From NewPop to… NowPop, and what are we to make of Green Gartside hovering around ‘Someday’ like a very discreet but expensive perfume on the imminent Kylie lp? From the minimal techno of first single ‘Slow’ to the impeccable art direction of the lp sleeve, it’s as though someone in the Minogue team actually read Paul Morley’s Words and Music and decided to fulfil his fantasia of Kylie as immaterial pop icon of the post-Now and post-Here. Except ‘Slow’ didn’t really grab me in the same way as ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ and on ‘Someday’ Green is airbrushed out of all existence, worn like a designer label.
It feels almost mandatory here for me to quote Roland Barthes. In his crypto-biography he wrote of artworks whose ‘most obvious quality is of an intentional order: they are concerned to serve theory. Yet this quality is a blackmail as well (theory blackmailed): love me, keep me, defend me, since I conform to the theory you call for…’ Like a lot of ZTT product towards the end, nu-Kylie is pushing all the right critical buttons, bells and whistles, yet — at the risk of coming over all Marcello Carlin — there isn’t much in the way of punctum, nothing of the order of that ravishing minor key bridge from ‘CGYOOMH’: ‘there’s a dark secret in me…’
A much more interesting reappearance of the Scritti signature is the bootlegendary mix of ‘Absolute’ with ‘Like I Love You’ I downloaded by chance the other day, which makes vivid the premonitory beauty of Cupid & Psyche – Green anticipating the silk and steel of Now Pop all the way back in 1985.