Kylie Questions

Friend Walt sent a Christmas card with two questions regarding the Australian Kylie concerts:

• Was I the oldest person there?
  

No, actually there were all ages present. The oldest people I spotted were about 60 years old. Many people treated the concerts as an occasion for an all-ages girl's night out. I saw lots of groups where one or two middle-aged women shepherded five or six teenage girls - mothers, their daughters, and their daughter's friends. Normally, one wouldn't expect such an age range at a rock concert, but Kylie's early start (she started appearing on Australian television by age 11 - 1979!) gave her an early, loyal cohort of fans - critical to success! It makes you appreciate the potential of youth-oriented media outlets, like the Disney Channel of today, in creating the stars of tomorrow!

(Interesting Wikipedia article - I didn't realize that INX's reference to 'Suicide Blonde' is a direct reference to Kylie.)

Even though I wasn't the oldest person there, as an American, I was clearly outside the normal demographic. I got two reactions from people in my immediate vicinity. At the first concert I attended, I talked to two girls, about 16. They were VERY impressed that I had made the trip to see their idol and I sensed nothing but the greatest warmth from them. At the second concert, I talked to two college students, about 20, and they also were surprised, but they were also curious about what I was doing there, in order to properly categorize my 3-sigma scatter point in the demographic distribution. They asked if I was one of these rabid fans who pursue their favorite pop star around the world, and I disappointed them by saying no, it was just that Kylie doesn't perform in the U.S., so, as a fan, I had little choice but to travel overseas.

After the concert, on the train, I talked to a couple, also about age 20, and I told them I suspected Kylie doesn't perform in the U.S. simply because of economics - her fans are too scattered to make renting an arena profitable. The girl found this explanation wholly unsatisfactory: surely she could pack an arena in San Francisco! Maybe - who knows? - but Kylie's entire career arc has relied on avoiding the U.S. as much as practicable. I'm not sure why, although I have a theory....

But first, question two:

• Did Kylie's illness affect her performance?

I think that was the question lurking at the back of everyone's mind. Kylie's career as a Queen of Pop has meant celebrating some of the most evanescent elements in popular culture. Using math-speak, suffering breast cancer is completely orthogonal to that history, to say the least. How could it not affect her performance?

Kylie's team had to make several critical decisions. They didn't want to revamp the "Showgirl" concert tour, since large sums had been spent on costumes, but a year-and-a-half gap was too long to avoid doing so: they HAD to release the European "Showgirl" DVD, for cash-flow purposes, if nothing else. So, they had retool the show for Australia, taking into account Kylie's condition. Fortunately, the show was already a costume-heavy extravaganza, so hiding scars was fairly-easy, but that meant sinking new sums into costumes and rechoreographing the show. What made the whole project feasible was the loyalty of the work force - the dancers, musicians, techies, etc. - and the loyalty of the audience (apparently of the hundreds of thousands of tickets sold, only several hundred refunds were made).

I saw an edited version of the European "Showgirl" show on the flight across the Pacific, and I was trying to mentally compare what I saw (sometimes with binoculars) onstage with that broadcast. I suspect Kylie was a little less active in the Australian show, but not in a way that seriously-compromised the entertainment value of the show. For example, there is one scene in both shows, set (oddly enough) in a 50's-era American baseball team locker room. Kylie and a weightlifter/dancer interacted in the European show (if memory serves), whereas in the Australian show, Kylie sang while seated upon a pommel horse while a gymnast performed behind her - more restful. The Australian DVD will come out shortly, and I suspect more people than would admit to it will carefully compare and contrast the shows to see what has been lost (and maybe what has been gained).

But as far as singing by itself went, I detected no weakness - she is probably singing better than ever!

I suspect Kylie's illness has accelerated several trends that were already evident in her career - a classicist tendency you normally don't see in musical theater. She is relying more and more on fashion as time goes on, particularly her favorite, Italian fashion, in the mode of Dolce and Gabbana. Her videos are becoming increasingly "arty", even abstract. Her longtime collaborator, William Baker, had been rumored to have been exasperated with her for supposedly 'playing it safe', but it may simply be a difference in artistic vision - fortunately Baker reunited with her for this tour (she does better with him there).

(Actually, Baker has written that he tends to see clothes as direct representations of ideas, so the use of clothes to represent abstractions probably makes him uneasy.)

Oh yes, my theory (wholly original)! When you look at the movie "Xanadu" (1980), you see many elements that pre-figure Kylie's career: Gene Kelly's last major movie (the 'dying' tradition of Hollywood/Broadway), together with fashionable disco dancers (massed on rollerskates!), and with the ingenue Australian (Olivia Newton-John) as the reincarnation of Kira (sounds similar to Kylie), an ancient Greek goddess of music and dance (classical tradition). I just bet she went nuts when she saw that movie, as a precocious 12-year-old! She decided she would appropriate the entire tradition - the whole tamale! - and relocate it to its natural home, Melbourne, and she would reign as the Queen of Pop. And it would be FUN!

Interestingly, in Kylie's videos, you rarely see specifically American settings or references except as nostalgia - almost nothing after about 1980.

The vision suffered a little in the execution - she had to relocate to London, and America, particularly in the persona of Madonna, has proved to be not quite as dead as it might have looked from the distance. (She had the grace to cover Madonna's "Vogue" on this tour - the first time she has ever acknowledged the voracious American on stage, and very much very fashion-conscious). Still, considering everything, she has succeeded, as much as could have been done, in what looks like was originally a very ambitious plan. And there are other international female starlets out there too, using Kylie's experience as a guide. Imagine the swarms of ambitious starlets in Bollywood, or in Latin America, trying to make a difference! The American musical theater tradition moves offshore, and changes in unexpected ways!