In the mid-nineties, the career of Australian pop star Kylie Minogue was at a dead end. Having become famous in the eighties as an actress in a popular soap opera in her country, she had embarked, at first almost as a joke, a musical career that had seen her become a pop heroine of two worlds, between Australia and the United Kingdom. After four successful albums produced between 1988 and 1991 by the trio Stock Aitken and Waterman (those of Rick Astley, Dead or Alive and Bananarama) Kylie Minogue seemed to have lost momentum. Above all, she herself seemed to be tired of being Kylie Minogue, so much so that she decided, with a move that could seem reckless, to get rid of the producers and authors who had made her famous. Kylie was poised to end up like so many other British pop meteors.
But she was something more than a meteor rained in the United Kingdom from a distant former colony: it had crept silently into the collective imagination. His image had evolved to become an avatar of the most transversal male fantasies. It was the divetta who with ripped jeans hot pants winked at the posters of magazines like Just Seventeen e Smash Hits and excited the fantasies of heterosexual teenagers. At the same time she was also the vestal of the lightest dance pop and a good fairy for gay teenagers who were looking out for the first time in the club. The old musical formula was exhausted, but Kylie Minogue continued to be a fantasy for many guys, gay or straight, and a point of reference for many girls attracted by her innate ability to be sexy and reassuring at the same time. Kylie was also an erotic-musical obsession for the Australian musician Nick Cave who in 1995 contacted her by proposing a song called Where the wild roses grow, a song about a murderous passion, a morbidly romantic version of what today we would call femicide. “I had a silent obsession with Kylie,” Cave said in 2007, “I’ve been meaning to write something for her for years but none of the songs I wrote really seemed to fit her personality. Then I wrote this piece, a dialogue between a murderer and his victim, and I sent it to him. She answered me the next day ”. A very fortunate collaboration was born between the two and a friendship that still lasts.
Unlike Madonna, who pushed her way into the global pop imaginary, Kylie Minogue entered on tiptoe and her changes in musical direction, look and personality were never proclamations or calls to arms. Madonna has always projected a strong and assertive image, Kylie has always remained one showgirl who with grace, playfulness and not a little irony, changed costumes and songs, always letting us glimpse something from behind the circus tent.
From the mid-nineties onwards, therefore, a risky but exciting phase of experimentation begins for Kylie Minogue. Knowing she has nothing to lose makes her brave and not being a girl anymore makes her confident in her choices. Impossible princess is the most experimental and risky album Kylie Minogue has ever made. And that definitely makes it my favorite. He had started working on new songs with the British dance duo Brothers in Rhythm but soon other writers and other producers came on board, including indie rock band Manic Street Preachers, Dave Ball (formerly Marc Almond’s partner in Soft Cell) and Robert Dougan, esteemed trip hop producer and author of Clubbed to death, a piece that would become very famous thanks to the soundtrack of Matrix.
For the first time Kylie writes all the songs and interacts directly with producers and musicians who come from worlds far away from hers. The result is a chaotic, disjointed, alienating but very human album. For the first time we hear a Kylie Minogue who, finally off the rails of traditional pop, sings, acts, speaks, improvises and even screams. Too far, the song that opens the album, is a dizzying flow of consciousness on a drum n bass base in which, almost out of breath, he asks us for help: “This time I went too far!”.
In Did it again she comes to dismantle herself: “You think you’re smart but you think too much, girl … you think you know everything but you don’t know a damn thing.” In the video we see her fighting with herself, with the other Kylies of the past who attack her and want to blow her up. In Some kind of bliss, the britpop piece that the Manic Street Preachers compose by putting together two different texts written by Kylie herself, the theme is freedom, the freedom to be alone even if in love. Have you ever heard a pop princess sing that in the end we are always alone and that accepting it is “a kind of bliss”?
Some kind of bliss, with his vaguely Tarantine video, is chosen as the album’s launch single and a commercially bad idea is revealed: it goes so badly that the label decides to postpone the release of the album. Kylie’s audience doesn’t seem interested in her rock twist. Too bad that in Impossible princess there is much more: dub, trip hop, drum n bass and even a sort of electronic country western (Cowboy style) that Madonna will resume a few years later with a paw of hers when she does Don’t tell me. The material for the album was so abundant that Kylie found herself unwrapping Soon, a song that Nick Cave had composed on a text written by her. “It was a beautiful ballad, but at the time of singing it I couldn’t do it justice,” admitted Minogue.
To worsen the commercial fate of the album, in the week it should have been released, on August 31, 1997, Lady Diana dies. Impossible princess, “Princess impossible”, becomes an unacceptable title for the record company and is hastily changed to Kylie Minogue in the European market. Despite four singles and four memorable videos (Some kind of bliss, Did it again, Breathe e Cowboy style), and despite a tour, Impossible princess remains Kylie Minogue’s least successful album.
Yet it is the work that has given her the longevity she would never have had if she stopped. And more: Impossible princess, listened to today, it is a time machine to relive that strange year of rupture that was 1997. The year of the Spice Girls and Ok Computer by Radiohead; the death of Gianni Versace and Lady Diana. The year the internet went mass and the first handheld computer came out, the year it came out Around the world of Daft Punk and poet Allen Ginsberg dies.
Kylie Minogue
Impossible princess
Deconstruction/BMG/Mushroom, 1997
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