“Shut down, turn around, don’t look that way anymore…”

Yeah yeah, the Hottest 20 happened over the weekend. Blah, blah, blah. More self-congratulating and lamenting corpesfuckery. Songs by dudes and for dudes. Only one GLBT artist, less than 10% women. So obviously, Kylie Minogue was a shoe-in, right? …right, fellas? Anyway, today I thought we’d talk about Our Kylie again. You know, a lot of people don’t know this about me, but I think Impossible Princess is Kylie’s best record; and remains one of the more underrated pop records of the 90s. It came at a very peculiar time, where she was caught between rock and a hard place. Yeah, literally as in rock music – as showcased here.

A lot of people think the Come Into My World video was the first time several Kylies had appeared on screen at the same time, but trek back five years prior to its release and you’ll find this gem of a clip. Considering the woman has had roughly as many reinventions as Madonna, it was only fitting that several of her personalities came out to play in the Did It Again video. The four Kylies are Cute Kylie, Dance Kylie, Indie Kylie (naturally, my favourite) and Sex Kylie. All four of them try to dominate the screen in the verses, which was a fairly playful – if not excessively blatant – stab at the conflicts that have come with the changing of the times and the style development. Eventually, it looked like Dance Kylie won out: the lead single of the next album was Spinning Around, the video for which is another story for another time. Still, we’ll always have 1997. We’ll always have this wonderful, bizarre time. We’ll always have the Impossible Princess. Kiss the tiara.