From underground to mainstream: Kylie Minogue and French house
1. From underground to mainstream: Kylie Minogue and French house
With the release of Kylie Minogue's album Fever in 2001, many critics made
the connection between the song Love At First Sight and the international
hits of French house artists such as Daft Punk and Stardust. In NME, Alex
Needham mentions the influence of the “French robots” that he associates
with a “filter disco effect” that “splashed all over” the song. When Alexis
Petridis, in The Guardian, talks about “fashionable electronic effects largely
borrowed from Daft Punk”, he is referring to the same technique. He also
mentions Stardust's Music Sounds Better With You, which uses similar effects.
In the same vein, Jacquelin Hodges makes the link with the group Modjo,
and Hunter Felt with the song Digital Love by Daft Punk.
But what is this French house from which Love At First Sight seems to have
been inspired? How does it differ from the older deep house it’s indebted to?
That’s what I’ve been working on over the past few months. The elements of
definition that emerge from my literature review are essentially social,
historical or geographical. I tried to complete them by means of a
comparative musical analysis of four French house and four deep house
tracks. Based on this work, I will show what Kylie Minogue borrows from
the musical and extra-musical characteristics of French house in Love At
First Sight. Then I will consider the elements she left to French house, which
will allow me to open the particular case of this song to a broader issue of
popular music studies, the question of the relationship between the
underground and mainstream scenes.
A musical influence
The use of filters is the most obvious musical influence of French house on
Love At First Sight: that’s what both Needham and Petridis point out.
Filtering, or the artificial attenuation of certain frequencies in the sound
spectrum by electronic means, is widespread in popular music. It can be
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2. encountered in such effects as the “wah-wah” or “phaser”, and is a key
element of analog synthesizers. My analysis shows that the artists of French
house make very frequent, diversified and obvious use of filtering.
One of the most specific and audible ways to use it is to drastically filter all
instrumental tracks, as Daft Punk does in the first eight bars of Around The
World with a low-pass filter that attenuates frequencies above 1000 Hz. This
effect is even more conspicuous when associated with a variation in the
filter cut-off frequency, i.e. the limit frequency at which the spectrum is
amputated, something which Simon Reynolds describes as “low-pass filter
sweep”. This is what Daft Punk does from the ninth bar of Around The World
onward. The introduction of Music Sounds Better With You by Stardust
consists of a looped sample subjected to a bandpass filter, which attenuates
both low frequencies (below 400 Hz in this case) and high frequencies
(above 3000 Hz), without changing the cut-off frequency. Kylie Minogue
draws inspiration from both in the introduction to Love At First Sight, with a
bandpass filter between 100 and 1000 Hz, which opens very gradually at
first, then much-more quickly on the very last beat.
She also borrows the idea of a very pronounced low-pass filtering on all
tracks except the voice from Music Sounds Better With You. In Love At First
Sight, this part is particularly highlighted by a “low-pass filter sweep”
effect playing the role of spectral fade-out and fade-in.
There is no melodic or harmonic language that is typical of French house: of
the four tracks I have analyzed, one is polyphonic and clearly modal; the
second is harmonic and tonal; the third is also harmonic but modal; and the
last is atonal! However, there is a tendency for melodic, harmonic and
rhythmic patterns to be developed from some external source idea, which is
a sample from a disco song in three cases out of four. In a way, Kylie
Minogue takes part in this process since the six-note main riff, which is
repeated throughout the song, is derived from two external sources of
inspiration: its first bar recalls the first bar of Around The World’s bass line,
while the second is very close to the fourth bar of the Music Sounds Better
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3. With You. Of course, one should be cautious about drawing conclusions from
groups of only three notes; but these are not just any notes.
The first three notes of Around The World actually come from Chic's Good
Times. This bass line, among the most influential in popular music, has
directly inspired many other titles such as Sugarhill Gang's Rapper's Delight,
Queen's Another One Bites The Dust, Captain Sensible's Wot? and, of course,
Daft Punk's Around The World. Daft Punk admitted Chic's direct influence on
this track in an interview for Wax Poetics in 2013. All these songs have taken
up without any modification the formula consisting of 3 staccato crotchets
on the tonic stressing 3 successive beats, while the following varies
according to each version, always preserving the idea of a contrasting
syncopated rhythm in the following bar. My analysis of Around The World
shows that a large part of the polyphonic development of this song is based
on this external inspiration. So I interpret these first three notes of Love At
First Sight as a new “daughter” bass line from Good Times, probably through
the influence of Around The World.
As for the second bar, we recognize the syncopated rhythm and melodic
motif of the sample from Chaka Khan's Fate, which forms the basis of Music
Sounds Better With You. The similarity is even more obvious in the fourth bar
when the bassline (added by Stardust) doubles the upper part of the chords.
In the following montage, these excerpts from Around The World and Music
Sounds Better With You are transposed to the same key and tempo, and
played successively then simultaneously with Love At First Sight to highlight
this melodic influence. It is interesting to note that the melodic material
borrowed by Kylie Minogue from Daft Punk and Stardust is precisely the
very same material that they themselves had first borrowed from their disco
idols.
The question of Frenchness
The existing literature more readily defines French house by extra-musical
characteristics, whether social, historical, or geographical. Does Kylie
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4. Minogue share some of them? Not really. She doesn’t make electronic
music, did not grow up in the Paris of the eighties or compose her album in a
home-studio. Raphaël Malkin recounts a meeting between Kylie Minogue
and the organizer of the emblematic Respect French house evenings,
Frédéric Agostini, which took place in July 2000 following a concert in Los
Angeles with Dimitri From Paris and Thomas Bangalter (who is a member of
both Daft Punk and Stardust). But this is not enough to include her in the
friendship and professional network often used as a social definition of
French house. However, certain indications suggest that Kylie Minogue
could have imitated the so-called “Frenchness” of French house. A concept
that, in itself, is problematic.
The French house's Frenchness was often questioned at the peak of its
popularity. With hindsight, it appears that nothing particularly “French”
characterizes its most influential tracks. The hypothesis of a relationship
with the Musique concrète of the GRM or the French disco of Cerrone or
Ottawan is very questionable. Some artists such as Dimitri “From Paris”
exploit Paris's touristic reputation but this remains a minority trend.
Abroad, the common quality recognized to French house artists is a certain
“elegance”, or “refinement”, considered to be typically French, in a similar
vein as luxury goods or high fashion. If the care given to their image, the
videos, costumes and packaging by most of these artists is undeniable, the
correlation of these aspects with the artists’ nationality is probably a cliché.
Nevertheless, Kylie Minogue seems to use this cliché in a tacit and discreet
way. To get a better idea, let's take a closer look at three clips from Fever,
starting with Love At First Sight.
Two elements remind me of Daft Punk in this video. The first is the helmet
worn by the dancers from 3'20" which is similar to those of Daft Punk: the
colour of one and the shape of the other. The year before the video was shot,
Daft Punk had made a strong impression by disclosing their famous helmets
designed by Tony Gardner, associated with their new public identity as
robot characters. The second concerns the “robotic” choreography, starting
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5. at 2'20" which is similar to that of the robot characters in Around The
World’s video clip. In his article Seven Ages Of Kylie Minogue, Lee Barron
evokes the “robotic” look and movements of the dancers in the video clip of
Can't Get You Out Of My Head which is carried on in the Kylie Fever 2002 tour
with the “Kyborg Queen” costume. To return to Love At First Sight, the
costumes that appear from the second verse at 1'12" remind me of the
Leeloo character in Luc Besson's film The Fifth Element, that shares many
similarities with French house songs: the work of a French creator inspired
by Anglo-Saxon models, it was an international success in 1997, at the same
time as the fashion for French electronic music was booming. The costumes
in this film were designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier, a figure of French
high-fashion.
The video clip of Come Into My World, shot in Boulogne-Billancourt near
Paris, features many Parisian clichés through its characters and sets. Its
production was entrusted to Michel Gondry, who had directed the clips for
Around The World and Music Sounds Better With You a few years earlier.
Gondry is one of the visual designers who are renowned for giving French
house a touch of elegance which is considered typically French. As such, his
work was for example presented at an exhibition dedicated to the visual
aspects of French house at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 2012.
None of these visual elements taken independently would be enough to give
Fever this aura of Frenchness. But this bundle of converging indications, in
this musical and temporal context, corroborates the hypothesis of a French
influence, or rather the influence of a somewhat fantasized Frenchness such
as that which contributed to the reputation of French house, on the
videographic work that accompanies the singles from Fever.
Underground / mainstream
After having shown what Kylie Minogue possibly took from French house,
both musically and extra-musically, it seems interesting to me to question
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6. what she might have chosen to leave. Through these differences, we will see
a demarcation line drawn between two facets of the music industry that are
often presented as exclusive of each other, the underground and the
mainstream. This will be an opportunity, through the example studied today,
to contribute to drawing its outline.
While mainstream status is hardly debatable for Love At First Sight, French
house that evolves from the illegality of Parisian rave parties to radio hits
like Music Sounds Better With You is more difficult to rank. According to
Violaine Schütz, Raphaël Malkin and others, the attraction-repulsion
relationship between French house and the music industry is one of its
commonly accepted extra-musical characteristics. Daft Punk personify this
ambiguity perfectly. Known to hide their faces as a rejection of the
star-system, they agreed to sign with Virgin, a major, on the condition that
they remain entirely independent artistically.
This artistic freedom is promoted by a more artisanal approach to music
production which is centred around the home studio. By recording their
music “at home”, using the new technologies democratized during the
eighties and nineties, they avoided the traditional recourse to expensive
professional recording studios, those temples of popular music that
represent significant operating costs and therefore limit the time spent on
site to create or experiment. Free from the need for such an investment,
previously granted by record companies in exchange for guarantees of
profitability that generally translate into sales and marketing department's
right to control creative work, the artists of French house all have the
artistic independence to which they aspire. The rough sound and ingenious
but approximate mix of Daft Punk's Homework, highlighted by Ulf
Poschardt has been considered as one of its main positive qualities.
Although this sound has influenced many musicians later on, it has not been
imitated by Kylie Minogue in Love At First Sight, which remains a very
“professional”, smooth or even sanitized production, conducted in a
recording studio by producers and technicians perfectly in line with the
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7. usual techniques and standards of the music industry. These differences in
production strategies should be put in relation with Agnès Gayraud’s
observations made in her Dialectique de la Pop, about the importance of
amateurism in the concept of genius as it is understood in the field of
popular music.
This independence is not only economic, but can also be expressed in terms
of artistic collaboration. Daft Punk, like Stardust, Motorbass, Cassius, Mr.
Oizo or Air, were at the same time the composers, performers, technicians
and producers of their own music. The Homework credits are expeditious:
“All tracks written, performed and produced by Thomas Bangalter &
Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. Mixed and recorded @ Daft House” (i.e. in
Bangalter's apartment). A collaboration which is at the very least limited,
compared to the thirty or so authors, composers, musicians, producers,
mixers and engineers surrounding Minogue on Fever. Here again, it is
interesting to relate this to Gayraud's comments on the importance of
teamwork and the division of labour in the process of developing so-called
mainstream popular music.
In his article The Seven Ages of Kylie Minogue Lee Barron discusses Kylie
Minogue's “multiple identities”, making a connection with other great
names in pop as a global genre, such as David Bowie or Madonna. French
house allows the pop performer to embody a new character and reinvent
herself. This can be seen as a form of recognition deserved by those who
have won the hearts of the public; or, according to some purists, a
perversion of the expression considered more “authentic” of early French
house. In any case, a careful examination of the elements taken or left from
French house by Minogue shows two things: alluding to the aesthetics of
French house doesn’t question Kylie Minogue’s status as a mainstream pop
star, and even helps to define it; and despite their popular and commercial
success, French house artists seem to be rooted in their underground
origins.
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