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The answer lies somewhere between the gutter and the stars, with her celestial image balanced out by her unaffected approachability. To straight men, she's the girl next door who grew up to become a pleasurebot with a penchant for hot pants. (Hey, you'd show off too if you looked that good at 33.) She's a gay icon who doesn't resort to gay clichés to pacify or exploit her gay audience. To females, she's the perfect, pretty rich cheerleader everybody loves because she reads to the blind, knits sweaters for orphans and is extra-super-nice to everyone, always. She's a happiness-radiating, glitter-encrusted fairy out of a Walt Disney movie, hot yet pure — no wonder Baz Luhrmann cast her as just that in "Moulin Rouge."
While other pop stars go out of their way to reinvent themselves, Kylie Minogue perfected herself. With her last album,Light Years (2000), Kylie fully embraced the role of a disco pixie who's unashamed of her past pop transgressions. She's entirely capable of singing into a live mic yet entirely incapable of covering herself up, preferring tiny interstellar stewardess outfits or just a few filmy bits of gauze — the most sturdy item of clothing she sports in the album's booklet is a towel. A towel. Best of all, she can do the Robot. Jeez, why did it take so long for us to get it?
"Nothing else that I had done had translated," Minogue said. "A few times people said, 'Hey, this might work in the States,' and I'd go, 'Yeah, maybe, but I've heard all that before, and it's never happened.' "
And it still may never have happened, had Madonna not stretched Minogue's name 'cross her chest in T-shirt form at the 2000 MTV Europe Music Awards — just as she had on these shores with Britney Spears' name the previous week.
"I was so surprised," Minogue recalled. "I had done my performance with Robbie Williams. I was heading back to my dressing room, and there were a few people around a monitor and they saw me coming and said, 'Quick! Quick, come!' Probably no words came out. What can I say? I mean, it's fantastic. I'm extremely flattered."
Well, if Madonna's willing to draw a comparison between Kylie and Britney, she can't be wrong, right? Thing is, just as Robbie Williams has failed to make a blockbuster leap, so were expectations low for Kylie's crossover. And Light Years — a near-perfect concoction of burbling Giorgio Moroder/Donna Summer futurmuzik, smarmy lounge funk, Village People homages and epic tales of good times spent at the discotheque with "Le Freak" and "Dancing Queen" — was, perhaps, a little too out-there to make the trip. Fever, which traded in Light Years' Robbie Williams collaborations for work with D-Mob diva Cathy Dennis, proved to be just the ticket thanks to its first salvo, the aptly titled "Can't Get You Out of My Head."
"It's basically down to the song," Minogue said. "People are responding to the video and the imagery and the album and everything surrounding it, but I have a lot to thank the song for.
"We're trying to keep up with the song," she continued, invoking the royal "we" to put the onus on the troops of label reps and business-enders fluttering about. "It's doing most of the groundwork."
Helped, no doubt, by the bizarre white-hooded-poncho-type-thing she's wearing, which threatens to reveal more than just cleavage at every turn.
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Photo: Capitol
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