The Rita Ora riddle: how did a pop star with so little music become quite so famous?

This is an updated version of an article first published in 2018

If you naughtily broke lockdown rules last month, chances are that Rita Ora was with you, too. Booked an appointment with a backstreet hairdresser? Rita Ora was probably there as well. That stranger reclining on your friend’s sofa at the party that shouldn’t have happened? Yep, most likely it was Rita.

Last week, the British singer was forced to apologise for breaching government-issued rules by hosting a 30-strong party for her 30th birthday at London restaurant Casa Cruz. Yesterday, Ora was forced to apologise again: it turns out the bash occurred just a week after returning from Egypt, where she had played a private gig at the W Hotel for a six-figure sum.

She’s said she’s been left “mortified” by her actions, but wouldn't it have been unusual if Ora hadn’t created a lockdown scandal at some point in 2020? After all, this is a pop star whose career is almost incidental to the embarrassments, mistakes and noise surrounding it. Frankly, we were overdue.

One of the funniest running jokes in modern pop culture is that nobody actually knows who Rita Ora is. Immortalised by US talk show personality Wendy Williams asking, with every degree of seriousness in 2015, “Who is this woman?”, and chronicled in every episode of the C-list celebrity podcast Who? Weekly, Ora’s reputation for having no reputation has long been her trademark – even if today we all, deep down, know who Rita Ora is. But it’s only happened as a result of the most relentless media onslaught in recent memory.

Ora is the sole female survivor of an era of quickly evaporated UK pop stars, a victory only enabled by her sheer will to succeed. In the six years between the release of her debut album and its follow-up in 2018, Ora bulldozed her way into film, television, fashion and the general celebrity ecosystem, refusing to buckle beneath a staggering level of setbacks that have historically sent the Pixie Lotts of the world into the pop ether.

Ora’s survival is all the more impressive when you consider the names dominating British pop at the time of her arrival on the scene. When RIP, her debut single, first impacted charts in May 2012, Jessie J was arguably the UK’s biggest female pop star, Emeli Sandé was in the midst of her suffocatingly inescapable imperial phase and Tulisa’s first solo single had just hit number one. Ora, with a run of early hits heavily indebted to the sounds of the time, looked set to follow them into commercial oblivion.

If anything, quick failure would have made more sense. Mentored by Jay Z and his Roc Nation label, Ora was introduced to the British public as a homegrown version of Rihanna, previously Jay Z’s most famous discovery. But the comparison proved unflattering – Ora, at that point in particular, lacked the obvious charisma of Rihanna, and has been accused of stealing her “look”.

It didn’t harm her on the charts, but it did give her an air of an impostor, or somebody entering the world of pop off the back of somebody far more successful. She was the 98 Degrees to Rihanna’s Backstreet Boys, or a Mandy Moore to RiRi’s Britney.

But with Roc Nation as backers, she also had a certain level of clout that her music didn’t necessarily match up with. Foisted upon the American public, she became a regular presence at fashion shows, milling around with Anna Wintour, dating a second-tier Kardashian and scoring countless magazine covers – all without an actual album release in the USA (Ora, her debut, remains unreleased there to this day).

There was also slut-shaming, Rob Kardashian taking to Twitter with lurid accusations about her fidelity (a move he would later pull with Blac Chyna, the mother of his child), leading to widespread jokes at her expense. Spin Magazine would come to dub her “the music industry’s go-to pi?ata” in 2015.

It was a curious moment of ostensible success blurred with a number of gaffes and setbacks. A second album, launched with the euphoric Calvin Harris-produced single I Will Never Let You Down, was abruptly cancelled when Harris, Ora’s recent ex at the time, reportedly blocked her from releasing any more of the tracks he produced for her.

And an attempt to woo fans with a promise of new music if one of Ora’s tweets was retweeted 100,000 times spectacularly backfired when she only managed 2,000 (she later claimed she’d been hacked). It felt, for a time at least, that everything Ora touched turned to cringe.

Even the alleged promise of her backers proved disastrous. In 2015, Ora filed a lawsuit against Roc Nation claiming she had been left “orphaned” by the label as it turned away from its music acts and into other areas of entertainment. As a result, she claimed that she was unable to contact individuals within her label, and was being forced to finance her own television appearances and studio sessions. She also claimed that Roc Nation were refusing to release the numerous albums she had recorded in the wake of her debut.

It was a move that, for many other young singers, usually leads to years of stagnation, with one-time next-big-things including JoJo and Kesha left floating in amber as a result of label mismanagement and related legal woes.

But then something funny happened: Ora transformed into a pop star that didn’t actually release music. Instead she leveraged her fame into a series of lucrative brand extensions. There was a supporting role in the Fifty Shades franchise, a cameo in a Jake Gyllenhaal movie, endorsement deals with Rimmel, DKNY and even Marks & Spencer. She judged a season of The Voice and, in arguably her strangest move, took over from Tyra Banks as the host of a rebooted America’s Next Top Model.

Did it matter that her hilariously minor Fifty Shades cameos inspired widespread mockery? Was it a problem that an America’s Next Top Model eliminee struggled to remember her name after working with her for weeks? In further proof of Ora’s unprecedented success rate, it truly didn’t. Her face was out there, she was collecting large paychecks, and few could escape her even if they tried.

Speaking to Clash Magazine in 2018, Ora explained her process, citing fellow jack-of-all-trades Jennifer Lopez as an inspiration.

“I’ve built my brand [in the States] before I let the music do the talking because it was the only freedom I had because of where I was at with the contract at that time. I just thought that it was better than completely disappearing; I did not want to do that… I’m just a big believer in building a brand and a business, being smart and having a plan. I don’t want to waste it all, y’know?”

In an era of British pop that has struggled to launch any true female superstars that aren’t named Dua Lipa (and even that was only after years of Lipa being stuck in development hell without a breakout single), Ora’s back-up plan showcased an enviable level of business smarts.

In one of the few ways they’re explicitly comparable, it’s strikingly similar to the rise and continued success of Madonna, who recognised early on the importance of striking while the iron’s hot, and folding yourself into every element of pop culture to become a superstar. With that in mind, it’s no real surprise that Ora counts Material Girl, Madonna’s clothing line, among her many endorsement deals.

After numerous half-starts to a second album, including a gloomy collaboration with Chris Brown, Ora finally prevailed against Roc Nation, the two parties reaching an amicable separation and finally freeing Ora up to release a new body of work. Within months she had signed to Atlantic Records, recorded new tracks, and sung for the Pope – something that arguably remains funnier sans any context at all.

And, in an even more shocking turn of events, Ora’s new output was actually very good. Despite being co-written by Ed Sheeran, single Your Song was a breezy, lighthearted bop, while Anywhere, Ora’s finest single to date, was just the kind of euphoric pop number that she shines on, and capably lit up summer of 2017.

Neither, however, made an enormous impact in the US, once again plunging a second album in limbo. A go-nowhere collaboration with Liam Payne, in full Kevin Federline mode, was just the first indication that things were flying off the rails again.

Then Girls, her attempt at a Lady Marmalade all-woman collaboration for 2018, became an unmitigated PR nightmare. After being accused of pandering to the male gaze and stereotyping queer women, Ora apologised and came out as bisexual in the process. But it couldn’t help but derail momentum for the album.

That Cardi B, one of Ora’s collaborators on the single along with Charli XCX and Bebe Rexha, tweeted in advance of the track’s announcement that she would be working with three women she described as “not big but so talented” was just the icing on an unfortunate cake. Throw in a decidedly on-brand appearance at the 2018 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, which saw Ora lip-syncing several seconds behind a backing track, and the promotional tour for her second record was almost surreal in its insistence on going desperately awry.

And that train just keeps on chugging. In March, millions of pounds was probably spent on the unnecessarily expensive video for her latest single, which saw her rolling around in egg yolk and palling around with aliens, only for the launch of her third album to be delayed by the pandemic. Her seemingly never-ending lockdown snafus also arrive on the heels of a bizarre virtual-reality version of herself that has left viewers terrified throughout November. It’s apparently part of an advertising campaign for EE, but could quite easily be re-used for a horror movie if Ora needed some quick cash somewhere down the line.

Whether she’s releasing music or not, Ora’s most consistent character trait is being a pop star stubbornly unmoveable from pop’s B-list. She’s music’s ultimate tryer – always just that little bit unfortunate, and magnetised to gaffes and messiness. But, honestly, it wouldn’t feel right any other way.