Part 1. Kylie vs Morrissey

 

Part 1. Kylie vs Morrissey

That Voice – It is rather astonishing that in a musical career lasting 30 years, Kylie has a voice that wouldn’t be out of place if it came out of an animated sea otter in a Disney movie. It is as substantial as candyfloss, as deep as Donald Trump. Hear it acapella and you’ll be begging for the backing track to return and hold that voice up again before it collapses in on itself.

It is inoffensive but that will garner you nil points from this armchair critic. I suppose it is the perfect vehicle for middle-of-the-road bubble-gum pop tunes to truck their way into the consciousness of gym users in Milton Keynes as they weakly pump iron and Kylie can hit a few high notes but Billie Holiday she ain’t.

In summary, this is the voice you might expect to hear coming out of a five foot nothing Aussie girl doing karaoke in a roadside bar in the outback but somehow it has ventured out across the globe to millions of listeners – like it or not. Recognisable? Not really. Kylie could stand by my bed at midnight, crooning her pop anthems and I would still reach out, half-dreaming, to try and turn the noise off.

Score: 3/10

Plenty of bands have had careers with singers that can barely hold a note and I don’t have a problem with that. But a voice can do more than carry a tune. Personally, I believe the paragon of voices will hold us for a moment in time, reaching out to a voice inside us, and making an emotional connection.

To do this, there must be a tender and fragile element to the voice and in this regard, Morrissey can have me tuning out the world and my agitated little place in it to just listen to him, to be held for a moment by that voice. It helps, massively, if the singer has some kind of emotional connection to the words they are singing. It helps if they also wrote those words as well, something I am not sure is true of Kylie. Ironic, really then that Kylie can release a song titled ‘Where is the feeling?’ and sing it without any.

Contrast that with Morrissey who can convince me he is weary of the world and everything in it when he begins ‘Asleep’ with ‘Sing me to sleep/Sing me to sleep/I’m tired and I/I want to go to bed’ but can also sound as convincing when he opens ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’ sardonically apologising to his lover for when he ‘wanted to smash every tooth in your head’.

His voice can inhabit a song, take me on a journey, make me feel something with him. He’s also good to sing along to which should be Kylie’s pop remit but nothing makes me want to be quiet and Duct tape my head with pillows more than Kylie’s anodyne pop squeak.

In summary, Morrissey was that rare beast of indie who had a distinctive melodic voice perfectly married to the arch lyricism of his songwriting.

Score: 8/10

Wordsmithery – Let’s make this quick and painless, shall we?

Kylie (from ‘Tears on my Pillow’)

You don't remember me

But I remember you

'Twas not so long ago

You broke my heart in two

 

Love is not a gadget

Love is not a toy

When you find the one you love

She'll fill your heart with joy

 

Shall we start with ‘Twas’? I must admit that when I’m writing pop songs in the 21^st century, I like to channel my inner Coleridge and bung in a few ‘dosts’ and ‘thous’ for the modern listener… And ‘Love is not a gadget/Love is not a toy’? Hasn’t Kylie ever looked in the bedside drawer of a single woman? At least change ‘not a gadget’ for ‘now a Rabbit’ and raise a smile at least.

In one song, Kylie sings of having a 'dark secret'. Really, love? What is it? That you forgot to put the bins out? That you left the cap off of the toothpaste? You can't perform for the Queen, get your OBE and pretend to have dark secrets, no matter how much of your arse cheeks are hanging out your kecks.

Score: 2/10

Here’s Morrissey (from ‘I Want the One I Can’t Have’):

A tough kid who sometimes swallows nails

Raised on Prisoner's Aid

He killed a policeman when he was thirteen

And somehow that really impressed me

It's written all over my face

 

On the day that your mentality

Catches up with your biology

 

And if you ever need self-validation

Just meet me in the alley by the railway-station

It's written all over my face 

Hard to imagine Kylie (or whatever music industry pony-tailed coke-faced arsewipe she uses to write her lyrics) coming up with the above let alone singing it. What do I like about the above? Well, there’s a couple of sly, smutty jokes – what is written all over his face after the meeting in the alley? There’s also a pen portrait of a tough kid whose gruesome acts are just awful enough to inspire affection in the subject of the song rather than the expected revulsion.

I could have picked so many different Morrissey-penned lyrics (‘Writing frightening verse/To a buck-toothed girl in Luxembourg’) and all of them would have stomped on poor Kylie’s word-mizzle. After all, who else would have written a song (November Spawned A Monster) reputedly inspired by the 19th-century French poetic novel ‘Les Chants e Maldoror’?

Then there are the song titles alone:

·       Shoplifters of the World Unite

·       Sweet and Tender Hooligan

·       The Boy with the Thorn in his Side

·       Barbarism Begins at Home

·       Girlfriend in a Coma

·       A Rush and a Push and the Land is Ours

It was never a fair fight, was it?

Score: 10/10

Pound of Flesh

Any Kylie fans might be hoping for some redemption here. Rumours that she was wearing an item of clothing in her ‘Spinning Around’ video have been dispelled by this viewer although the FBI might be able to slow down the footage enough to zoom in and find it. I imagine Kylie's stylist has a cardboard cutout of her and won’t wrap it in anything that comes half an inch lower than her groin.

Still, you can’t knock her for ‘putting it out there’. There is very little of Kylie that is left to the imagination; her tour of Afghanistan is surely never going to happen (Tali-banned?). I imagine her appeal to pre-pubescent girls has led to many a conversation about ‘not going out dressed like that’. What Kylie’s dad thinks, heaven only knows…

Score: 9/10 (If the Kylie punani ever enters the public arena, then it’s rounded to a perfect 10)

Morrissey – fey, celibate (now and then), intellectual – might not be able to compete with the Aussie sequinned stripper but it is not hard to find footage and photographs of the Morrissey nipple, belly-button and midriff. Smiths-era Morrissey was frequently seen in a shirt open to the waist and this, coupled with a penchant for dancing on stage like a dog cocking its leg to piss up a lamppost, means more of Morrissey’s top half has been bared than you might imagine. 

Was he ever lowered on stage in a cage wearing a burlesque corset and a cheeky smile? No, he wasn’t but he gets a few points for not wearing a donkey jacket and a fisherman’s hat.

Score: 3/10

Design Aesthetic

If you’re in the public eye for thirty years, then you probably need to have one very distinctive look that you are willing to trot out for every occasion or you need to consider the art of reinvention.

For Kylie, starting out in the 80s, that perm surely wasn’t going to hold out until 2020. Neighbours-era Kylie was all smiles and dungarees and big hair which is all very girl-next-door. Roll forward through the years and we’ve seen everything from saucy lounge singer to Greek goddess to Pearly Queen. Fad? I want to be on it. However, it’s easy to be dismissive and snark at the lack of overall design aesthetic (Can anyone say what is Kylie’s look?) and ignore her shape-shifting chameleon success.

And somehow, she has managed to not only offend pretty much every demographic but has a massive gay following who love her sparkly, slightly winsome, no-danger-here persona.

Score: 7/10

Mmm… We’ll cut Morrissey a bit of slack for being born in the late 1950s when fashion wasn’t even a thing and ‘image consultants’ were just an awful idea yet to be realised and unleashed on the world. So, let’s be relatively kind:

Fact: Morrissey was the best-dressed member of The Smiths (very little competition)

Fact: He made the conscious decision to unbutton his shirt, wear Buddy Holly glasses now and again, and to dance around onstage with a collection of daffodils sticking out of the back of his trousers.

Fact: He had a fucking marvellous quiff.

Also, The Smiths’ album covers – evocative, tinted photographs – had a coherent, recognisable aesthetic.

Score: 5/10

Carved A Space

Life without Kylie… Unimaginable? Not really. Go back and remove her from history and maybe there are a few less girls on a Saturday night out in Newcastle in the mid-nineties wearing hot pants smaller than a handkerchief. Maybe there are a few lost gay boys dancing absent-mindedly to some other iconic pop star and wondering if they’ve forgotten to do something (keys? wallet? oven left on?).

Inevitably, some music moguls want to find the next Kylie because she shifts ridiculous units but it’s hard to imagine any young aspiring singers wanting her voice. She was canny but ultimately vapid; a blank slate for whatever our desires were, in any given decade.

Score: 4/10 (for longevity)

Sometimes, you need someone to come along and push off your shallow little wheelbarrow. Someone who will happily plug Oscar Wilde and Sandy Shaw in the same interview. Someone who admits to reading and feeling, if not confused, then at least ambivalent about many things: their sexuality/their parents/the world in general.

When hardly anyone spoke about being gay, Morrissey was happy to explain that these were just labels anyway and, really, what’s the big deal? For introverted, intellectual teenage boys, who preferred poetry to puberty, all stuck in their mid-80s bedrooms thinking they were going to be forever isolated and alone, here was a figurehead for all their lonely desires and ambitions. He may have been a Bigmouth but with The Smiths and his lyricism he made the world feel a bit bigger than it was before.

Score: 8/10

I have to admit to some bias because, aged fifteen, I snuck into the only nightclub in town wearing a big polka dot shirt and a pair of jeans and I am dancing awkwardly in the dry ice smoke cloud to ‘William, It Was Really Nothing’ with a couple of pints knocking me joyfully off centre and I am feeling on the cusp of my life as an adult, spinning there on the sticky dancefloor, mostly obscured from view.

So, total scores…

Kylie: 26      Morrissey: 34