slowdown and dance with.me.uk

A flashback report

Kylie's seat of power

July 27 2002
Sydney Morning Herald

If Russell Crowe was Maximus, then Kylie Minogue is Gluteus, a woman as
famous for her rear end as her records. On the eve of her sold-out
Australian tour, Jon Casimir toasts her success.

In March this year, London newspaper The Sun sponsored a campaign to have
Kylie Minogue's rear end heritage-listed, preserved for "posteriority" on
the grounds that it's an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The tabloid
invited its readers to lobby the government to make sure Kylie's "bum
remains in safe hands - by turning it into a national institution".

The heritage listing has not yet been confirmed (how, exactly, would you go
about preserving the area? Formaldehyde? Botox?), but The Sun is no doubt
still hoping, if only because the resulting story would provide another
excuse to run a circulation-boosting photo of Kylie bending over.

For The Sun, the heritage campaign was just another in a long line of
excitable Kylie stunts, coming only a fortnight after a story that suggested
Kylie had undergone a bum lift, secret cosmetic surgery to enhance her
pertness and "boost her appeal down under". Declaring its intention to
uncover the source of the lift rumour, the paper said it was "trying to get
to the bottom of the cheeky claims".

This week, Madame Tussaud's unveiled its new Kylie exhibit, a model of the
singer on all fours with backside provocatively raised. Such is the English
fixation with Kylie's rear view that chat show host Johnny Vaughan recently
commented that "if an alien landed on Earth he would think Kylie's arse is
the world's leader".

How quickly things change. Only three years ago, Kylie's career had its own
postcode in the doldrums. After her Impossible Princess album (retitled
Kylie Minogue for the Brits after Diana's death) stiffed in the UK, she was
written off by media and industry alike. Now she is England's most beloved
pop star.

And certainly, she is an English pop star. To consider what makes her career
work, you must first accept that she made one single, Locomotion, in
Australia before relocating to London. Nothing about her work - the sounds,
the styles, the fashions, the context - is Australian. We may love her and
she us, but we are not her core audience, financially or creatively.

The greatest career resurrection of recent times is most often attributed to
the pair of gold leather hotpants (famously bought in an op shop for 50
pence by stylist Will Baker) that Kylie wore in the video for Spinning
Around, her 2000 single. The song's clip, the closest TV has come to lap
dancing, did not pretend to be much more than a showcase for her rear, a
casting decision Baker defended by saying "Kylie's bottom is like a peach -
sex sells and her best asset is her bum." Kylie's dry reply was "You never
know what the future holds. It could become a pear."

Spinning Around went to No 1 in the UK, her first chart-topper there in a
decade. Since then, her career has exploded, moving beyond mere questions of
chart placings, units shifted, dollars banked. BRW estimated her 2001
earnings at $10 million, up from $2.1 million the previous year.

Here she is, at the zenith of her success, 15 years after it began, dropping
into Sydney to play six sold-out shows at the Entertainment Centre. After 40
weeks, her Fever album is still in the Top 10 and has sold more than 350,000
copies in Australia. Its lead-off single, Can't Get You Out Of My Head, went
to No 1 in 19 countries and even cracked the US top five.

Yet, though Kylie can carry a tune, she can't carry one far. And even Baker
was quoted last year as saying she can't really dance, though he later
denied the comment.

Neither of these flaws holds her back. Kylie works brilliantly within her
limitations. Name one other act, just one, a band or a solo performer, whose
comeback has been bigger than the initial wave of success. So how do you
explain her revival? Here are a dozen reasons:

Kylie loves the camera/the camera loves Kylie

Kylie tells a great story about the night she and her makeshift band of
Neighbours cronies played Locomotion live for the first time, at a benefit
for the Fitzroy Lions AFL club. After the song, someone told her she should
record it as a single. Her first thought, she recalled last year, was not
"I'd get to make a record." It was "I'd get to make a video."

Kylie understands the packaging necessities of the modern pop star. Like
Madonna before her she has, particularly of late, fashioned a career as much
out of canny media manipulation as musical nous. In her recent videos and
public appearances, she has carefully courted attention, knowing when to
push boundaries and when to pull back.

Kylie is sexy

Look, it doesn't hurt that she flaunts the bod but don't sell her short by
reducing her success to skin alone. For one thing, Kylie's sexiness is not
new. People have been commenting about her grown-up appeal since Better The
Devil You Know, the 1990 video that saw her abandon the perm and fairy floss
image for something more slinky and stirring.

What is new is the acreage of her flesh on display. The clip for Can't Get
You Out Of My Head featured Kylie in a hooded, white outfit split up the
thighs and down the torso. It left approximately nothing to the imagination
- her nipples had to be taped to the inside of the fabric to keep them away
from the lens.

What works for Kylie is not the fact that she's sexy but the kind of sexy
she is. After all, there are plenty of female singers trading on their
sultry looks. But Kylie is not a competitor with Britney; she's an antidote.
She's no panting, try-hard adolescent, all hot and bothered for the camera.

Kylie's sexiness is more contained and more of a game. Kylie delivers it
with a wink. She knows the bum fixation is pure 1960s England, the latest
manifestation of a never-far-from-the-surface fascination with knickers and
stocking-tops. She's a saucy seaside postcard. She's a Carry On gag. And
this is at least partly because ...

Kylie is tiny

At 152 cm, she's a whisker over five feet in the imperial measure. Her
smallness makes her overt sexuality less threatening. No matter how much she
bumps and grinds, she never quite seems aggressive or predatory. She is sexy
to men and non-threatening to women. Smallness also makes her seem
vulnerable. It helps her youngest fans relate to her. And her size makes her
a perennial underdog. It's easy to barrack for Kylie and her career - she's
the little engine that could.

Kylie really can act

As long as she's playing Kylie, that is. And don't think for a second that
Kylie is not a role (everyone close calls her Min; Kylie exists for the
public). Read any Kylie interview. She is meticulously self-deprecating. She
flirts, giving the impression of parting with confidences while never
actually offering much of an opinion - let alone a revelation - on anything.
Kylie presents as grounded, human and straightforward, never too big for her
boots. Kylie is pretty much the Queen Mother of pop: a woman with longevity
and the common touch, permanently in the public eye, ever gracious, ever
aware that without the support of the people, she is nothing.

All these things are no doubt partly true, but there is always a sense that
she is withholding another self. This probably goes back to her initial
mauling at the hands of the English press. Visiting South Africa in 1989,
the year before Nelson Mandela was freed, she made things worse when she was
asked what she thought of the situation in the country. "I think they should
stop killing the rhinos," was her reply. Since that gaffe, Kylie has exerted
an almost magisterial control over her persona.

Kylie works damn hard

It is, of course, possible to get to the top without talent. It happens all
the time, through various permutations of marketing, coincidence and happy
accident. But you don't get to stay at the top without having something. And
what Kylie clearly has is tenacity.

Read either of the two biographies published this year, Kylie: Naked and
Kylie Confidential. Everyone who works with her seems to comment on her
steely work ethic. She's conceded on many occasions that her "hideous
professionalism" comes before her life and has pushed herself to breakdown
point more than once.

Kylie found her irony

For a long time, it appeared that Kylie had no sense of humour. Then, in
1996, with Nick Cave urging her on, she took the stage at the Poetry
Olympics in London and recited, with mock seriousness, the lyrics of I
Should Be So Lucky. Subsequent live tours have included torch-song versions
of the single. Kylie learned to laugh at herself, to embrace the kitsch part
of her career for which her fans maintain affection. Now that she knows that
we know that she knows it's all just pop music, the whole shebang is a lot
more fun.

Ambition first, ego second

After breaking away from the Stock, Aitken and Waterman hit factory in 1992,
Kylie set out to find herself as an artist. The wonderful Confide In Me
single was an early flowering, but it was Impossible Princess she really
poured herself into - the first time she really committed her thoughts to
paper, declared herself in the lyrics (Will Baker says anyone wanting to
understand her should read them).

The fact the Big Personal Statement tanked (it performed respectably here,
but disappeared in the UK) could have destroyed a bigger ego, but Kylie
appears to have taken what she could from the experience and moved on. If
confession wasn't what the people wanted, then she'd give them what they
did. Which leads us to ...

Kylie has come full circle

Kylie has used her hard-earned pop puppet skills to fashion her recent
career. In essence, she has become her own puppeteer. She's a packaged,
marketed, targeted commodity again, but this time, the calculating is all
her own.

Here she is in 2002 offering what is essentially the music that made her
famous: upbeat, uplifting pop. Make no mistake, her new songs have a greater
hip quotient but the same old formula: tunes you can hum, cheerful
sentiment, unchallenging lyrics.

She is fluffy Kylie again, showgirl Kylie, good-time Kylie. In a recent
attempt at derision, David Bowie labelled her a cruise ship entertainer.
Yes, and his point was?

You can't beat good songs. Spinning Around was written by Paula Abdul for
her own, aborted comeback. Kylie snapped it up and the rest is history. And
when you choose songs rather than write them, as Kylie does, success breeds
success. With every degree your star ascends, the choice improves. Right
now, Kylie will have her pick of the work from the best songwriters around.

Timing. Oh, and September 11

Kylie suits the new millennium. Good-time pop music is what sells right now.
Post-September 11, this trend has been even stronger. We're looking for
things that make us feel better about ourselves and our world. That's part
of the reason the World Cup soccer was so huge and it's part of the reason
Kylie's surge continues. She combines forward-looking optimism with
comfortable nostalgia. Her current career phase will last as long as these
values are saleable.

Kylie's gay audience

While it's true that Kylie's gay audience has been incredibly and
impressively loyal, it's not the audience as much as the aesthetic that is
most important. To look at Kylie now is to see a drag act. She has never
lost the sense of being a little girl playing dress-ups, vamping and pouting
for all it's worth. The Fever tour includes: torch singer Kylie; New York
cop Kylie, Barbarella Kylie and geisha Kylie, to name but a few.

The X factor

In the end, there are always indefinables. Stand a few feet to the left and,
when the bus crashes, it won't hit you. Kylie's career is a triumph of X
factor. Though there are many reasons for her success, they never add up
neatly. As she has charitably pointed out, there are buskers with more
talent. You need luck, you need timing, you need to know what to do when a
door opens.

The derriere

OK, it has to count for something. Though Robbie Millen writing for The
Times recently observed that "her bottom will go the way of the Empire:
overstretched and financially packing less of a punch, it will decline and
fall", you'd have to bet it has a few years left in it yet. Kylie herself is
clearly aware of its power. She's been selling underwear at her shows for
years. She told the Sunday People, in her usual modest fashion, that her
bottom "does what it's meant to do and it's in fairly good shape". At least
all those hours in the gym aren't being wasted.

When the Fever tour began in Cardiff at the end of April, The Mirror's
scribe, Richard Smith, amused himself by counting all the bum wiggles in the
first show. He came up with a figure of 251, noting that Kylie averages two
a minute and "even has two sorts of moves. Wiggle One is a full-on seductive
sort whereas Wiggle Two is made up of a short, sharp hip thrust".

And you always thought Wiggle Two was the purple one who sleeps a lot.