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In another thread, Radiator said: So, cutting to the chase, are you going to to offer some justification for your somewhat hollow claim that Kylie "starts trends rather than follows them"?
It must surely be clear to anyone reading said thread with the tiniest shred of reading comprehension skills, that Kylie played a role in the crossover of bootlegs/'mash-up' records from the underground to the pop charts. That'll do for example 1.
Before I move on - let me just ask, are you based in the UK or USA, Radiator - I'm genuinely unclear? Let me put it this way: the sound of chart pop, particularly from female artists, has moved in two different directions over the past couple of years in terms of UK radio. One is towards an r&b and hip-hop flavoured sound - the American influence, essentially. The big acts who have helped inspire this direction are fairly obvious (Beyonce & co, Mary J, Ashanti - the latter of which is really just the latest in what is now quite a long line - it's a tradition). The influence can be heard in records like Liberty X's 'Just A Little', or those by Jamelia and damn, who's that woman who did that "you can be the hardest something something it don't matter to me" song? Javine?
On the other hand, you have a move towards a more disco influenced, electro sound - a more European sound, if you will - and it's this direction for which I think Kylie has been at least partly responsible for pushing pop. From 'Spinning Around' onwards, she's been releasing a series of singles that sound like they belong in the disco, or the club (I know the difference between the two can be arbitrary, but it's worth acknowledgiong). Rather than non-r&b pop as sugary rush and playschool chant (eg, S Club's 'Reach'), this is pop as nagging groove - the beauty of repetition. Which is good, because it's better to dance to, and becomes irritating much less readily.
Performing the Fischerspooner version of 'Come Into My World' on Top Of The Pops is probably the most obvious moment - you can pin the crossover of a certain sound to that specific moment, if you like. And the results can be heard all over the radio, whether it's her own sister, the new Holly Valance single, Rachel Stevens' solo stuff, etc. BUT even more tellingly, Kylie's sound on Fever has fed back into the clubs/'underground'. Tracks like Goldfrapp's 'Strict Machine' or Felix Da Housecat & Miss Kittin's 'Silver Screen Shower Scene' (and the extent of their success) clearly bear the stamp of being post-'CGYOOMY'/'CIMW', to my ears, and that's just for starters. And to me, this is when a pop artist starts to become truly influential - when not only their more obviously 'commercial' peers, but also the more 'credible' acts and scenes from which they themselves originally drew, start displaying their debt to such an artist. |
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