Saturday, 15 December 2007
put on your red shoes and dance away the blues
X… as in Ten. Kylie’s Tenth Album.
X…. as in Adult.
X… as in that mysterious something that everyone wants. The X Factor.
Rebuilt from her fight against cancer. Fresh from a broken heart, determined to love again. Or something. X is the grand statement of a survivor. That life goes on.
And therefore, what X is, is Business As Usual in Kylieworld. A world of pop and of love and of soft feelings. A world where nothing exists but the music and the beat and the boy and the girl. Where politics is absent, where heartbreak is only a mere inconvience, where the destruction of the Great Love is not a heartbreak, but an opportunity. To check out that boy on the dance floor.
Kylie is Pop. Kylie is soul. Kylie is indestructible. And X is the most pop album. Kylie herself, she just carries on. Whilst the world is falling apart around her, whilst she is facing life-threatening moments, all she wants to do is carry on. Nothings going to change her world. This then, is the final statement, in many ways : that life goes on. Just as normal.
Our brave Kylie is no such thing. Staring at the abyss and the abyss staring back, she put on her red shoes and dances away the blues. Let’s Dance. For there is nothing in here, not even the slightest glimmer, the most fleeting acknowledgement of the fact that Kylie has faced so much. In one way, it’s prefect pop. In another, to come through all that, and not to utter even the slightest comment on vinyl makes me pause and stop and wonder. Is there anything actually at the heart of Kylie as an artist.. Or is she just a pop puppet peddling entertainment in an emotionally frozen void?
After the crisis in confidence that came from the under-appreciated “Impossible Princess” (an album of great merit and skill), Kylie did the same thing U2 did with “Pop”. Reverted from artistic expression after relative commercial failure, and begun again with a fresh slate. Reverting to type. The old template. And in the hands of an artistically free statement as she was a decade ago, X could have been her most fascinating, interesting album built upon the central paradox of pop that faces its own mortality. Instead, “X” is just a pop album.
And what a Pop album. It contains several of Kylie's finest pop songs. And since Kylie's pop is better than almost anyone elses, these are some of the finest pop songs ever written., "2 Hearts", "The One", "Wow" are all full of the adolescent rush of hormones and optimism. But fundamentally, it's hollow. The heart of the record is a void. There's no feeling here, and it seems to me that the record has been sanitised and airbrushed into a Photoshopped piece of Perfect Pop : the backing is perfect and spotless, the vocals anodyne and lacking in any distinctive personality (and occasionally this exposes the lack of forceful personality that makes our greatest pop artists great ; the neurosis and individuality of a Robbie Williams or an Elvis Presley).
But forget that. Put on the music and dance. That's what X is. It's no great reinvention, no fascinating statement. X is a pop record, made of sheen and shine. It's a fine pop record. But fundamentally, it isn't interesting enough to capitivate the listener. I want to hear Kylie face her life and write about the girl she really is, instead of playing the part, acting the role of pop cypher that we can mould and dress and bend to our desires. Sometimes, ambiguity reveals that really there is nothing at the heart of things, and thus, "X" is undoubtedly both a great Pop record and artistically silent. Put on your red shoes and lets dance away the blues.Only registered users can write comments.
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