Kylie Minogue: Critical Insights into Music and Media Celebrity

This book is a first-of-its kind contextualization of Kylie Minogue’s creative oeuvre, situating Minogue’s celebrity in relation to musical performance, digital media practices, gender, race, and age. Kylie Minogue’s international celebrity across music, television and film spans more than 40 years. As the only woman recording artist with a #1 album on the British charts in five consecutive decades, and with more than 80 million record sales worldwide, Minogue enjoys a premier status and remarkable longevity. Since her break-out role on the Australian soap opera Neighbours in the 1980s, Minogue’s persona has moved fluidly from ‘girl next door’ to pop diva to gay icon and beyond. Her public disclosure as a cancer-survivor in 2005 drew attention to her ageing stardom and further marked her distinctiveness within international music and media cultures. Divided into four sections, the book traces the production of a “Kylie sound” by attending to vocal aesthetics and musical influences, especially her association with dance and disco. Part Two examines the curation of Minogue's image across live performances as well as visual and social media, including the articulation of an intersectional white female (and ageing) celebrity. Part Three explores Minogue’s diverse fandoms as sites of affective investment in gay iconography and feminist representation. The final section analyzes Minogue's embrace of global cosmopolitanism through musical innovations. A critical appraisal of this one-named global celebrity phenomenon—as “Kylie,” she takes her place alongside Cher, Madonna and Beyoncé in the pop pantheon—is long overdue. In a world increasingly defined by the power of celebrity, and particularly the premium accorded to the platforming of influence across constantly emerging new media forms, the time is right to examine Minogue’s long-standing, dynamic, media-saturated celebrity.