“Hold on to Now” by Kylie Minogue, Saturday, September 30, 2023
While Troye Sivan was clubbing in his home of Perth, Australia, between COVID lockdowns, the soundtrack may have included songs by fellow Aussie Kylie Minogue, who has been an iconic pop star for a certain demographic for decades. But it’s not just the gay clubs where Kylie is famous. In fact, she is the highest-selling Australian female artist of all time. In Europe, she is often called the “Princess of Pop” because of her sense of style and her hit-making. In America, mainstream pop audiences probably know Minogue for her 2001 hit “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” which is the singer’s most streamed song.
SOME MOMENTS ARE MAGIC. But pop music is much more than the Weekly Top 40, and the songs popular in Australia and Europe don’t always catch on in America. Kylie Minogue made several hits and even reached her Hot 100 peak before 2002 in the ‘80s with the number 3 hit “The Loco-Motion” in 1988 from her eponymous debut album. The song was a cover of a 1962 pop song written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, originally performed by Little Eva and later by Grand Funk Railroad. But after her second single, Minogue only reached the lower regions of the Hot 100 until her big comeback record Fever in 2001. By 2002, Minogue was 34 and returning to popularity, laying a prototype for new millennium dance beats, a staple of her career for the next twenty years. Minogue never followed up “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” for U.S. Top 40 listeners, but her latest album Tension, released last Friday, is what critics and Minogue are calling a return to Fever.
DREAMIN’ WE’LL BE DANCIN’ FOREVER. The lead single from Kylie Minogue’s most recent album Tension, “Padam, Padam,” was considered to be a “gay anthem” for the summer. The song is a seriously danceable track. The second single and second track on the record, “Hold On to Now” is an electronic dance song with a sadder song with lyrics that evoke mild existential dread. Kylie’s voice is part siren reassuring her listeners that everything will be worked out someday. Yet somehow, maybe because I’m not dancing at the office or at home when I’m listening to it, I’m pulled back to the questions the song raises. Elsewhere on the album, the fifty-five-year-old singer balances current club sounds with lyrics of falling in love--or lust--and the search for love and being taken care of by a lover. Today’s song reminds us that now is all we ever have. Sort of like my deleted post of Switchfoot’s “Gone”--that’s a story for later--it doesn’t do us any good to stress about what may happen. It also doesn’t help us to live in the past. And yes, most of the time, we have to get to work. But occasionally, we can just enjoy shaking our asses on the dance floor for a bit.
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