During a charity event in Melbourne with other Neighbours cast members, Minogue performed Little Eva's "The Loco-Motion" and was signed to a recording contract with Mushroom Records in 1987. Released as a single, and retitled "Locomotion", it spent seven weeks at number one on the Australian music charts, and was the year's highest selling single. Its success resulted in Minogue travelling to London to work with Stock, Aitken and Waterman. Her first album, Kylie, a collection of dance songs, reached number one on the British albums chart and became the year's highest selling album. It sold over 7 million copies worldwide, with most sales occurring in Europe and Asia, and it contained six hit singles, including the biggest hit, "I Should Be So Lucky". The United States was the only major record market in which the album did not sell strongly, although "The Loco-Motion" reached number three on the US Billboard Magazine Singles Chart. In late 1988 Minogue left Neighbours to concentrate fully on her music career.
A duet with Jason Donovan, titled "Especially For You" was a major hit in Britain in early 1989. The critic Kevin Killian wrote that it was "majestically awful... makes the Diana Ross, Lionel Richie "Endless Love" sound like Mahler". http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/stadler_center/how2/current/others/killian.shtm Another critic named her "The Singing Budgie", and this tag continued to be used by her detractors over the coming years. Chris True's comment about the album Kylie for All Music Guide suggests that Minogue's appeal transcended the limitations of her music, by noting that "her cuteness makes these rather vapid tracks bearable". http://launch.yahoo.com/read/review/14177772
Her follow up album, Enjoy Yourself (1989) was a success in the United Kingdom and Australia, and contained several hit singles, but it failed in the United States, and Minogue was dropped by her American record company Geffen Records. She embarked on her first concert tour in the United Kingdom, France, Belgium and Australia, where Melbourne's The Herald Sun wrote that it was "time to ditch the snobbery and face facts—the kid's a star". Minogue had become Stock, Aitken and Waterman's highest selling act, so in the face of widespread comment that the second album was a poor imitation of the first, it was decided to adjust the overall style of her music.
Rhythm of Love (1990) presented a more sophisticated and adult style of dance music and also marked the first signs of rebellion against her production team and the "girl-next-door" image. Determined to be accepted by a more mature audience, Minogue took control of her music videos, starting with "Better the Devil You Know", and presented herself as a sexually aware adult. A relationship with INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence furthered her attempts to gain acceptance as a mature performer, with Hutchence saying his favourite hobby was "corrupting Kylie", and writing the INXS hit song "Suicide Blonde" in reference to her. http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=1079&id=86972003
The singles from Rhythm of Love sold well in Europe and Australia and were popular in British nightclubs where Minogue started to be regarded as fashionable by the older audience she had targetted. When "Shocked" reached the British Top 10 in 1991, she became the first recording artist to place their first 13 single releases in the Top 10.
Minogue's contract had been for three albums, but she was persuaded to record a fourth. Let's Get To It (1991) was designed to broaden her appeal by presenting a diverse range of ballads and slower dance songs, but despite positive reviews it failed to make the British Top 10. Still, a British concert tour in late 1991 sold out. In Australia her popularity of the previous years diminished, and when the Australian public appeared to have grown indifferent, her supporters described her as a victim of tall poppy syndrome.
By this time Minogue had fulfilled the requirements of her contract and elected not to renew it. She had often expressed the viewpoint that she was stifled by Stock, Aitken and Waterman, and later compared the experience to her time with Neighbours, saying all they wanted her to do was "learn your lines... perform your lines, no time for questions, promote the product". Realizing that her fans were growing apathetic towards the Stock, Aitken and Waterman formula, and that she could only develop as an artist if she broke away from them, she decided to leave. She agreed to record three new songs to be included on the Greatest Hits album, which was released to coincide with her departure from them in 1992. The album reached number one in Britain, but the new singles were only minor hits.
Minogue's subsequent signing with Deconstruction Records was highly touted in the music media as the beginning of a new phase in her career, but the self-titled Kylie Minogue (1994) received mixed reviews. Collaborations with artists such as Pet Shop Boys and M People disappointed both critics and record buyers. The album was a moderate success and the single "Confide In Me" spent five weeks at number one in Australia. When the singles "Put Yourself In My Place" and "Where is the Feeling" failed to make the top ten in Britain or Australia, some commentators predicted the end of her career. Minogue was unhappy with the finished product, describing it later as "a musical bridge over troubled waters—but one that I had to endure ". http://www.kylie.co.uk/pressroom/00000016.html
Australian artist Nick Cave had been interested in working with Minogue since hearing "Better the Devil You Know", saying it contained "one of pop music's most violent and distressing lyrics" and "when Kylie Minogue sings these words, there is an innocence to her that makes the horror of this chilling lyric all the more compelling". "Where The Wild Roses Grow" (1995), was a brooding ballad whose lyrics narrated a murder from the points of view of both the murderer (Cave), and his victim (Minogue), and its success demonstrated that Minogue could be accepted outside of her established genre as a dance artist. It received widespread attention in Europe, where it reached the top 10 in several countries, and acclaim in Australia where it reached number two, and won ARIA Awards for "Song of the Year" and "Best Pop Release". She performed it with Cave at the Australian summer rock festival, "The Big Day Out" before a crowd of alternative music fans, and was well received. She also appeared with Cave during several of his concerts in small venues throughout Europe, which gave her more experience performing outside of the dance/pop genre and before audiences that were not necessarily her fans. She recited the lyrics to "I Should Be So Lucky" as poetry in London's Royal Albert Hall "Poetry Jam", at the suggestion of Cave, and later credited him with giving her the confidence to express herself artistically, saying: "He taught me to never veer too far from who I am, but to go further, try different things, and never lose sight of myself at the core. For me, the hard part was unleashing the core of myself and being totally truthful in my music". http://www.kylie.co.uk/pressroom/00000016.html
By 1997 Minogue was in a relationship with the French photographer Stephane Sednaoui, who described her as a combination "geisha and manga superheroine". He began taking photographs of her that downplayed her glamour, with the aim of attracting a more sophisticated and mature audience, and she drew inspiration from artists such as Shirley Manson and Garbage, Björk, Tricky and U2, and Japanese pop musicians such as Pizzicato Five and Towa Tei (with whom she would later collaborate on the single "GBI: German Bold Italic").
Impossible Princess (1997) featured collaborations with musicians such as Manic Street Preachers, and Minogue contributed the majority of the lyrics. Largely a dance album, its style was not represented by its first single "Some Kind Of Bliss", and Minogue countered questions that she was trying to become an indie artist. She told Music Week, "I have to keep telling people that this isn't an indie-guitar album. I'm not about to pick up a guitar and rock."http://www.kylie.co.uk/pressroom/00000020.html Billboard Magazine described the album as "stunning" and concluded that "it's a golden commercial opportunity for a major with vision and energy . A sharp ear will detect a kinship between "Impossible Princess" and Madonna's hugely successful new album, Ray of Light". http://www.kylie.co.uk/pressroom/00000016.htmlIn Britain, Music Week gave a negative assessment, "Kylie's vocals take on a stroppy edge ... but not strong enough to do much".
It became the lowest selling album of her career in Britain, but was her highest selling album in Australia since her debut album, with sales boosted by a highly successful live tour. In reviewing her show, The Times wrote of her ability to "mask her thin, often nondescript voice with musical diversity and brittle charisma and genuinely great pop songs by any standard", and a live album recorded during her tour, titled Intimate and Live, was successful in Australia. She maintained her high profile in Australia with live performances, including the 1998 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, the opening of Fox Studios in Sydney in 1999, where she performed Marilyn Monroe's "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend", and a Christmas concert in Dili, East Timor in association with the United Nations Peace-Keeping Forces.
Minogue and Deconstruction Records parted company and she signed with Parlophone in April 1999. Her album Light Years (2000) was strongly influenced by 1970s disco artists, such as Donna Summer and Village People, and included several songs written by Robbie Williams and Guy Chambers who imbued their lyrics with humour. New Musical Express wrote: "Kylie's capacity for reinvention is staggering" and summarised the album as "sheer joy" and "what she does best". http://www.nme.com/reviews/5502.htm It received the strongest reviews of her career and quickly became a success throughout Europe, Asia and Australia, selling over 2 million copies worldwide. The single "Spinning Around" became her first British number one in 10 years, and its accompanying video, featuring Minogue in revealing gold hot pants, received widespread television airplay. The subsequent single releases, including the duet "Kids" with Robbie Williams, also sold strongly. She joined Madonna as the second female performer to achieve British number one singles in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.
She played at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, where she performed a cover version of the ABBA hit "Dancing Queen" and her then-current single, "On A Night Like This". She then embarked upon a concert tour, On A Night Like This, which played to sell-out crowds in Britain and Australia, where she sold over 200,000 tickets and set an Australian record for a female artist. Her 6 planned Melbourne shows were increased to 22 due to public demand. Inspired by Broadway musicals, it featured elaborate sets such as the deck of an ocean liner, an Art Deco New York City skyline, and the interior of a space ship, and Minogue was praised for her new material and her reinterpretations of some of her biggest hits, turning "I Should Be So Lucky" into a torch song and "Better The Devil You Know" into a 1940s big band number. She won a "Mo Award" for live entertainment in Australia, as "Performer of the Year". Following the tour she was asked by a Seattle Post journalist what she thought was her greatest strength, and replied, "That I am an all-rounder. If I was to choose any one element of what I do, I don't know if I would excel at any one of them. But put all of them together, and I know what I'm doing." http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0226/two-reighley.shtml
In 2001 she released the album Fever, which retained some disco elements and combined them with 1980s electropop. The first single, "Can't Get You Out Of My Head", became the biggest success of her career, reaching number one in over 40 countries, and selling more than 4 million copies worldwide. The album's success was equally widespread, and after extensive airplay by American radio, Capitol Records released it in the US in 2002. It attracted favourable comment, with Rolling Stone calling it "campy as a tent full of Boy Scouts and yet easy on the cheese", while Popmatters described it as "a perfect album of gorgeous dance music". http://www.metacritic.com/music/artists/minoguekylie/fever She also attracted some scathing commentary, such as from Launch's Bob Gulla who wrote: "she'll do virtually anything to get our attention. Not since Pia Zadora have we seen a more vacant talent grab... an astoundingly bland helping of hollow dance pop grooves and nauseating pleas for sex ... it's so desperately lightweight it's in imminent danger of disintegrating altogether". http://launch.yahoo.com/read/story/12042063 The album debuted on the American Billboard chart at number 3, and the single reached number 7. "In Your Eyes", "Love At First Sight" and "Come Into My World" were substantial hits throughout the world, and Minogue established a presence in the mainstream American market, achieving particular success in the club scene. In 2003 she received a Grammy Award nomination for "Best Dance Recording" for "Love At First Sight", and the following year won the same award for "Come Into My World".
Minogue's stylist and creative director William Baker explained that the music videos for the Fever album were inspired by science fiction films—specifically those by Stanley Kubrick—and accentuated the electropop elements of the music by using dancers in the style of Kraftwerk. Alan MacDonald, the designer of the 2002 Fever tour, brought those elements into the stage show which was based around a framework of seven iconic female images, drawing from Minogue's past incarnations. The show opened with Minogue as a space age vamp, which she described as "Queen of Metropolis with her drones", through to scenes inspired by Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, followed by the various personas of Minogue's career. Minogue said that she was finally able to express herself the way she wanted, and that she had always been "a showgirl at heart".
Her next album, Body Language (2003), was released following an invitation-only concert, titled Money Can't Buy, at the Hammersmith Apollo in London. The event marked the presentation of a new visual style, designed by Minogue and Baker, inspired in part by 1960s icon Brigitte Bardot, about whom Minogue commented: "I just tended to think of BB as, well, she's a sexpot, isn't she? She's one of the greatest pinups. But she was fairly radical in her own way at that time. And we chose to reference the period, which was ... a perfect blend of coquette and rock and roll."
The show attracted mixed reviews, with the main criticisms being that nothing substantially new was presented, and that the new songs did not match the appeal of her previous hits. Despite this, the concert was made into a successful television special that drew high ratings.
The album downplayed the disco style and Minogue said she was inspired by 1980s artists such as Scritti Politti, Human League and Prince, blending their styles with elements of hip hop. It received some of the most positive reviews of her career with Billboard Magazine writing of "Minogue's knack for picking great songs and producers". http://www.billboard.com/bb/reviews/album_article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=2085991All Music described it as "a near perfect pop record... Body Language is what happens when a dance-pop diva takes the high road and focuses on what's important instead of trying to shock herself into continued relevance" http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:7u0qoarawij9~T1 Sales in the United Kingdom and Australia were relatively low, despite the success of its first single, "Slow" and in the United States the album made little impression, although the singles became major club hits. In November 2004, "Slow" was nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of "Best Dance Recording".
As of 2005, Minogue has sold more than 40 million singles and 25 million albums worldwide, and has had at least one number one hit in over 45 countries. She released her second official greatest hits album on November 22 2004, entitled Ultimate Kylie, along with her music videos on a DVD compilation of the same title. The album introduced her single "I Believe in You", co-written with Jake Shears and Babydaddy from the Scissor Sisters. It became her 28th British top 10 single, making her the second most successful female performer on the British charts, behind Madonna. A tour named Showgirl, The Greatest Hits, reported to be the most extensive of Minogue's career, was announced in early 2005.
:
Ever since they first fooled around in the Atari era, movies and videogames have had a troubled relationship.
Movies based on games -- like Super Mario Bros. and Postal-- deliver pure cinematic dreck, yet somehow games based on movies up the crap ante. Slapped together on tight development schedules by B-list teams, movie tie-in games rarely crawl out of the hole of mediocrity. Quite frankly, they dream of being mediocre.
Adding insult to injury, they sell enormously well. The NPD Group reported in June that the PlayStation 2 Iron Man game was May's seventh best-selling U.S. game.
Here's our list of the 10 worst movie-to-game translations in history, with input from a Wired.com reader poll. If it seems heavy on retro games, just remember that things used to be a lot worse.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Atari 2600 owners who ripped open their Christmas presents in 1982 were probably doubled over in glee at the prospect of jumping into the fedora of America's sweetheart, Harrison Ford, and going on an adventure as Indy. Instead, what they got was a game that we might charitably describe as "ahead of its time" but after a drink would call "ridiculous."
Not only were the graphics completely inscrutable -- can you even tell which of these abstract objects is supposed to be Indiana Jones? -- but the game was impossible to understand unless you pored over the instructions. Woe betide you if they ended up in the trash bag with the wrapping paper.
"Indecipherably bad graphics, unintuitive 'gameplay' (if you can even call it that) and the worst possible control scheme ever," writes commenter Sakimori.
:
Star Wars (Namco version)
A long time ago (1987) in a galaxy far, far away (Japan), the development house behind Pac-Man decided to try its hand at creating a Star Wars game for the 8-bit Nintendo system. For the most part, it's a mundane side-scrolling game in which Luke hacks away at enemies with his lightsaber and dies a lot. But you know that things have gone horribly awry when he enters the Jawa Sandcrawler after about five minutes of gameplay to find Darth Vader, who transforms into a scorpion.
No, really. Luckily for everyone involved, this game was only released in Japan.
:
Back to the Future
Screwed up though it was, Namco's version of Star Wars was more or less faithful to the movie insofar as Luke Skywalker does, at times, use a lightsaber. If we were to apply the same sort of thinking to the Nintendo Entertainment System version of Back to the Future, we would necessarily determine that the film starred a young man who spent all his time being assaulted on the street by killer wasps, girls with razor-sharp Hula-Hoops and men wearing pink. Back to the Future's controls were so shaky that players felt like they were as drunk as the people who programmed it.
Even the jump to 16 bits didn't help the series. "Shonky controls and mediocre graphics were just the start of this atrocity that really did seem like it had traveled through time from the past," wrote an anonymous Wired.com reader about Back to the Future III for Sega Genesis.
Back to the Future was just one of the flood of execrable movie-to-game releases foisted on an unsuspecting public by the thankfully dead Acclaim Entertainment. (We'll see them again before we're finished with this dreadful expedition.)
:
Nausicaä Kiki Ippatsu
This is another game that only saw release in Japan, but its worldwide impact has been tremendous. The developers at Tokuma Shoten, tasked with creating a game based on animation legend Hayao Miyazaki's breakout smash Nausicaä, turned a film about nonviolence and environmentalism into a vapid shooter.
As the story goes, Miyazaki was so enraged by the game that Studio Ghibli never had anything to do with videogames ever again. Sure enough, no game projects have ever been released for any of the studio's later films, like Princess Mononoke or the Oscar-winning Spirited Away. Maybe that's all for the best.
:
Friday the 13th
Yes, it's another inscrutably bad movie-to-game translation courtesy of our good friends at Acclaim Entertainment. You all remember Friday the 13th, that horror film about camp counselors who throw knives at Yetis that burrow up from beneath the Earth. At least the Back to the Future games kept epileptic Marty McFly constantly moving toward the goal.
Making a failed attempt at nonlinearity, Friday the 13th mostly left players to wander around the identical screens that made up the virtual version of Camp Crystal Lake, listening to exactly four bars of the worst sonic torture ever devised until they died. Technically it was possible to finish the entire game in three minutes, and we feel terribly sorry for anyone who spent the time to learn how.
"I'm not sure if I've ever seen anyone do anything besides run around and die," writes reader (not the real) Bob Dole.
:
Seven Samurai 20XX
Wired.com reader Fnord called this PlayStation 2 game "a generic-to-bad brawler game that was trying very hard to be Ninja Gaiden, shoehorned and chopped and hammered into something that tried to resemble the plot of one of the best movies ever made."
We simply call it an atrocity. Akira Kurosawa wasn't even five years in his grave, and already his son Hisao was whoring out his classic films to the highest bidder, allowing Japanese pachinko-maker Sammy to turn Kurosawa's samurai masterpiece into a campy futuristic fighting game. It's embarrassing to even say this game's title out loud, let alone play it.
:
Total Recall
For all of Acclaim Entertainment's sins of the 8-bit era, perhaps none was so unbelievably ham-fisted as Total Recall. Turning R-rated films into games for children had to have been hard work, but that still doesn't explain why the gameplay of Total Recall consists of a gorilla that is supposed to be Arnold Schwarzenegger being kidnapped by bearded midgets in pink jumpsuits, dragged into alleys and kicked in the knees. To death.
Everything about this game is hilarious, except for the fact that children spent actual money on it back when the dollar was worth something. Also, there was no three-boobed alien hooker.
:
Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game
Quick, what's a worse idea than turning Street Fighter II into a live-action movie? Turning said live-action movie into a videogame. Hey guys, there already is a Street Fighter videogame, and it's awesome. We don't need one starring Raul Julia. But Raul Julia we get.
Isn't it amazingly sad that this talented actor's final appearance is in a videogame where he (his stuntman, actually) gets to serve as a punching bag for a squad of B-list actors? Besides Jean-Claude Van Damme and Kylie Minogue, there's also Ming Na, and seeing her jump around in a tiny China-doll dress shouting horrifically mangled Japanese catch phrases more than makes up for how preachy Mulan was.
Bonus points: When Street Fighter: The Movie came to the PlayStation and Sega Saturn, it was so bad that it wasn't even published by Street Fighter creator Capcom. Instead, it carried the logo of -- you cannot make this stuff up -- Acclaim Entertainment.
:
Enter the Matrix
Every now and then, there's a movie game that is supposed to change everything we know about movie games. This is inevitably followed by the backlash that results when these massively hyped projects turn out to be just as crappy as their predecessors.
Reviewers agreed that the only reason to play Enter the Matrix would have been to watch the extra footage from the Matrix Reloaded shoot, a desire that simply watching Matrix Reloaded should have cured. Otherwise, it was an utter mess.
Even sadder? In a past life, lead designer David Perry was responsible for one of those rare-as-a-unicorn good movie games: Aladdin for the Sega Genesis.
:
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
Wired.com readers might not have enjoyed the Raiders of the Lost Ark game, but Steven Spielberg liked the Atari 2600 title enough that he asked its designer, Howard Scott Warshaw, to design a game based on his upcoming film E.T.
In time for the film's release. Which was six weeks away.
Faced with an impossible deadline, Warshaw sequestered himself away in his Atari office, emerging just a month and a half later with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. It's not the single worst videogame ever created, but it lives in infamy as the videogame industry's first high-profile disaster. Again, let us look back at children opening their presents one fine Christmas morning in 1982, and watch as they attempt to maneuver E.T. around the game screen, only to fall into a pit that they cannot escape from, no matter how many times they try. Repeat until tears are flowing steadily and Mom takes the game back to the store.
There are many urban legends about E.T., and all of them are true. Atari manufactured 4 million copies of the game and found itself stuck with 2.5 million leftovers, which it buried in a New Mexico landfill. But E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial remains one of the best-selling Atari 2600 games of all time, proving the old adage that people will, in fact, buy any videogame with a movie license on the cover, no matter how terrible.
Published: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 02:00:00 GMT - Source: Wired.Com - Read the article
Literature
Heavy Load: UK punk band with learning-disabled members.
Today on Boing Boing tv -- a sneak preview of Heavy Load: A Film About Happiness, a new documentary about a UK punk band whose members include people who have developmental disabilities. '70s punk star Wreckless Eric describes them as "a triumph of dysfunctionalness," and even Kylie Minogue (they've covered a hit song of hers) has become a fan. The band says their mission is... ...to demonstrate that disability rocks. There are few genres left in music that have yet to be defined. Heavy Load have unwittingly created a brand new one. The band is also behind a campaign called "Stay Up Late" which advocates for the right of cognitively disabled people to be allowed to go out, supervised, to live music shows and -- well, stay out late enough to actually see and hear the show. Again, from the band: We play gigs all over the country and we have noticed that something strange happens at 9.00pm ? people start to go home. Heavy Load are fed up with people with learning disabilities leaving club nights and gigs early because their staff finish their shifts at 10pm. This means they are missing out. If this happens to you: You need to talk about this with your friends, support workers, family and advocates. Our ?Stay Up Late? campaign is to make managers and staff know that we want them to plan ahead and talk to us about what we want to do... Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion, downloadable video, and BBtv podcast subscription info. The full-length documentary premieres on the US cable network IFC on June 23rd, 9PM ET/10PM PT, and again on 24th June. (Special thanks to BB's Mark Frauenfelder, and to the film's director, Jerry Rothwell)...
Published: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 03:19:52 GMT - Source: Boingboing.Net - Read the article
Entertainment
Family dinner as Kylie reaches 40
Family members are due to join Kylie Minogue in Germany later as the singer celebrates her 40th birthday. Published: Wed, 28 May 2008 09:38:50 GMT - Source: News.Bbc.Co.Uk - Read the article
