It was always a bit scary to see the high-flying apologists who captivated the doll-like Kylie Minogue. After the emancipation from the Stock-Aitken-Waterman trinity, she was transfigured into an allegory of bold innocence.
Anything could be projected onto her empty fictional figure: the child woman as an iconographic saint, the glamor and charm of Lolita as a fetish. Sometimes she scurried across the beach in a transparent white dress, then she cuddled sultry with plush lap dogs. Kylie continued to make music, but she had lost the teenagers. Nothing grows back.
The fact that Nick Cave, a fellow Australian, thought of Kylie in his ballad “Where The Wild Roses Grow” is, after all, a bold and wonderfully dubious variation on Pygmalion. From Jason Donovan to Michael Hutchence to Cave: This is how Kylie Minogue becomes a diseuse amid swelling mocking laughter, this is how she finally loses herself.
The best miscast imaginable
It’s about murder again. One would think that it was a murder of pleasure, and the two poseurs staged it very admirably in their interplay. Kylie has long been as mannered as Cave, and the patron has no trouble eulogizing his ward: “It’s a dangerous song for her. She took a big risk with this project and I admire that.”
And is the piece heartbreaking? Yes, it is. Soon afterwards, a Cave album was released with lots of murder ballads. For Kylie Minogue it can only end as suicide.
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