Time Capsule: Kylie Minogue, Kylie

John Seabrook’s 2015 book The Song Machine casts a pointed look at the synthesis of engineering, artistry and business across the 1990s and 2000s pop production space, in a quest to understand how we have the landscape we do, through songs so hook-heavy they seem genetically engineered to produce pleasure. Prior to this particular song machine, one that grew into a runaway train in the streaming era, the record industry had a litany of little song machines: The hitmakers at Motown, for example, ushered in a movement in U.S. pop in particular that echoes well into this decade with its ingenuity and sincerity; another such hit factory, Stock Aitken Waterman (SAW, or “The Hit Factory”), constructed one of Britain’s foremost dance pop factories, delivering the worst, and the best, of Hi-NRG, a rock-inflected post-disco style of dance pop that excised funk in favor of shine. As a mini-movement, it’s a true mixed bag, and critics still argue among themselves if SAW should be seen as cynics or geniuses. I think they’re neither.

The trio’s radio hits started from a more avant-garde place, recognizing the inherent power in the uptempo, synthetic dance music sweeping UK gay clubs in the wake of Donna Summer’s 1977 masterpiece “I Feel Love.” Their first collaboration, “The Upstroke” by Agents Aren’t Aeroplanes, is an attempted Frankie Goes to Hollywood rip-off that had all the right pieces for a gay club hit. Once they launched Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)” into the stratosphere at the end of 1984, the trio’s compositions dotted English radio for the remainder of the ‘80s with formulaic, aggressively simple pop rife with Motown throwbacks, octave bass lines and fresh-faced stars. To SAW, image was half the story, and linking up with attractive, talented young people and double-tracking their vocals on family-friendly love songs worked more often than it should’ve. SAW became a launchpad for newcomers like Rick Astley and Bananarama while churning out hits for established stars like Donna Summer and Cliff Richard.

Enter Kylie Minogue. Before she was an adult, Minogue had made a name for herself as a teen actress in smaller parts of Australian soap operas—including a difficult two seasons on The Henderson Kids—and delivered her first televised performance singing on Youth Talent Time. As a star on Neighbours, Minogue continued to sing, covering the 1962 Little Eva hit “The Loco-Motion,” itself a product of the Gerry Goffin-Carole King songwriting empire. The cover generated meaningful buzz for Minogue in 1987, helping solidify a record deal and a plan to collaborate with SAW on the other side of the globe. It almost didn’t happen; a miscommunication between the famously frazzled and occasionally difficult trio’s members resulted in Minogue stuck in London for 10 days with no studio time, only to get a few hours to whip up a recording of “I Should Be So Lucky,” which was written in under an hour. Minogue flew home to Australia disappointed.

“I Should Be So Lucky” turned out to be a smash hit. After its late 1987 release, the bubbly, sugar-sweet anthem for crushing stayed at #1 in the UK and Australia for over a month. No one had yet managed to top both charts at once. After extensive, due apologies, Minogue agreed to keep working with SAW for what would become Kylie, her debut album, released in July 1988 just a month after her 20th birthday. The slew of singles in advance of the album catapulted the established actress into a proper music career, inspiring her to leave Neighbours, tour and release a follow-up that next year. Kylie changed everything for her and for pop radio.

SAW are all over the album, writing the rest of the non-“Loco-Motion” tracks. With Kylie, they targeted the teenage audience, an emergent consumer base in the years since the explosion of personal cassette players, and loaded the album with images of love in all its forms: effervescent, unrequited, even trashed. “I Should Be So Lucky” is bright but displays a forlorn girl dreaming to be lucky in love; “Je ne sais pas pourquoi” portrays Minogue as being stuck on a past love over yet more danceable synths and a slamming bass. “It’s No Secret” reads like a sitcom, where Minogue finds out that not only has her counterpart been cheating, but she’s the last to know.

Behind the sweet smile and silly hat on Kylie’s cover was, at least according to the songs, a young girl unlucky in love. SAW made a habit of keeping songs to surface-level detail, excising bridges for more chorus time and keeping things light-hearted—but the teen market and an impending acid house revolution started demanding a little more drama. The pop machine was no stranger to breakup songs or lovelorn balladry, but it can be hard to square exactly how SAW’s Hi-NRG synth-pop fits with anything beyond joy. “It’s No Secret” is a real conundrum: How do you match your vocal energy on a song about being the last to know that your man is unfaithful over bouncy synths, pointy guitar and programmed brass? Minogue’s bright, double-tracked vocals show little signs of faltering; she almost sounds like she’s singing with a slight grin, as if she’s already laughing about her own predicament. What was presumably a cynical attempt to court the teen market with bright music about everyday sadness ended up creating something that is, bear with me, oddly post-modern. Smiling through bad luck in love may seem dreadfully sitcom (because it is), but it makes for an overall uncanny listen.

Minogue’s rich vocals throughout the album are given the SAW standard: double-tracked almost the whole way through. The Hit Factory’s key to making pop classics was uniformly bigger and brighter, and “Look My Way” does away with the doubling, revealing a voice that is still big enough to carry a powerful melody but vulnerable enough to sound genuine. As unforgettable as hits like “I Should Be So Lucky” and “Turn It Into Love” are, “Look My Way” feels the most human. Instead of pile-driving bubblegum brilliance through your ears, Minogue delivers a convincing vocal performance that suggests she may be bigger than the SAW boilerplate.

The SAW assembly line was a fairly unscrupulous bunch. In a freshly globalized pop market, the trio had the artists in their orbit—either produced in their studio, PWL Hit Factory, or signed to their in-house label PWE (short for Pete Waterman Entertainment)—rehashing old hits and trading songs amongst each other to max out the potential in every market they penetrated. “Look My Way” takes a re-recording of the instrumentals from the Whispers’ new jack swing hit “Rock Steady,” re-contextualizing one of the decade’s Hot Black hits for the pop machine’s latest young blonde. The original singer of “The Loco-Motion,” Little Eva, was blocked from owning any of the rights, and after being typecast as a dance-craze singer, she retired to North Carolina in obscurity without anywhere near just compensation.

Similarly, Minogue inherited three songs originally intended for other PWL artists: “Got To Be Certain” was originally written for Mandy Smith; “Look My Way” for Haywoode; “Love at First Sight” had been an instrumental demo for Sinitta. Hazell Dean covered and released “Turn It Into Love” to produce another hit in her arsenal after SAW decided that Minogue had enough radio hits to build hype for Kylie. While SAW were more visibly on the cynical side of things, they were not going against the norms of their industry. Today’s pop machine is a constant flurry of songwriters and singers linking for demos that get tossed off and passed around for the sake of precision engineering, as was the pop industry before SAW. How SAW managed to get radio hits out of Fordist pop manufacturing stumped critics (Neil Tennant once called their records “Thatcherite,” context-free and joyful to a point of ignorance) and, to pop critics today, SAW feels like a low point in pop history.

What fascinates me about the Stock Aitken Waterman story is how their signature dance-pop sound could offer sudden stardom to underdogs, mostly sending folks into what Shaad D’Souza has called the “middle class” of pop stardom. In today’s musical ecosystem, pop is understood as an aesthetic practice just as much as a reflection of popular culture. Even when the capital-p Pop doesn’t top the charts—the last 20 years have been an exciting time of watching it, hip-hop, rock, country and electronica fight with each other for the chart’s pole position—there is this emergent, strong class of singers who’ve carved out smaller, devoted fan bases who will applaud every move. For stars who’ve touched the charts but haven’t commanded them, like Carly Rae Jepsen, Bebe Rexha or Tinashe, there’s an incredible infrastructure for fans to connect and share their favorites in an effort to push their underdog into the mainstream. There are plenty of devotees of Taylor Swift, Beyonce or Lady Gaga doing the same, but the pop middle class formation has a way of collecting attention at formative junctures. Take Charli xcx’s BRAT: By all metrics, Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department “outsold” it, but what BRAT did to elevate Charli’s profile made her the memetic focus at the Democratic National Convention. When I found that out, I did cringe, but I had to hand it to Charli’s Angels: They made it big.

The ‘80s are rich with one-hit wonders and other figures who vied for chart success in a period of great change. The Stock Aitken Waterman trio isolated a specific dance pop aesthetic in Hi-NRG, deviating largely to sand down the pluralistic genre’s avant-garde possibilities (even their songs with Divine sound tame), and marketed the hell out of the artists on their in-house label while generating international leads for their would-be stars. Their formula sent a handful of stars to household name status—Kylie Minogue being the most enduring as a Madonna-level figure in the Commonwealth—while others like Hazell Dean and Big Fun are mostly fixtures in the memories of gay men of a certain age. For girl groups like Bananarama, still going long after their SAW days as one of the most successful acts in their history, that “fiercely loyal” LGBTQ+ fanbase is a point of pride. Sinitta has said the same: She’s always been entwined with the gay scene as the daughter of disco singer Miquel Brown, whose hit “So Many Men, So Little Time” is Hi-NRG royalty, closer to “I Feel Love” than anything Dead or Alive ever did. That connection between the English gay scene and this ready-to-wear dance pop fashion house didn’t just help create hitmakers of their day. It created legends who could perform authentically while singing songs that clearly stuck to the surface.

With Kylie, Minogue demonstrated that she could be more than just a teen actress, that she could perform what her songs asked of her without sacrificing what made her distinct. Even if the songs themselves fail to represent Minogue’s interiority or showcase her true talent—most of the vocals are doubled thickly, for God’s sake—you can hear a singer who can match, even exceed, the energy of her time and make the dated production feel timeless. As inane as big SAW production can be, it has a loaded meaning now when so many pop sensations—underdogs and majors alike, think Taylor Swift—are mining the ‘80s for inspiration. Even Sabrina Carpenter seemed to call back Italo disco, a key ingredient of Hi-NRG, in her smash hit “Espresso.” In the right context, the SAW sound and its components are winners in today’s pop ecosystem. For Carpenter, the curiosity that is “Espresso” helped win her over with critics, leading to the release of Short n’ Sweet, a multi-genre pop exercise that promises to take her from the upper-middle class into sustained stardom.

Is Kylie a perfect album? No. What it did was facilitate Minogue’s uncommon pivot from TV to music, clearing the obstacles for her to achieve the generational stardom she’s cultivated. Even for the SAW powerhouse, Kylie was a slam dunk, becoming the fifth-highest selling album in the UK across the 1980s and the highest for any female artist. In the US, her notoriety was modest but formidable, and curiously she remains in that tier. After Kylie, Minogue released three more full-lengths in partnership with SAW: 1989’s Enjoy Yourself, 1990’s Rhythm of Love and 1991’s Let’s Get to It. She slowly pivoted from the cookie cutter bubblegum pop of her youth into something clubbier, growing from a teen idol into a generational icon and launching herself beyond SAW’s bubble just as the trio started imploding. She’s gone on to release forward-thinking personal pop (1997’s Impossible Princess), millennium-defining disco-dance (2001’s Fever), electroclash (2007’s X) and even leaned country once (2018’s Golden). As of this writing, Minogue has released five new songs in preparation for her 17th studio album, Tension II, the follow-up to last year’s critically acclaimed dance-pop gem. It’s littered with players from across pop’s middle class: Superstar Bebe Rexha and cult favorite Tove Lo share the spotlight on “My Oh My,” and up-and-coming queer favorite Orville Peck can be heard on “Midnight Ride” with legendary producer Diplo.

Minogue herself is not a member of pop’s middle class; she can take over the Australian and British charts just by sneezing near them. Arguably, she’s barely spent any time toiling in that space. But, to understand Kylie’s enduring beauty despite its shortcomings, one has to understand how producers harnessed the next big thing from gay circuits—not unlike the popularization of disco in the 1970s—and turned them into Fordist enterprises that churned out niche legend after niche legend. Pop music as we know it has a very long history, as does dance pop, but it hit an inflection point in the 1980s with more global markets liberalizing and more money to be made. The Stock Aitken Waterman formula itself may be retired, but the pop industry learned a thing or two from the Hit Factory in identifying handsome talents who could deliver feel-good favorites.

In Kylie, that formula met its match in a fully formed star who could take simple numbers and turn them into unforgettable tracks. It helped justify pop for pop’s sake, which has grown into a cottage industry of alternative pop from the banal to the experimental. Perhaps, in no small part because of Kylie, we have the growing fervor around pop stardom and rooting for the niche legends to break into superstar status, for all its brilliance (Brat Summer) and detriments (stan accounts on X). It’s all way more complicated, but wouldn’t it make sense that the constant push to find the next chart topper would be mirrored forty years later in fan bases pushing for their favorite to be that chart topper?

For its 2024 awards, the Recording Academy presented a new category: Best Dance Pop Recording. Among its first nominees were two David Guetta tracks (one with Bebe Rexha, the other with Anne-Marie and Coi Leray), Troye Sivan’s acclaimed single “Rush” and the lead single from Minogue’s 2023 album Tension, “Padam Padam.” In winning the category that year, Minogue not only earned more acclaim for what became the favorite tune at Pride parades that summer, but she earned due recognition for decades imbuing dance pop with a genuine flair, all the way from her Kylie days. Maybe the rascals at SAW have earned a toast, too, for recognizing that the synthesis of dance music and radio-friendly pop could be an enduring combination. As a critic, I’m not interested in giving SAW more credit than they’re due—I think it takes a winsome personality to sell their witty but generic material. But there’s this whole universe of dance pop, from the purveyors of the underground like Shygirl to the big-tent oddities of David Guetta, that can look to the Hit Factory and Kylie Minogue as interesting catalysts for the genre’s popularity. We should be so lucky.

Devon Chodzin is a Pittsburgh-based critic and urban planner with bylines at Aquarium Drunkard, Stereogum, Bandcamp Daily and more. He lives on Twitter @bigugly.