November 06, 2003
love the sexy payola
I saw bits and pieces if the I Should be so Lucky episode of the ABC's Love is in the Air last Sunday night, whilst cooking a Middle Eastern rice dish.
It was all about global domination, making money, pop success and Mushroom Records finally making it. Nothing about the craft of musicianship, good music, the meaning of the songs. It was about dreams of global success in joyous world, especially the dreams of a suburban girl called Kylie Minoque. This was the Melbourne pleasure machine of the 1980s and it was full of cultural optimism.
Was this going to be a good old fashioned morality tale about artists not doing business with the world of commerce without being exploited or losing their soul? Would it be a narrative about how to bridge the modernist divide between bohemia and business in a way that would yield a profit? Would it be about the pop machine appropriating the idea of continually fashion itself anew from the modernist avant garde? Or would it be about how suburban sex becomes urbane porn?
I had watched the brilliant Win Wender's film Buena Vista Social Club on the same night. This highly visual film was full of passion for music and the musicians, it treated the Cuban musicians with respect and dignity, and it foregrounded them as people and the music they played with Ry Cooder.
Love in the Air, in contrast, was all surface. There was no exploration of the meaning of the image of Kylie Minogue as pop princess in terms of the development of Australian culture, or the significance of celebrity for pop culture.
The message? Australian pop culture came of age because of monetary success. It was possible because of television--Countdown--and the suburban cultural world of the 1980s. The suburban fans love for Melbourne Pop was tempered by their anxiety about high culture and the European avant garde. It was pop culture celebrating itself in terms of its froth and bubble.
There was a story of sorts. Kylie outgrew suburban Melbourne. She opened up to a global culture by becoming a part of the London pop production machine of Stock Aitken Waterman (SAW). The machine produced glossy banality, happy sounding records and young, clean, stylish singers who loved being pop stars. Kylie as a success pop princess was created by the pleasure machine with its manufactured sound.
These are her roots: pop from the pop factory, music by numbers. She becomes a pop creation; a pure sign; a pure mutable image that could serve as a metonymy for so many meanings. But there was nothing here about market and politics, and no exploration of the society of the spectacle.
These were images of celebrity but ones in constant reinvention:
The other messages? Seduction that perpetuates itself through the alluring appearances of bodies. The transformation meant that she no longer appealed to suburban teenage girls. Kylie was female desire on the way to becoming a sex siren/vamp and a gay icon in the 1990s:
She bends pop into erotica without it even being noticed by suburbia and without it being authorized by the name of Culture.
More success! Kylie shifts from being a pop creation to a pop creator of the pleasure machine (her image and story) after falling in love with a rock god (Michael Hutchinson) who was the reigning presence in the Sydney rock scene. Australian Pop and Rock embodied in two cosmopolitan bodies celebrating sexual desire with a touch of sacredness. As international celebrities they were out of reach and could not be touched.
What was not discussed was Kylie's desire, and search for, artistic credibility collaborated, as with her collaboration with Manic Street Preachers. The programme was about success in the form of "global domination" not pop as art or the independent music scene.
Where were the blackclad ugly beasts from the swamp? The punk & Nietzsche that was other to pop and rock and whose representations were about inchoate experience of violence, death, eros, decay and chaos?
Then celebrity becomes all mixed up as the images and styles blend into one another in the media flows and become parodies and cliches. in which pop flows into erotica without ever being tainted by the smell of pornography
Melbourne was all so different to New York. Such contrasts to highlight cultural particularity can enable us to come to know the past of our visual culture through making histories of it. The nation is constructed in language, we live in a world of visual images and various narratives are buried within them.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at November 6, 2003 06:15 PM | TrackBack