Kylie Minogue Gets the Documentary Treatment

Kylie Minogue: How a “Singing Budgie” won over the world

I seem to have missed several decades of international pop culture, including those that featured the rise to prominence of “pop princess” Kylie Minogue. Watching all three parts of the “Kylie” documentary, new on Netflix, helped to fill in a part of my void.

I had seen a Kylie Minogue video and noticed that she was flashy and attractive, but I hadn’t realized that, at the point that I first saw her, she was already a couple decades into an extraordinary career.

Much of it seems to have happened outside of the United States, so that partly explains my ignorance. Kylie, I learned, was an Australian version of those Disney and Nickelodeon-type kids who grow up to be Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, Selena Gomez, Zendaya, Ariana Grande, Hillary Duff, Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato, Hailee Steinfeld and…you get the point. Establishing a young fan base, and particularly a young female fan base, is a launching pad for an aspiring pop princess.

In fact, watching this video gave me a better understanding of Taylor Swift’s devoted female fan base. Female fans seem to develop attachments to their idols, who they think of as friends, and they stay loyal to them the way girls do to their girlfriends. I don’t think boys do that.

I also learned from watching this documentary – not the first such, there was a documenary on Kylie in 2007 –  that Kylie, who is a tiny little thing, has an extraordinary likability factor. She apparently has always had an innate optimism about her that made me think of a personality who was huge when I was a kid, Hayley Mills. Kylie seems always to have been a natural bright light, a positive addition to anything she’s ever been involved with, even through her journey to find her true self has included public failures.

Kylie was born with delicate features, including pouty lips that part to reveal an enormous bank of teeth. I wonder if part of the light she projects isn’t reflection.

Kylie Minogue began acting on Australian television in 1979, when she was 10-years old, cast in a series of shows. She became a sensation in 1986 with a soap opera called “Neighbours”. Americans may remember the Luke and Laura (General Hospital) phenomena in the U.S., and teenaged Kylie experienced something similar. Her image and career became intertwined with that of her Neighbours co-star, a young blond lad named Jason Donovan. Australians apparently loved this young couple. They stayed with Kylie, even after she broke young Donovan’s heart, leaving him for doomed INXS front man Michael Hutchence.

Kylie’s success as a pop princess began with a hurried London songwriting and recording session, timed so that she could catch a return flight to Australia, where she was shooting her television show. “Lucky, Lucky, Lucky”. Kylie had a surprise hit.

Kylie has a younger sister named Dannii, who is a singer and actress and has been a British TV host for years. She and Kylie had experience performing together on Australian television, but Kylie seems to have been swept to a solo career as a pop princess by some natural force. People love her, especially the gay fan base, for whom she became a super star.

Critics, on the other hand, have not been kind. Kylie’s act mirrored much of what her idol Madonna had done before her, so Kylie has suffered through that comparison. Critics found her disco sound to be all provocative beat and very little brain.

Kylie seems to have struggled for years to gain credibility as an “artist”, to the extent that a person doing a burlesque disco act could achieve as much. She contributed to some of the music she was known for, but in her early days her team was making songs up for her as they recorded them. Everything was happening fast. Profundity was not really the target. Critics were hard on the pop princess, who would sell 80 million records and become Australia’s most successful female pop performer of all time.

Critics weren’t nuts about Kylie the singer, either. She has had an unusual voice, thin but sexy in some way, little girlish until now, at 57, she has matured into a normality that betrays that which made her famous.

Life isn’t fair and for all Kylie Minogue’s success, haters have been mean to her, critics have treated her with disrespect, she has been unable to have the children she wanted, and she has battled cancer for years. While she seems largely to be a person private about personal things, her fame made it impossible for her to hide her health problems. The world rallied to her. She became a heroine to not only her fans, but to women in general who felt for her and have admired the grit she shows in going through what she continues to go through. She’s cool.

I like Kylie and would recommend sitting through her three-part documentary. I don’t know that she is an artist – in fact, the lesson of her personal journey seems for her to have simply accepted herself for who she is, not for what she’s not – but she strikes me as a sweet soul. She seems to just want to be a light in the world, a pop icon with a dance track, a beautiful image.

That’s not nothing.