Kylie Minogue: Critical Insights into Music and Media Celebrity

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

This book is a first-of-its kind contextualization of Kylie Minogues creative oeuvre, situating Minogues celebrity in relation to musical performance, digital media practices, gender, race, and age. Kylie Minogues international celebrity across music, television and film spans more than 40 years. As the only woman recording artist with a #1 album on the British charts in five consecutive decades, and with more than 80 million record sales worldwide, Minogue enjoys a premier status and remarkable longevity. Since her break-out role on the Australian soap opera Neighbours in the 1980s, Minogues persona has moved fluidly from girl next door to pop diva to gay icon and beyond. Her public disclosure as a cancer-survivor in 2005 drew attention to her ageing stardom and further marked her distinctiveness within international music and media cultures. Divided into four sections, the book traces the production of a Kylie sound by attending to vocal aesthetics and musical influences, especially her association with dance and disco. Part Two examines the curation of Minogue's image across live performances as well as visual and social media, including the articulation of an intersectional white female (and ageing) celebrity. Part Three explores Minogues diverse fandoms as sites of affective investment in gay iconography and feminist representation. The final section analyzes Minogue's embrace of global cosmopolitanism through musical innovations. A critical appraisal of this one-named global celebrity phenomenonas Kylie, she takes her place alongside Cher, Madonna and Beyonc in the pop pantheonis long overdue. In a world increasingly defined by the power of celebrity, and particularly the premium accorded to the platforming of influence across constantly emerging new media forms, the time is right to examine Minogues long-standing, dynamic, media-saturated celebrity.

Author Bio

Stephen ONeill is Associate Professor of English at Maynooth University, Ireland. He is the author of two monographs: Shakespeare and YouTube (Bloomsbury, 2014) and Staging Ireland: Representations in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (2007). He has co-edited two books and two journal special issues. Maria Pramaggiore is Professor and Chair of Interdisciplinary Studies at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC, USA. She co-edited Vocal Projections: Voices in Documentary (Bloomsbury, 2018) with Dr. Annabelle Honess Roe and has published articles on Mr Ed and Francis the talking mule (2021), YouTube soldier videos (2016), radio after Hurricane Katrina (2010), the 9/11 Sound Memorial (2010), and the use of jazz in Neil Jordans films (2005).