Kylie Minogue ”Better Than Today”It’s a little slice of 1980s heaven: Back-up girls wearing hot pink wigs for shoulder pads! Back-up boys in Robert Palmer suits and Pac-Man helmets, wielding key-tars against a backdrop of Wham-ian block lettering and Atari 2600 level video game graphics of pixelated monsters gobbling up pellets. All the while, our heroine cockteases a small army of Marshall amps. Oops. Pardon me, I’m drooling. (The keytars, people, the keytars.) Did I mention the song’s pretty good too? It’s “Better Than Today”, the third single from Kylie Minogue‘s super-awesome Aphrodite album, which might’ve been a shoo-in for the best dance-pop record of the year, had Robyn not gone totally over-achiever on all our asses.
Though most everywhere else in the world, Kylie Minogue has been a pop icon second only to Madonna for the last 25 years, we here in the U.S. have given her only intermittent attention. Back in the 80s, we appreciated her teenybopper take on the 60s dance hit “The Loco-Motion”, and in 2001, we couldn’t get the la-la-la’s of “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” out of our heads, but that’s pretty much it. Kylie’s getting set to release her 11th studio album (her first on the venerable Astralwerks label) – Aphrodite – on July 6. The album is preceded by the single “All the Lovers”, which comes with a video that should prove very, very eye-catching, taking the “city street nudity” theme, introduced by Alanis Morissette back in the 90s and most recently advanced by Matt & Kim and Erykah Badu, to another level altogether.
Okay, so no one’s getting naked naked in this video, least of all Kylie, who despite being probably more scantily clad than she normally appears in public, remains the most covered. Watch as pedestrians on a bustling city street spontaneously rip their clothes off – spilling their milk, spilling their briefcases, spilling their… marshmallows? – and find the nearest body to make out with. Meanwhile, Kylie rises – all-goddess-of-love-like – as the beautiful gleaming spire at the top of an ever-rising ziggurat of writhing (and occasionally swaying-to-the-chorus) flesh, a glittering tower of carnal indulgence. Oh yes, this video should definitely get Ms. Minogue the undivided attention of the American listening public. Until next year at least.
