Friends of Charlene: The Angelic Engineering of Kylie Minogue - by Jonno Revanche
ISLAND | ISSUE 159 Rimbaud notes two ways to die: earthly and
of devotion
I’m coming ’round to the possibility of surrender,
of being a sub for once ...
“I’m the one
Love me, love me, love me, love me”
Lyrics from the song ‘The One’
from Kylie Minogue’s tenth studio album
titled X, released in 2007
—Athena Thebus, Doggy, 2016
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,
which we are still just able to endure, and we are so awed
because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, 1923
In all my time scouring websites and holy texts, I have realised that there is no proper script for courting messengers of heaven. Who are they? Who calls upon them? There are vague suggestions of what to do when an angel appears, of course, and the possibilities that follow, but no manner to fit if it happens. Like the much-adored pop star, we perceive an angel in all of its godliness, but the premise of meeting one, of establishing a relationship with the sacred unseeable, is never viable even as it’s dangled before us as a means to make us ‘good’. We scream into the shadows, use the same hashtags to gain their attention, but the account remains locked and unverified.
You’d think there’d be a level of ceremony to seeing an angel – some kind of procedure behind all of it. You’d be passed the information in the right time by psychic means, feel a holy shift, becoming expectant toward the prospect of a heavenly union, readied for the opportune realisation, and respond, finally, in an emotionally felicitous way.
As Catholic pariahs disappear from contemporary life, we choose replacements. We manifest idols into our collective imagination.
“As Catholic pariahs disappear from contemporary life, we choose replacements. We manifest idols into our collective imagination.”
Recent Google search: Likelihood of an angel visiting
Followed by: What to do when you see an angel. Can humans see them? Do angels have genitals? Can angels cum? Can they procreate? Are angels political? Can an angel be a diva? If so, which one, and when will that become clear?
‘Do not be afraid / be not afraid’ is said in variations more than a hundred times in the Bible, and, most often, voiced specifically from the mouths of angels. There’s a clear reason for that: the sheer number of repetitions reveals that when angels appear, commoners are often terrified by their presence. Rather than bringing peace as one might assume, these angels arouse pure panic.
Memes have recently started appearing randomly in friends’ social media posts, with the angel in question depicted as an amorphous glob of emojis, appearing as burning golden wheels with a number of eyes trapped inside interlocking wings, or a myriad of them – reaching out across fields, overlapping a ball of light and circling toward the sky, making a spire. These are comedic, in a sense, but they suggest a trypophobic response – an involuntary hybrid of intense nervous fear of and disgust at the cluster. The original angels, the ones from the Old Testament, emit a celestial glare and spruik God’s fluorescence from under their eyelids, lifting their hands (if they have them) to reveal bodies brimming with danger; no peaceful welcome. Even as western characterisations of the angel lean towards the Anglo-Saxon, their biblical depiction suggests something more startlingly supernatural, freakish, if not ultimately implausible. It was the Renaissance that fucked it all up and made them beautiful.
“Even as western characterisations of the angel lean towards the Anglo-Saxon, their biblical depiction suggests something more startlingly supernatural, freakish, if not ultimately implausible. It was the Renaissance that fucked it all up and made them beautiful.”
That angels appear in a burst of dramatics to establish contact – to assure vulnerable or frightened people that God is present and that he offers protection – is paradoxical. When angels speak, it is most often as an assurance of God’s love and power. To reassure, God must first create this fear.
In 2010, at the behest of absolutely no one, Kylie Minogue decided to become an angel.
In the music video for ‘All the Lovers’, Kylie was lifted up on the shoulders of a scantily clad flesh army, an architectural flash mob and assemblage fantasy brought to life by director Joseph Kahn (who would later be credited as the auteur behind the videos for Taylor Swift’s album 1989.) Her dutiful gays scurried to meet her as if by a wordless summoning. Her hair billowed behind her, her torso wrapped in Jean Paul Gaultier, those white-banded leather lines crisscrossing her like wings as she conducted the crowds below. She is exactly how we perceive goodness: luminescent (and with an expensive wig!) There is something equally as impressive, and uncanny, as a girl from outer suburban Melbourne funnels upward through a mass of anonymous bodies to stake her claim as the conductor in the sky, as if it was the most normal thing in the world.
Just like the angels in the heavenly texts, arms outstretched and torsos braced, in ‘All the Lovers’ Kylie gushes throughout the chorus, ‘don’t be frightened’. Buoyed upward and balanced by coordinated synths and supporting vocals (the beautifully choral refrain of yeah yeah yeah), her vocals echo outward as if she recorded them sitting at a pew in a grand cathedral, microphone positioned three feet away from her.
*
Through the early ’90s and onward, Miss Minogue shocked and upset middle Australia as her image adapted and fluctuated, but she managed to maintain a holy resilience within gay clubs and pop music. She was particularly adored by gay fans down-under, those sub-plot communities who were desperate for some kind of imagery that transgressed the masculinist order that floods every perceivable corner of our culture. It was all very right place right time. At home in the discotheque, the modern church, she wanted us when we had so wilfully resigned ourselves to abandonment, to assimilation.
“Through the early ’90s and onward, Miss Minogue shocked and upset middle Australia as her image adapted and uctuated, but she managed to maintain a holy resilience within gay clubs and pop music.”
We synced with her buoyancy and incandescence, the appeal of the unapologetic camp that she introduced into her pop-cultural craft and persona. Before long, she was our Kylie, realised with a shrug, even if she initially threatened to unseat that standard or be thrown aside like so many Sony BMG-style, Aus Idol pop contenders before her. McKenzie Wark suspects that her persona (or image) was so divisive because it actually embodied the so-called utopian Australian values that the rest of our nation never delivered on – the sole redeeming product of this self-satisfied colony. Therein was the promise of equal opportunity and freedom of the ‘lucky country’ that was mostly proven false by lived experience.
To liken the music of Kylie Minogue to a portrait of religious absolution is to create a necessary parallel with Australiana. Pop music is intentionally far-reaching and persuading. If the criticism of pop as a market for the lowest common denominator rings true, then let’s celebrate that, even if it only ever sought to engage the common people just like any prophetic script. Over time, this kind of soft populism has endeared some of the biggest cynics. Fittingly, when Kylie was seeking to emancipate herself from her saccharine teen pop image and to find an outlet to test-drive new sounds, she discreetly released hardcore dance tracks into the Melbourne club scene by sending them off to DJs under the name ‘Angel K’.
Kylie Minogue’s hymns have often sat comfortably with their frailty. She is indisputably human, normal, hardly even ready to call herself an artist. It contradicts what we’ve come to expect of pop stars, and thus, weirdly, makes her qualify all the more for sainthood. She embraces the downtrodden, delicate, forgotten, disenfranchised or heartbroken, empathising with them and kneeling beside them. She is always within reach, reliable, a girl next door. In fact, during filming of Neighbours, co-star Nadine Garner described Minogue as ‘fragile’, often crying on set after being yelled at by producers for forgetting her lines.
If an angel is terrifying, then Kylie is the substitute protector – we could simply never imagine her bringing any kind of pain. If we picture the ideal angel, one who safeguards us from harm and acts to soothe our wounds through poetics and beats, she might fill the role.
“If an angel is terrifying, then Kylie is the substitute protector – we could simply never imagine her bringing any kind of pain. If we picture the ideal angel, one who safeguards us from harm and acts to soothe our wounds through poetics and beats, she might fill the role.”
But that does not necessarily make her music apolitical or divorced from the frequencies of her time. Nick Cave suggested that on ‘Better the Devil you Know’ on her third studio album, Rhythm of Love, ‘the love song becomes a vehicle for a harrowing portrait of humanity, not dissimilar to the Old Testament psalms. Both are messages to God that cry out into the yawning void, in anguish and self-loathing, for deliverance’. Kylie as a proudly self-identifying push-over, as a stalwart, as a vacuum for our collective hurt. It’s funny that when Kylie herself was asked about her gay icon status, she commented, ‘there's been no tragedy in my life. Only tragic outfits.’
One way to interpret her songs is not as psalms toward the gods of heterosexuality, about a woman seeking a man – with a potential boyfriend or paramour clearly in mind – but as if she were instead singing to a friend. The relationship between a (gay male) fag and his (cishet female) hag is remarkable in this innocence. There is no ulterior motive; only a true desire for friendship, however intensely intimate or romantic that can ultimately be.
In rationalising the magnetic nature of this type of intimacy, as a brand of romantic friendship that rests on a necessary and codependent silent dialogue between parties, I refer back to a quote by Claudia La Rocco in an interview for Adult magazine, which seems to hint at some kind of basis for why Kylie’s music finds meaning:
... there is a certain quality of attention one can give another person that is deeply erotic, deeply intimate, deeply sensual – whether or not anything sexual is going to transpire, or is even meant to. But something about taking someone in fully, or feeling that you are being taken in, fully apprehended – I dunno that I can put it into the right words, but there is an all-lit-up, liquid intensity to that exchange. A charge like nothing else. You. I’m looking at you.
If Kylie has ever fully achieved ‘raunch’, the most explicit example is the video for her 2003 song ‘Slow’. ‘Slow’ doesn’t suggest a sexual act as much as it lines the walls with eroticism and parlays attraction into diversion. A camera pans out from the aerial view of her body to reveal scores of (tanned, oiled) dancers or ‘movers’ in swimwear, the majority of whom are men, while Kylie continues to emote and establish herself in the centre of the visual.
It’s aestheticism as religion. This serves as a partial reference to Helmut Newton’s photographic work, but also acts like a DNA magazine-style, homoerotic bait and switch. The vision of this homoerotism seems to place her in a clever bind that can’t be easily deconstructed: as one woman seeking solidarity amongst others like her, the danger of objectification becomes neutralised. It acts as forestalling – any satisfaction bleeding from entitlement or ownership of her body is somehow problematised by the Speedo-wearing muscle hunks who surround her.
*
There’s a seemingly forgotten YouTube video of an early Mardi Gras, blurred and low-quality in that familiar way that old VHS often is: the sound occasionally disrupted by an eerie anomaly in the recording, static lines glitching the sound and vision for a few ghostly milliseconds. Most of what you can see is a loosely illuminated crowd, jubilant, waving hands and colliding. The footage is blurred by the limitations of the technology but it’s an archive moment, and totally charming. Everything about the performance screams dollar-store camp, total cheesiness ... and it works. The pink tutu with large Perspex hearts sewn onto the bodice now hangs, I think, in a museum somewhere. I notice these details as she takes the stage and the fans scream in response, her hair coiffed reminiscent of Rita Hayworth. Her choreography is not revolutionary or particularly sophisticated, but it hardly seems to matter.
Kylie resonates as she responds to the vibration of the crowd, which is mostly unseen in the video but indisputably present, entranced by her, the holy mass a ministry of presence occurring at Kylie’s whim. She ad-libs her dance routine and bends the euphoria to her will. Watching Kylie feed off the energy of her fans, who I envision to be a score of muscle queens, shirtless in the blanket of dark, reminds me of any other relationship where you try to replicate salvation. Knowing that someone has been out there trying to listen, ear pressed up against laminated oak, all along. Recognition seems elusive. When you were dancing in one world, striving for actualisation amidst the unattentive in an amphitheatre, feeling very much on your own, your real people were locked outside, fists banging doors, trying desperately to get in, to reach you.
*
If an angel is terrifying, then Kylie is the titanium cherub, like the fairy she depicts in Moulin Rouge. She transforms from unassuming television star to the otherworldly, crafting new worlds into music videos, waiting to hold us all captive and turn our attention into willingness through a superlative procession of love.
Australian journalists who either did not know what to make of her or were affronted by her continued chart performance and anti-plutonian tendencies were eager to brand her as a fake, a soldier of the banal, the ‘singing budgie’. In other words, as an approachably cute but mostly repetitive performer who was force-fed her lines. She was not a bird who could learn, on her own terms, that she could speak.
One review described an album as seducing us, ‘like the high-end escort who knocked on our bedroom door bearing champagne, strawberries and an impressive selection of novelty condoms’. These reviews are predictably chauvinistic, but to be expected from the old guard of Australian critics who probably equated musical value with guitars and mateship.
Kylie’s reception at the hands of a predatory committee of Australian men echoes the dynamic that trans women and gender-non-conforming people walk every day – is your femininity acceptable, is it pliable? What conditions do you have to meet to be guaranteed acceptance, respect, even safety, and, once that is finally given, will it remain?
“Kylie’s reception at the hands of a predatory committee of Australian men echoes the dynamic that trans women and gender-non-conforming people walk every day – is your femininity acceptable, is it pliable?”
‘Authenticity’ becomes an easy on-hand argument to dismiss the contributions of many pop artists, especially women. To actually attain this, says theorist Helen Davis, ‘performers must be seen as an accurate representation of his or herself, produced for personal self-expression rather than financial gain’. Femininity is at once expected but received as a construction and an insincerity, this double-bind working ruthlessly to contain the ability to which a public performer can express themselves in a fluid way. But record label executives rarely give women the licence to control their image. Women who do are often written off, Davis says, as cold and controlling.
*
Pop veteran Kylie Minogue dutifully fulfils the collective psychological desire for a matriarch, one who may lead with conviction and with studied tactics of care. A pop icon in contemporary society is in a position both enviable and difficult. I see Kylie as an all-encompassing mother, one with far-reaching convictions, or maybe she is the classic cool auntie – someone with a limited but necessary responsibility for you, who can maintain all the right distances. Who can sing ‘I believe in you’ with lightness, buoyancy and believability but never tells you what is your right, what you are capable of, or what you should believe. She might be a spiritual caretaker from beyond, even, unconditionally accepting and forgiving and protective to gay listeners where their real mothers might have failed.
‘Breathe’, one of the first songs Kylie wrote completely of her own accord for her 1998 album Impossible Princess, is as expertly executed as her early hits, at once both discreetly and immediately powerful. The music video – which shows the singer floating mildly through a kind of illuminated snow globe – has parallels with the Kate Bush song of a similar name (‘Breathing’). Both allude to the claustrophobia and shelter of the womb, the music video simulating a foetus trying to make it through development and out of the warm, sunken darkness. One imagines an association with home, of a protection perhaps taken for granted, a safety that is timely but conditional. Gay men are devoted to the burrows carved out by their mothers, pulled close to that streak of femininity but consistently betrayed by it.
Hilton Als has argued that the fag hag recognises that she is the ‘image of male fear: vituperative, self-hating, controlling and punishing,’ but she accepts this image as true of other women and therefore also of herself. The fag hag or gay icon becomes enshrined due to, or relative to, her embattled femininity, her sacrificial nature or decentring of self as much as the self becomes transposed upon a certain type of mythology, one that is from that point on up for grabs.
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The transition from uneventful and desolate suburbia, where Kylie played Charlene in Neighbours, to a big city environment caught up in its own pace is a narrative shared by many young gay men / femme people in particular. It is no accident that Kylie’s videos take place in these urban playgrounds, shifting away from isolation into lighter, more forgiving scenes than the apparently arid outback, adorned as she is in Martin Margiela, Dolce & Gabbana or Chanel – or more thrillingly Azzedine Alaia – accompanied by uniformly chiselled but diverse (gay?) men. They surround her, move with her and gently attend to her despite their size.
Metropolitan spaces have often been narrativised as being where gay/queer men collect, unite and flourish. The club, the streets, the alleyways behind bars, the parties are seen as central locations of celebration and personal liberation, where living is rapidly and gloriously transformed. As the lush of the city becomes more apparent, so does the din – underneath that sonic patchwork the queers can come to life, can stake their claim in the temporary hedonism that permits difference. Those raucous bubbles of celebration are not often so easily found in the country or the suburbs, which often exist entirely on their own terms. Which is not to say that cities are naturally more accepting, but that they tend to license the ability to network and connect, to dip into a wider pool of people and create the ideal collective.
“As the lush of the city becomes more apparent, so does the din – underneath that sonic patchwork the queers can come to life, can stake their claim in the temporary hedonism that permits difference.”
Kylie is invigorated by the epiphanies that stem from self-determination, and although the rhetoric of love becoming realised was mainly passed off as radio fodder by critics, her songs land in the right psychological spaces for the gay listener. She coaxes the doubtful out of hiding, promising them the freedom that comes from breaking restraints and throwing them aside, the triumphs (and devastating failures) of being totally vulnerable, inhabiting that fleeting euphoria and welcoming all that is fascinating, caught in every sticky opportunity. In Kylie’s songs, the possibility of danger in spontaneity might even be more beautiful than that of safety. ‘Why won’t you move?’ she whispers in ‘All The Lovers’, ‘even if it throws you to the fire?’ ▼
This article appeared in Island 159 in 2020. Order a print issue here.
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