Let me begin by saying that I don’t particularly care for
Kylie’s music. It’s not because I’m too cool.[1]
I’m not dolewave or bust. Abiding by the old cliché—‘oh, I just love all
music’—I truly do enjoy all music—well, except for most thrash metal and
cookie monster singing, which is just awful—and listen to a fairly wide variety
with only minimal discrimination (see my dislike of metal).
It’s not even that bubble-gum pop
dance music is beneath my rarefied academic standing and serenely intellectual
reading of the avant-garde. Trust me, I am as suspect to the subtle and
persistent invasiveness of pop culture, with all its goods and glittery
chattels, as any person inundated in the internet, well YouTube, age. I don’t
spend my evenings seated in a leather armchair, swirling cognac and
deconstructing Deleuze whilst wearing a monocle, a fine Kashmir cardigan and
well-healed slippers, a scarf carelessly flung around my neck. Generally, I
indulge myself in free-to-air television and videos of screaming goats/top ten
countdowns of the best superhero weapons (Iron Man’s suit, predictably, wins
hands down).
Rather, it’s as simple as the
fact that her music has never really grabbed a hold of me. Yeah, ‘Can’t Get You
Outta My Head’ and ‘Spinning Around’ are fun tracks, and I think we’d all be
lying if we were to say we’d never done the ‘Locomotion.’ I’ve locomotioned—or was
it locomotored?—like a surprisingly nimble train on more than one occasion.
Even then, however, I’m not going to go out of my way to listen to Kylie.
Yet, after reading this what
seems to be camp tongue-in-cheek,[2]
albeit with a serious contention, piece of tripe—http://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/private-sydney/the-end-of-my-love-affair-with-kylie-minogue-20140321-356if.html—I
will defend Kylie's right to sing about sex—having it, embodying it, affixing a ‘y’
to the end of it and being it—in whatever ribald terms she feels warrant such
expression. ‘Sexercise’ for all and sundry, I say! ‘Les Sex’ for everyone! Why
not stop there? Let’s chuck in some ‘Sexy Love’ for the hell of it because why
not?
The gist of the article is that
Kylie should essentially, at her “age,” scale down the sexual content—in her
music—and provocative sexual image she insists on projecting—a cover shoot for GQ
magazine with a couple of young male models comes under fire. Why? Well,
apparently, at a ripe 44—and dayum it is a ripe 44—it’s “a little
bit creepy and undignified” to sing about sex in particularly physical, one may
say kitschy, terms. Worse still, she actually has the audacity to try and be sexy! Still! At her age! How dare she refuse to
submit to Anne Bancroft’s upper-class cougar image in The Graduate!
And, topping it all off, adding
the completely innuendo-less cherry to the top, Kylie defended the
indefensible, the utterly morally corrupt, the disfigured hell-spawn of the
Devil, the pop-star Tony Abbott of our time: Miley Cyrus!!!
GASP!!!
Kylie didn’t lecture a young
woman on how to behave!? She didn’t act like her facsimile mother!?
WITCH!!!
(A moment, obviously, while you
all collect your jaws from the ground and recover from the fainting fit I am
sure all you had. Please, go have a drink of water and hydrate. Maybe a
chocolate bar to get some sugar back in your blood.)
…
What ageist and sexist garbage. And
let’s add nonsensical to the mix too, because Miley’s behaviour doesn’t really
have anything to do with Kylie’s age and her notions about the younger star’s
actions. She is entitled to her opinions, and her opinion about Miley being a “scapegoat”
in pop music (particularly in terms of ‘appropriate’ levels of female, even
youthful, sexual and personal expression) is actually not too far off the mark.
If Kylie thinks that Miley is ok doing what she is doing, that it is Miley's
choice, then why criticise her for having such an opinion?
The suggestion, then, is that Kylie
should be leading her down some mythical path leading to a righteous ideal of
pop-stardom. (Is that a virgin image or the married with children one? Perhaps,
the road leads to gay iconicity? Maybe, Jason Donovan? Who knows? I get
confused when it comes to socially accepted appropriate female behaviour.) Yet,
since when was Kylie supposed to be a role model for younger pop-stars? Who gave
her that role? And why has she not been more present in Brittany’s life, I ask?
But back to the ageist and sexist
thing, which is at the heart of my rant here.
Just because Kylie is getting
older does not mean she is suddenly barred from sexually expressing herself;
that this aging process mysteriously dismisses, or precludes, her sexuality.
And let’s talk simply here, perhaps quaintly in keeping with the author’s
old-fashioned view of ‘dignified’ behaviour: Kylie is a stone-cold fox and if
she wants to flaunt it and use it as a tool in her continued career as a
singer, then she has every right to do so. Even if she was starting to wrinkle
and show her age, perhaps sag here and there, she can still express her
sexuality, in whatever over-the-top, Sia-written, way she so desires. It is
utterly her right to do so. And I, for one, am grateful for it.
Ultimately, I can’t help but
think that this is all tied up with her being a woman. To pull a tired analogy
out of the bag, we look to Hugh Hefner, in all his excessive age, as some sort
of demi-love-god; chuckling and muttering, ‘good old Hugh. Still got it! The sly
dog!’ We excuse his extremely creepy, grandfatherly expression of
sexuality. But as soon as a woman like Kylie—who even has the advantage of
being spectacularly attractive—in all her prohibitive 44 years (half Hugh’s
age) has the gall to sing gyrating-ly of ‘Sexercise’ and suit down next to a
couple of much younger models, people scream, ‘act your age,’ suggestively silently
amending, ‘you slut,’ to make the point clear.
And, really, attractiveness
should have nothing to do with it. Sexual expression is not something that
should be stashed away as people age just so the archaic and repressed
expectations of society are sated; whether the lady, or man, in question is 18
or 80 if they want to call themselves a sexual being, then so be it.
In the end, we all want ‘Sexy
Love.’ What’s the point of hiding it behind some kind of disguised, unassuming
and restrained exterior? And why criticise people who do not feel compelled to hide
it just because of their age or looks?
Let’s just do the locomotion and
get on with life.
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