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Kylie Minogue’s signature tune Can’t Get You Out of My Head is one of those rare moments in pop: sleek and chic and stylish and damnably danceable, but with a darker element hidden in plain sight.
There’s nothing second-hand about it: the restraint Kylie exercises in the vocal serves the music and the sentiment of the lyric well. As Guardian critic Dorian Lynskey suggests, it feels like the single-minded pull and sway of Kylie’s obsession – “I can’t get you out of my head/La la la/La la la la la”, she repeats over and over – goes beyond simple lust. It could well be aimed at the forbidden fruit; a one-night stand, a cheat – real or imagined – on her full-time lover.
Despite the simplicity of its lyric, the darkness contained within the locked grooves and velveteen robo-disco of Can’t Get You Out of My Head is very far removed from the upbeat bounce of Kylie’s late 80s and 90s output, when she was mainly known for the pop fluff of songs like her 1988 debut single The Loco-Motion.
On early Stock, Aitken and Waterman forays such as I Should Be So Lucky, Kylie famously plays the wide-eyed ingénue with alacrity. There’s no such optimistic looking to the future here: she knows this obsession she has with her mystery lover is unhealthy, and that ultimately it could destroy her if she allows it. But she can’t get it (you) out of her head. It’s a desire that is wholly dependent on her own self-control. So she performs her dance of seduction, while subcutaneously giving off signals that emphasise her unavailability (giving off an aura of ‘purity’ while performing in a plunging neckline).
Some academics have suggested that the measure of restraint and unavailability that Kylie exhibits in the retro-futuristic video to Can’t Get You Out of My Head is indicative of a wider dance of control that hyper-sexualised white female pop stars perform in the public arena.
In a 2005 essay entitled Naughty Girls and Red Blooded Women (Representations of Female Heterosexuality in Music Video), academics Diane Railton and Paul Weston compare and contrast the videos to Beyoncé’s 2003 single Baby Boy and Can’t Get You Out of My Head. The first, the pair suggest, is representative of a certain "natural" black female sexuality that traces back its pattern of raced representation to colonial times: the black female body portrayed as “primitive, feral, uncontrolled and uncontrollable” – indicative of a (pop music) culture that often prefers to portray the black woman as sexual predator.
In marked contrast, Kylie’s performance is seen as “pure, restrained and controlled” – an idealised trope for white female sexuality that also has its roots in Victorian and colonial discourse. Both women perform a dance of seduction through their videos (and songs), but where Beyoncé "represents a universal availability”, Kylie's availability "is always provisional, restricted, and contingent”.
Written by Cathy Dennis and Rob Davis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head was originally intended for S Club 7 – whose manager Simon Fuller rejected it. (Sophie Ellis-Bextor also turned it down, perhaps surprisingly. It seems perfect for her brand of lustrous manufactured pop.) The song was then passed along to Kylie’s A&R exec: supposedly, Kylie agreed to record it after hearing just 20 seconds of the demo.
The single was immediately popular on its release in September 2001. It reached No 1 in around 40 countries, including Australia (and every European country, barring Finland) – and has reportedly gone on to sell over 6m copies worldwide. It also denoted a cementing in the change in the marketing and public perception of Kylie, which began with the release of the sexually-charged video to Spinning Around in 2000: wherein she transformed from the homely girl-next-door, soap opera star Charlene – so loved by the Australian public – into a much more flirtatious, sophisticated persona.
Can’t Get You Out of My Head predated the vast commercial and critical success of Daft Punk by several years. In many respects, it was one of the points where (as the BBC suggested) manufactured pop gained a new postmodern respectability. It marked a clear shift in attitude towards pop music among the "serious" rock critic fraternity: the idea that (manufactured, female) pop music might well be the equal of (organic, male) rock music after all, that each has their high points and their low. It didn’t hurt that you could trace the beat back to similar (male) critically-praised grooves from New Order and Kraftwerk: but this was as much about the refined, populist 70s disco of Rodgers and Edwards and Giorgio Moroder as anyone.
And it was by Kylie. Australia’s own Kylie.
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