The crowd at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 2024 induction ceremony was already on its feet before the final chorus landed. Cher, one of the night’s honorees, stood at the center of a moment that had been building for twenty-five years, and the room knew it. What makes a performance like this matter beyond the spectacle is simpler than it looks: a song about finding strength after heartbreak, sung by the woman who wrote it, joined by one of the defining pop voices of the current generation.
When Dua Lipa walked out to sing Cher’s own song back to her
Dua Lipa opened ‘Believe’ with the verses that made the song an anthem in the first place. ‘No matter how hard I try, you keep pushing me aside and I can’t break through,’ she sang, carrying the lyric with the same directness it had when Cher first released it. The arrangement held close to the original, giving the crowd the familiar shape of the song while the live room gave it new weight. When Cher stepped in, the two voices built toward the hook together, trading lines and then locking in on the chorus that generations of listeners have used as a kind of personal declaration. ‘I need love to be strong, cuz I’ve had time to think it through, and maybe I’m too good for you’ hit the room the way it always does, which is to say it hit hard.
The performance cycled through the song’s final movement with the kind of controlled escalation that a live ceremony demands. The repeated ‘I don’t need you anymore’ sections, stacked one on top of the other, pushed the energy in the room higher with each pass. By the time the last chorus arrived, the call-and-response between Lipa and Cher gave the lyric a new dimension: one voice representing the song’s history, the other representing the audience that inherited it.
The moment the room gave it up for Cher
As the final note resolved, the announcement came plainly from the stage: ‘Give it up for Cher.’ The cheering and applause that followed were the kind that a room produces when something has landed exactly as it should, not louder than expected, but certain. The induction ceremony exists precisely to mark the distance between where an artist started and where their work now lives in the culture, and this performance made that distance visible in real time.
The song ‘Believe’ carries a specific distinction in pop history for its use of pitch-correction as a deliberate musical choice, and hearing it performed live at a hall-of-fame ceremony underlined why that production decision mattered: the emotional core of the lyric survived every format change and every decade.
A lyric that kept going
The closing repetitions of the chorus, Dua Lipa and Cher cycling through ‘Do you believe in life after love?’ one final time, left the line hanging in the room the way the song always intended it to.
The ceremony had its formal business, its speeches and its retrospectives, but the ‘Believe’ performance was the moment that required no context to understand. Cher had written the question into the song in 1998, and twenty-six years later a packed room was still answering it.
