Happy Birthday, Kylie Minogue
Today marks the 46th birthday of one of the cutest little pixies ever to make her way to the top of the pop charts: Kylie Minogue. Okay, so maybe she’s not really a pixie – she’s actually five-foot-two, which puts her an inch above Lady Gaga, believe it or not – but there’s certainly not any question about her cuteness, which is practically off the charts.
Born in Melbourne, Australia in 1968, Kylie started her career not as a singer but as an actress, which is old hat to anyone who actually hails from “down under,” not to mention the UK, as her work on the soap opera Neighbours caused such a frenzy of fandom that her character’s 1987 wedding – where she married a character played by fellow actor-turned-singer Jason Donovan – pulled 25 million viewers in Britain alone. In that very same year, Kylie signed her first record deal with Mushroom Records, the folks who first brought you Split Enz and Hunters & Collectors, and released her debut single, a cover of “The Loco-Motion,” and the rest, as the saying goes, is history.
Except not entirely.
Although Kylie’s 1988 debut album, the appropriately-titled Kylie, provided her with a trio of top-40 singles – the others being “I Should Be So Lucky” (#28) and “It’s No Secret” (#37) – she couldn’t pull another hit record in the States after that to save her life. Like, we’re talking to the point that, if you look at her singles discography on Wikipedia, the ‘90s section doesn’t even have a column for the U.S. Meanwhile, compare that to her situation in the U.K., where she scored 23 top-20 hits during the course of the ‘80s and ‘90s, 15 of which actually made it into the top 10.
It took until 2002 – by which point she’d earned four more top-10 hits in the UK – before U.S. listeners finally gave Kylie another chance in the upper reaches of the charts, possibly because “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” had such an insistent hook that even us persnickety Americans couldn’t ignore. Having returned to the pop culture consciousness, she even managed to pull a few more hits, with “Love at First Sight” hitting #23 and “Come Into My World” briefly popping onto the charts at #91. Unfortunately, that’s also how high “Slow” – the first single from her next album, Body Language – made it, and...well, unfortunately, that’s actually the last time one of Ms. Minogue’s singles has hit the Billboard Hot 100. But given how many of her songs have continued to kick ass on the Hot Dance Club Songs chart (“Into the Blue” hit the top spot on April 12), not to mention the fact that she’s sold 10.1 million singles in the United Kingdom, thereby making her the 12th best-selling singles artist in UK history, somehow we’re guessing she still manages to sleep pretty well at night.
But that’s not to say that you shouldn’t educate yourself on all the great pop songs and dancefloor fillers she’s released throughout her career that you’ve missed. In fact, we can’t think of a better way to celebrate her birthday than by spinning around and spinning this playlist of some of her best stuff.
