era who allowed Ora to tap into the pulse of the streets she came from rather than the kind of smooth-edged pop dreamt up in major label boardrooms. Her beginnings in the early 2010s as the UK’s answer to Rihanna, all peroxide, red lipstick and West London attitude, held the promise of a career without limits. But regardless of how you feel about her, this is an unequivocable fact: the devil may work hard, but Rita Ora works harder. Her polymathic approach to pop culture and entrepreneurship, and her dedication to her visibility, wins admiration from some and sparks dislike in others. Column inches amplify her mistakes, most notably her violation of lockdown laws for her thirtieth birthday party, and rumours are fuelled between the lines, including the since-disproven theory that she was public enemy number one: 'Becky with the Good Hair.' It will come as no surprise, then, that Ora’s is one the leading faces for the banner of the Mail Online’s ‘TV & Showbiz’ online news section. Her name is a tabloid obsession with articles produced en masse, dissecting who she’s with, what she’s doing and where she’s going what she did – or, a particular newspaper favourite – did not wear. And, if that weren’t enough, she is Chief Creative Partner at Próspero Spirits, the first female Tequila distillers. Her image has also elevated the profiles of Calvin Klein, Super Ga, DKNY, Rimmel, Cavalli, EE (who could forget ‘Giant Rita Ora’ terrorising the lockdown London skyline in the name of 5G?), Thomas Sabo and Prada, to name but a few.
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The sheer inescapability of her name calls to mind an oft-quoted ambition of Victoria Beckham’s: “I wanted to be more famous than Persil Automatic.” Dissatisfied with being a pop star alone, Ora’s career has expanded into acting and TV presenting, having been a coach for both The Voice’s UK and Australia editions, as well as a judge for The X Factor. Say what you like about Rita Ora, because people often do – ‘ Rita Ora leaves little to the imagination…’, ‘ Rita Ora Dazzles…’, ‘ Rita Ora bares all…’ – but she has remained immutable within pop culture’s line of vision.
#Words to feel this moment professional#
Her celebrity, which has remarkably endured beyond a decade despite professional and personal obstacles others might have failed to clear, is by no means an accident. The artwork for her third record, You & I, the first substantial body of work she has released in five years, communicates Ora as more than a pop star but a ‘figure’ a woman capable of wielding the power of her image, and therefore, her voice – all in that sharp, knowing glance down the lens. There’s Rita, there’s ‘him’ and there’s all of ‘them’ – but she’s looking at you. Mr.A computer monitor bleeds static a man leans back on the table, his head decisively cropped, and in her hand is a phone, leveraged at the height and distance to capture herself. Whoa-oh-oh, I just wanna feel this moment Whoa-oh-oh, I just wanna feel this moment One day when the light is glowing I'll be in my castle golden But until the gates are open I just wanna feel this moment Ask for money, and get advice Ask for advice, get money twice I'm from the dirty, but that chico nice Y'all call it a moment, I call it life
