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THE ARTS/MUSIC | FEBRUARY 2, 1998 NO. 5 |
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A Darker Shade Of Kylie Once the perfect pop princess, the former soap star reinvents herself as queen of the night By MICHAEL FITZGERALD
Like the thoroughly postmodern popster that she is, Kylie Minogue has made a career of junking the past. In the 10 years since leaving fictional Erinsborough, she has busily remade herself, from Loco-Motion's pert, permed "Singing Budgie" to the early-'90s "SexKylie" of Shocked, to the battered corpse in her ARIA Award-winning duet with Nick Cave, Where the Wild Roses Grow. Now she's an eclectic dance diva, crowned with her new CD, Impossible Princess (Mushroom). It offers a potpourri of styles: rocky Kylie, indie Kylie and techno Kylie. "I run to the future and jump," she raps over the trip-hop soundscape of Jump. It's an imaginative leap that makes for fascinating listening. Where her five-year collaboration with Britain's Stock Aitken Waterman provided perfect prefab pop, Minogue is no longer so eager to please. Her first independent foray, 1994's Kylie Minogue, sold 500,000 copies, nearly 5 million down on her debut album, Kylie, but offered a welcome freedom from formula. On Impossible Princess, her voice snarls rather than smiles. She whispers with Bjork-like introspection in Say Hey, then wails with pain in Limbo. Even when she sings, "good to be here," in Some Kind of Bliss, there's less helium, more heft. The album also humanizes an icon who has always been a canvas for other people's dreams. Her lyrics for Impossible Princess reflect a gritty, complex soul. The seesawing emotions of a 29-year-old who, in a decade, has been transformed from Melbourne girl-next-door to London-based icon of cool are all expressed in her music. There's contemplative Kylie (Through the Years), harshly self-critical Kylie (Did It Again) and paranoid Kylie (Too Far). As she coos over the mystical eastern licks of Cowboy Style, "now I find and now I feel, the ordinary is surreal." Certainly Minogue is revealing more of herself these days. "I'm not happy...till you take all of me," she cries on the dance track Drunk. Recently the songstress appeared topless with body paint on the cover of Australian Style magazine. With Impossible Princess, Kylie Minogue stands just as naked musically. She should be so plucky.
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n stage for last year's poetry Olympics at London's Royal
Albert Hall, Kylie Minogue cleared her throat and began: "In my
imagination, there is no complication..." A decade since topping
the charts in Australia and England, her Stock Aitken
Waterman-produced song I Should Be So Lucky seems to brim with
irony. Certainly luck had something to do with her sudden rise
from pocket-size mechanic Charlene on the Australian TV soap
Neighbours to world hit-maker, with two dozen Top 20 singles in
Britain alone. But luck was also a stigma: rarely has a musical
career risen so quickly on such flimsy foundations.