What a moment this May has been. An Impossible Princess walked herself down the aisle to an audience of billions, re-inspiring and re-writing the rule book. Let it be noted that Meghan Markle is a card carrying yogini no less. Now, if celebrity is a ridiculous thing anyway and monarchies are in 'stay relevant or die' mode, then how fantastic that two crazy kids with a penchant for rebelliousness be given the keys to the kingdom (a platform) to do some good in the world? It's surely more credible then other enfant terribles who apply for trademarks on the name Kylie, without realising that there's been a Kylie before her and a Kylie who is still very much a here and now, thank you very much. Hello echo chamber.
So here's another May 2018 fact... Kylie Minogue celebrated her 50th birthday party this month, according to the copy of Vogue I was reading at my local (cafe, not pub) Piccola Baia, taking a stolen moment in the sun. Far out. How did Kylie arrive at 50?
A curious bit of trivia that's always stuck in my head / 'Can't Get you Out of My Head' / was that Kylie Minogue had scheduled the release of her landmark album Impossible Princess for mid year of 1997, but held off it's release following the tragic death of Princess Diana in August that same year. All of the artwork, everything was done. What an extraordinary hand of timing that is, to think she could well have been out in the world with that comment like prophecy. In any case from an artful perspective, what followed is a significant bit of cultural pathos anyway. Allow me to, explore...
In 1997 I was writing the national news section of the morning bulletins, for a radio station in my home town of Newcastle (Australia), when Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed had that fatal car accident. So for weeks I wrote and re-wrote the script that tried to make sense of the story, in a sort of haiku 2DayFM commercial radio style. I’m not judging that. I actually really liked the opportunity to catch people where they are, listening to music driving around, delivering snippets of news during their morning commutes.
I remember at the time, a cultural murmur about how little girls could no longer dream of being princesses. That the world's heart break over the loss of Princess Diana was actual, mythical and existential. Watching recent documentaries about the expectations on William and Harry to walk through the streets at their mother’s funeral, actually turn impressions of the Queen on the head. Back then she was seen as distant and disconnected, but now I get her point that she had wanted to protect the children and had wanted to allow a space for their grief.
Reporting on those times, back then was the beginning of this curious media practitioners phenomenon, of how when you write and re-write and re-work news bulletins from 4am to 9am every day, or monitor breaking news for broadcasters (it comes to mind tears streaming down my face at work, watching the rescue of office workers in the immediate aftermath of the Auckland earthquake)... or simply to, again and again make sense of stories, that those stories become 'nearly' lived experiences.
I say "nearly lived experiences", to qualify a gap here. It's the way in which some stories even at an apparent distance to our immediate reality are so deeply effecting that we do actually have an experience of the event. Like outward moving ripples on the surface of water, or the question of who's caring for the carer? There are moments when a society shifts culturally. When stories touch our hearts and inspire total strangers to start spontaneously talking and sharing those feelings en masse. In those times, it's actually happening to the observers in these refractive ways, simultaneous to those of you heartbreakingly at ground zero, different but nonetheless effecting. Bless. We are experiencing loss too. Or, we are also experiencing joy. Some moments like Cathy Freeman lighting the flame at the Sydney 2000 Olympics or a couple much like any other - getting married can fill us all with joy.
In yoga or mindful meditation we talk about the role of the witness and the witness perspective, which is supposed to give us an objective, strategic emotional distance from a trip the mind is taking. But in literal proximity as humans, we can bare witness to the life events of others and it deeply touches us.
For me, this truth, is the promise of the sacred feminine - relatedness.
Described nicely in We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love by Robert A Johnson, who suggests:
“The feminine, whether in a woman or a man, will usually drop her grudges, and forget the wounds of the past if she is offered genuine relatedness and affection in the present. This is one of the most noble and beautiful instincts in woman, one of the ways that she serves and transforms life. Relatedness is her first principle, the dominant theme of her nature, that for which more than all else, she lives.
So it is with Iseult. When Tristran.... ”
I direct you specifically to 'relatedness' as a terrific summary of what the creator of life, the Shakti, sacred feminine goddess of the Indian tradition, points towards. The interconnected nature of existence, that we are all effected, related and interdependent.
Hence the need for meditation, to systematically unpick ourselves from it all, in order to step back and identify which parts of existence must I really trouble my soul with? What mysteries should I be seeking to unlock and ultimately put down? What do I let go of? Then what am I ready to pick back up, but with a shift in perspective. What is the process for moving through the souls journey to enlightenment, ideally before I've got to race off to pick the kids up from sport and get dinner on!
Back to Kylie / "Step Back in Time" / that's the thing about pop culture and pop music. These little golden 'memes' shared, broadcast (instead of the news), downloaded - contain, the potential for relatedness. In a dissociative / reference to Paul Mac and Daniel Johns / world, pop music returns poetry and allows the soul to speak. And, a lot of people get it, for themselves in rather personal ways at any distance from the specific events that inspired the music.
This idea is written into smash hit musical Jersey Boys when Frankie Valli makes the comment in one of his reflective soliloquys - everyone loved the beetles, the rolling stones, but our music - our music was the stuff you fell in love to. It was the music real people, your mechanic, the local shop keeper, the average person was humming to.
So a few years ago when Kylie donned the unforgettable golden hot pants then smashed out 5 of the most terrific pop music defining albums (ever?) written, to still understated but steady critical acclaim. More importantly the result was epic fandom bliss even if just for the people truly listening / "Some kind of bliss" / (thank you very much, yes she did Janet, Madonna, Sia, Justin, Katy, Avalanches et al) we see that Kylie was finally moving beyond the haunting reviews of those asshole critics of the early Stock House and Waterman days, whose ghosts would chase her creatively for years to come and I'd wager still perhaps do now.
For aren't we all formed by what we've lived? And isn't that worth singing about?
“Makes me that much stronger
Makes me work a little bit harder
It makes me that much wiser
So thanks for making me a fighter
Made me learn a little bit faster
Made my skin a little bit thicker
Makes me that much smarter
So thanks for making me a fighter”
But before all of that arrival at state sanctioned coolness (when the critics finally graduate from their Communications degrees with a sense of genre theory), Kylie put out an album called Impossible Princess and I was 20 and I was listening. It was moody, soulful, artful, connected, raw and fragile. It revealed too much, it was punchy but paired back and just like the way she performed it in concert. The showgirl wore black with a sleek ponytail, insisting upon singing everything live - and for those irrelevant dicks who were awaiting the next opportunity to froth at the mouth since SH&W left the building, it confused people...
My take on it is, that back then in pop culture, upon the cusp of a pre 9/11 shift, we were still asking artists to say something authentic and real and put their face and name on it. Before Sia and Lady Gaga could hide behind pop performance art (and good on them, that's cool too), this confusing album was wedged in a moment, post nirvana, when it was ok to be sad and lost. Well, so was Kylie. But truthfully I didn't read it as sad, I just read it as soulfully seeking her / "Some Kind of Bliss" /.
It was just simply in the music. Here is a women charting her course, here is a woman seeking... Here's the lyrics on the final track on the album / Dreams (Impossible Princess) /
“To have every man but to love only one
To wake with the moon and sleep with the sun
To be a sinner, a saint, a lover, a friend
To know a beginning but never and end
To fly in the ocean and swim in the skies
Believer in truth, defendant of lies
To know the purest love, the deepest pain
To be lost and found again, and again, and again
These are the dreams of an Impossible Princess
To know the power of wealth and poverty
To taste every moment and try everything
To be hailed a hero, branded a fool
Believe in the sacred and break every rule
To give into pleasure with no boundaries
Living in chaos and harmony
To feel the touch of a man, a woman’s caress
To know the limit of torture and tenderness
These are the dreams of an Impossible Princess
It’s a way of dealing with all the feeling keep believing in dreams””
The braveness it takes, to share that voice, in the midst of a post grunge, Aussie pub rock halcyon daze, well - seriously. And credit where credit's due, we have the kids from Seattle to thank for some of this.
For a girl growing up on the beach in a Steel City (Newcastle), as it was known (back when Australian cities had identities based on the dominant work of the men in it) - I was really moved by that album (clearly). I felt like for those times in my life when I was deeply searching for something beyond the suburb, I realised, that out there in the world, others were too. The search for the sacred feminine for me, had commenced. I was just beginning to understand that it even had a name!
And if you wonder what people connect to Princess Diana about, it was exactly our sense of her humanity, both her empathy and her own crazy search for meaning and connection. A kind of embodiment of being heart led. She made her life and her power meaningful, just like the manifesto/love pact of Harry and Meghan promises to do.
So, Kylie expressed that album and after that, she kind of honed her craft and did what people do, they get better at the work. I stayed with her during those albums, I think because she was distilling ideas identified earlier in her work but making them slick, palatable and danceable. Hurrah. / "The Disco Needs You" /.
Somewhere along the way pop music got cool, wanting to dance it out, got cool again and instead of Kylie, Madonna and Janet being lone voices, the next decade saw the rise and fall of the midriff with Brittany, Christina, Destiny's Child, before the leotard and wrecking balls sent everyone back to a girlie kiss with Madonna on stage at the MTV awards. Yes, we'd seen it all before but guess what, newly empowered women were shouting out about it and popular was actually admired under the gaze of 'young, rich and powerful'. It's worth saying that all of this being still about 5 years away from Me To, so please don't hail the rise of sex and honesty with women as this thing that's old hat, nor even fully formed yet.
Cultural critics like Helen Razor still get panned and I shudder to think about the dystopical promise of The Handmaid's Tale.
So either Australia lost some part of it's national identity when the masculine tall poppy syndrome gave way to the American idea of unapologetic power, or it's potency just got waters down, I'm not sure. For now though, I'm not writing the president's name here but importantly - do you know how many followers Kylie Jenner has on instagram? I don't know, I heard she left it to start her own platform. In the same climate that UEFA is more powerful than the majority of nations, heaven please... arise Sacred Feminine as we need you. So thank God for the music. In a world of crazy we'll perhaps just have to sooth ourselves with Kylie's most recent offering:
“When I go out, I wanna go out dancing”
Kylie may not be known for her philanthropy or charity work, like Meghan or Diana but she is a consistent and prolific artist (pretty busy surviving breast cancer and touring and creating more music) who is waving the flag for the Sacred Feminine and so is Kylie Jenner. She is a proud lover too and this famous for the art or famous for being a lover is certainly exciting for all young women and others further along their way exploring their ‘own’ adventures.
So happy happy birthday Kylie Minogue. You've been brave, you've been shiny and you continue to be.
Love Amy Weidlich @amyariel @lotusbayyoga #happybirthdaykylieminogue #lotusbayyoga
This month at Lotus Bay Yoga in Little Bay we've really been catching the confidence to be our authentic selves and for me Elizabeth Gilbert and Kylie Minogue are contemporary trail blazers sharing their path.
