‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’ is so clearly pinned to a specific time in music — the menace and threat of Y2K hangs over it still, there’s the release and euphoria of the new millennium;- the wide-eyed optimism tinged with fear. There’s a darkness to it that Minogue carries with her voice, equally enticing and fearsome. It also, as Minogue points out, does exactly what it say it’s going to do: it doesn’t get out of your head. The free-flowing song structure, that sticky ‘la la la’ hook, the relentless chugging bassline — it fires itself straight into your amygdala.
The album that came after it, Fever, is one of Minogue’s sharpest, a mesmerising feast of Europop, disco, and techno. On release though, it was met with cynicism from critics — The Guardian reviewer Alexis Petridis labelled it a “soulless product”. “The odds on Kylie Minogue’s career long outliving 2001’s critically lauded rock bands must be as minuscule as the lady herself,” he sneered, in a particularly ludicrous sentence.
When asked how she views the slow change in perception of pop music — from frivolous and empty to worthy of of serious consideration, and the inherent misogyny attached to the dismissal of the genre, she meanders a little.
“I just set out to do my thing,” she says after a pause. “I’m asked a lot now about how it’s been, how I’ve found it to be a woman in this industry. I have never been a man in this industry, so I can’t give a true comparison, but I just kept going. You mentioned a review — there’d be a stack, I don’t even know how hard [a review must be] to dim your enthusiasm or dim your light. I’ve remained determined. I’ve never felt like I shouldn’t do anything that I set my mind to or anything differently because I’m a woman.
“I can now look back and go, ‘Well, God, there’s a few photo shoots I probably shouldn’t have done, I kind of wish I had never done, or said some things or done some things’. But that was a sign of the times. I think now it seems that the girls or women in the industry today…I think it’s a much, pardon the pun, a much more fertile environment for them where they can be strong.”
Kylie Ann Minogue, AO, OBE (/mɪˈnoʊɡ/; born 28 May 1968), often known simply as Kylie, is an Australian singer, songwriter, actress, record producer and television judge. Having sold 70 million records worldwide, Minogue is the highest-selling female Australian artist of all time and has been recognised for reinventing herself in music and fashion, for which she is referred to by the European press as the "Princess of Pop" and a style icon. Her accolades include a Grammy Award, three Brit Awards and 17 ARIA Music Awards.
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