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BuzzJack Music Forum _ Kylie and Dannii Minogue _ Billboard Women In Music Awards
Posted by: SmileyKylie 24th January 2024, 06:21 PM
https://www.billboard.com/lists/2024-billboard-women-in-music-awards-honorees-newjeans-ice-spice-tems/
Kylie an Honoree! 
icon Award
Minogue kicked off her Las Vegas residency on the heels of her 2023 Tension album, which featured the dance-floor smash “Padam Padam.” The track is nominated for a Grammy for best pop dance recording. Minogue won a Grammy for best dance recording 20 years ago for “Come Into My World.”
Minogue has a longer history on the Billboard Hot 100 than any of this year’s other nominees. She landed her first top 10 hit, a cover version of Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion,” in 1988. She returned to the top 10 in 2002 with “Can’t Get You Out of My Head.” Her album Fever reached No. 3 on the Billboard 200 in 2002.
Posted by: Padamic Tension 24th January 2024, 07:09 PM
Can't see it winning but stranger things have happened.
Posted by: Liam.k. 25th January 2024, 12:57 PM
From what I can see she already has won - the Icon award. The overall Woman of the Year has yet to be revealed but that’ll go to someone much bigger (no idea who though, Taylor Swift would the obvious choice but she’s already won. Miley Cyrus perhaps?).
Posted by: Padamic Tension 25th January 2024, 08:06 PM
Delighted she was awarded and there is no doubt she is an icon in our world.
Posted by: JustCarolHoney 12th February 2024, 10:52 PM
All these winning awards huns
Just Carol Honey ❤️
Posted by: pippa 12th February 2024, 11:36 PM
Kylie can never win too many awards.
Posted by: Padamic Tension 13th February 2024, 01:05 AM
Award wise it's been a few great months for Kylie.
The Grammy was great and huge for her as was billboard icon award but I think I'm more excited about the Brit as the UK is a home from home for kylie and its her most successful market aswell and there is huge love for her there.
Posted by: markivj 13th February 2024, 05:36 AM
As far as I'm concerned, UK is HER home and will always be. Australia to me is just her birthplace.
Australia got on the Kylie bandwagon only around the IP time but the UK has unconditionally supported her, raised her and loved her even when she was uncool (in her native country) during the Neighbours days.
There's also a huge difference in terms of responses between the British and Aussies. A lot of aussies still cringe at the mention of her name, even though they'd call her a "national treasure". But the British genuinely seem happy to talk about her, even those that don't listen to her songs or like them have something nice to say about her, like she's a family member or something.
Posted by: Fact Checker 13th February 2024, 08:14 AM
Australia got on the Kylie bandwagon only around the IP time but the UK has unconditionally supported her, raised her and loved her even when she was uncool (in her native country) during the Neighbours days.
There's also a huge difference in terms of responses between the British and Aussies. A lot of aussies still cringe at the mention of her name, even though they'd call her a "national treasure". But the British genuinely seem happy to talk about her, even those that don't listen to her songs or like them have something nice to say about her, like she's a family member or something.
I am sorry, but what a lot of total bullshit
Posted by: Fact Checker 13th February 2024, 08:52 AM
Kylie has 8 Number 1 albums and another 12 top 10 Albums (including Gh Albums) in Australia
She has 10 Number 1 singles and another 10 top 10 singles
This in a country that the media and radio stations refused to play her as they are owned by 2 anti gay organisations. Shit, they wouldn't even play Dolly until she collab with ONJ because her gay following was too big.
Kylie is not held with "Cringe" in Australia, she is very much loved by the Australian Public.
Posted by: JustCarolHoney 13th February 2024, 12:49 PM
I have never been to Australia so I do not know my hun
Just Carol Honey ❤️
Posted by: markivj 13th February 2024, 08:38 PM
She has 10 Number 1 singles and another 10 top 10 singles
Her first freakin #1 Aus album was in 2000, well over a decade into her career. Australia jumped on the Kylie bandwagon AFTER the UK made her a star. Today, there is respect in Australia for kylie because she proved that even without the support backing of her own country the first few years of her career, she could make it by working hard and perservering.
To me, home and family are the people you can count on when you're down and need someone to watch your back. Aus did neither in the early days.
Posted by: Padamic Tension 13th February 2024, 10:00 PM
Kylie did fairly well music wise in Aussie at the start of her career and without the infamous loco motion release becoming such a huge hit in Australia things may have turned out different as i think that was the catalyst for Kylie moving into a full time music career. The Aussies may not have invested in Kylie the same way the UK did but there was and is a lot of love for Kylie in Australia. Neighbours was also far far bigger in the UK than Australia which helped her hugely in the UK as Charlene was such a well loved character and she was the first big soap star to fully switch over to a music career. Aussie did come really good for Kylie in 2000 onwards and to be fair to Australia they supported Impossible Princess when no one else really did.
I think overall Australia has been very good to Kylie but not as good as the UK and i have to give a shout out to my own country Ireland as Ireland was hugely supportive of Kylie starting out, scoring 5 number 1 singles from her first 2 albums. She has done fairly well here overall although to varying levels in the later years of her career.
Posted by: markivj 13th February 2024, 10:52 PM
Again, aware that her first 3 singles went to no1 in Oz, and I'm not saying they hate Kylie or anything.
Just saying the UK loved Kylie unconditionally, esp in the early years when she needed that support and encouragement. On the other hand, Kylie had to earn love and respect in Australia.
The one good thing Aus did for her was giving Confide a full 4 weeks at #1 
Also, given that Kylie has a British passport as well, I wonder why they don't nominate her in the British categories.
Posted by: Fact Checker 15th February 2024, 07:18 AM
To me, home and family are the people you can count on when you're down and need someone to watch your back. Aus did neither in the early days.
Locomotion spent 6 weeks at number 1 in Australia in 1988. If you are going to bag a country, get your facts right
Posted by: Fact Checker 15th February 2024, 07:22 AM
I have no problem with you Mark, but gee mate you really don't know what you are talking about with Kylie and australia.
She had 3 number !'s in Australia before the UK even knew "Charlene" sang..just saying
Posted by: markivj 15th February 2024, 06:23 PM
Fact check: she had only one #1 in Australia (Locomotion) prior to the UK. Lucky onwards, both countries got her releases more or less at the same time (and yes, I'm aware that Certain was an Oz #1 and not a UK no1).
I'm not bagging Australia, in fact I love Australia (esp Melbourne!) but if you look at Kylie's Aus profile post the first few releases (mid 1988 to pretty much the Confide in Me era), there was a lot of negativity and backlash around her in Oz. I'm not saying the UK media was overly generous and loving to her, but they were far more reasonable, supportive and positive during the post Neighbours and SAW phases. The DeCon era, esp IP and the Nick Cave duet started some Oz love and it was I think the Parlo era onwards which cemented it. She herself has said on several interviews that she always did hold that tiny grudge during the early years. (this was a BBC R1 interview when she was promoting her 1994 album, I was surprised too at the time as I'd never known her to be so candid).
Posted by: SmileyKylie 29th February 2024, 07:12 PM
new billboard article. Can't post at the moment but says she is working with 2 producers in LA that she has wanted to work with for ages and came out feeling like she was on cloud nine
Posted by: Padamic Tension 29th February 2024, 10:35 PM
Im not too sure if thats good or bad, if she is meeting with r n b style producers id be like no but i will wait and see who it is.
Posted by: Jessie Where 29th February 2024, 11:06 PM
Give us Max Martin!
Posted by: Jessie Where 29th February 2024, 11:29 PM
https://www.billboard.com/music/awards/kylie-minogue-women-in-music-icon-padam-padam-1235617703/
AFTER ‘PADAM’ FEVER, KYLIE MINOGUE INTENDS TO ‘MAXIMIZE THIS BRILLIANT WAVE’ IN AMERICA
Three decades-and-counting into her prolific career, Billboard's 2024 Women in Music Icon is feeling "wildly inspired" and still expanding her devoted fanbase.
It’s Friday night in Las Vegas, and Voltaire, the intimate art deco-meets-Studio 54 new performance venue within the Venetian, has transformed into an extremely lit gay club. Beneath countless sparkling disco and glass balls, the crowd of 1,000 dances to the DJ’s mix of a who’s who of dance–pop — Jessie Ware, Spice Girls, ABBA, Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s recently revived “Murder on the Dancefloor.” Intermittently, elastic-limbed burlesque artists enter to striptease, dance and execute feats of dazzling flexibility. This is Voltaire’s Belle de Nuit “preshow.” And it’s just the warmup to the main event.
“It’s almost time for Kylie Minooooogue!” the evening’s MC declares. “Yeah, that’s right — Mother is coming!”
The screams become truly deafening when, roughly 10 minutes later, the curtain opens to reveal the diminutive 55-year-old Australian pop star clad entirely in metallic gold. She launches into “Your Disco Needs You,” a rousing track from her 2000 album, Light Years: “Let’s dance through all our fears, war is over for a bit,” she sings. “The whole world should be moving, do your part, cure a lonely heart!”
For the next 70 minutes, Minogue follows her own command, belting songs from her three decades-and-counting career that have united listeners with their infectious dance-pop melodies and lyrics that, whether ebullient or bittersweet, are always anchored by a deep, sincere sense of joy. She shimmies to her cover of Gerry Goffin and Carole King’s “The Loco-Motion,” one of her earliest hits from 1987 (and still her highest-charting Billboard Hot 100 entry, peaking at No. 3); she rises above the stage in a flowing red cape like some disco high priestess to sing her seductive current smash, and her biggest in the United States in more than 20 years, “Padam Padam.” She’s a consummate pop diva, stomping down the stage’s catwalk and striking poses — until each song ends. Then, she simply becomes Kylie: giggling, kicking up her stiletto heels in a happy dance and, at one point, speaking into her water bottle when she mistakes it for a microphone.
These two sides of Minogue — the glamorous, charismatic performer who has somehow also remained deeply relatable — have helped her to maintain a remarkably consistent yet organically evolving career amid the shifting waters of the music industry. “A feeling you get from Kylie’s music is that from an artistic point of view, she enjoys her place in pop culture. She doesn’t challenge it or try to run away from it — she looks to innovate herself and develop within that space,” says Stuart Price, the British electronic music producer who executive-produced Minogue’s pivotal 2010 album, Aphrodite. “And it’s infectious to see someone enjoying being themselves. There’s an openness there that creates a connection between Kylie and her fans.”
Much of that core fan base feels connected to Minogue because they actually grew up with her. They met her as the feisty teenager Charlene on Australian soap opera Neighbours; followed her first era of pop stardom in the late ’80s as one of the flagship teen idols from the Stock Aitken Waterman (SAW) “hit factory” that also produced Rick Astley and Bananarama; watched her break out of that mold in the ’90s on British label Deconstruction, exploring more experimental dance-pop on 1997’s Impossible Princess; and embraced her evolution into global star in the 2000s, especially in the United States, with the release of 2001’s Fever, her highest-charting album on the Billboard 200 (No. 3), which yielded “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” the song with a hypnotic “la-la-la” chorus that was a self-fulfilling prophecy and propelled it to No. 7 on the Hot 100.
Over all those years, Minogue has stayed both impressively prolific and commercially viable. Eleven of her albums — including her last nine studio releases dating back to Fever — reached the Billboard 200, and 10 appeared on the Top Dance/Electronic Albums chart, including Disco, a highlight of the dance-pop renaissance of 2020 that went to No. 1 on the latter. She has notched seven Hot 100 and five Mainstream Top 40 Airplay hits. It helps, of course, that her songs tend to “help people to smile and forget their daily problems for a bit as only a good piece of dance-pop music can do,” as disco legend Gloria Gaynor puts it. (She joined Minogue for “Can’t Stop Writing Songs About You” on an expanded rerelease of Disco.) But her releases also always feel fresh, genuine and intentional. “Every time she delivers an album, to her it’s like the first,” says Jamie Nelson, senior vp of new recordings U.K. at BMG, Minogue’s label, who is also her longtime A&R executive. “There’s nothing lazy or dialed-in about it.”
Minogue has long been considered pop royalty in the United Kingdom (she’s about to receive the BRIT Awards’ Global Icon honor), Europe and Australia, where she’s the highest-selling female solo artist born in the country of all time; still, her U.S. audience has never quite reached that level. But she has remained popular — and at the front of pop culture consciousness — for long enough that while her older fans stateside remain loyal, younger ones continue to discover her. And that happened in a big way last June, when she released one very unusually titled single and experienced the kind of bona fide U.S. breakthrough that few artists manage in their mid-50s.
“Padam Padam” — an onomatopoeia for the sound of a heartbeat — went viral on TikTok, with everyone from actress Suki Waterhouse to employees of the British art supply chain Hobbycraft making videos with it; to date, videos using “Padam Padam” have been viewed over 1.3 billion times on the platform. Simultaneously, “padam” became part of the pop lexicon, thanks in large part to Minogue’s LGBTQ+ fans who encouraged use of it as a noun, verb, exclamation or really any part of speech that called for it.
The song was such a runaway hit that, Minogue says, BMG delayed releasing Tension’s title track as a second single, “because ‘Padam’ just kept… Padaming.” With that momentum, Tension became her highest-charting album on the Billboard 200 since 2010 (peaking at No. 21) and her second Top Dance/Electronic Albums No. 1. “Padam Padam,” which is now her second-most-streamed song in the United States after “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” became her first Mainstream Top 40 Airplay hit since 2004, her highest-peaking (No. 32) since 2003 and just garnered Minogue her second Grammy Award — the inaugural win in the new best pop dance recording category and her first since “Come Into My World” took home best dance recording two decades ago.
Now, with the Tension train still going strong (Xtension, an album of extended dance mixes, arrived in September) and her Vegas residency a coveted ticket, Billboard’s 2024 Women in Music Icon is energized and determined to make the most of this moment. “I told someone at my label: It’s happening now. There’s no snoozing,” Minogue says firmly. “I am wildly inspired right now. I’m at a point in my life where I know it’s not eternal. I just want to maximize this brilliant wave. If you’re not out paddling for when that wave comes along, you’ve got no hope.” And, she promises, she paddles — constantly.
The afternoon following the show in late January, Minogue is in her favorite sweats, sipping tea in the empty Voltaire space and looking surprisingly awake. She doesn’t go onstage each night until after 11, and a two-show weekend renders her “kind of the amoeba version of myself,” she admits, crumpling her tiny 5-foot frame up, amoeba-style. “I’ll have a momentary internal dialogue with myself like, ‘OK, try to go a bit cruise control tonight?’ But it doesn’t work.”
Autopilot has never been Minogue’s thing. When she started out with Stock Aitken Waterman, she found the hit factory’s way of doing things a natural fit — “It’s like working on a TV show: ‘Here’s the script, you know what to do, here’s some direction, do it’ ” — but once her four-year contract ended in 1992, “I was gone. I’m a curious person, and I wanted to do more.” She had observed how the trio of songwriters of SAW worked, seen the craft and diligence it took to create “that song” — but becoming one herself? “That took a bit of haggling,” she says. “It wasn’t easy to make that segue.”
Thanks to signing with Deconstruction, and particularly her second album with the label, 1997’s Impossible Princess, Minogue escaped the “normalness” of the SAW starlet image, Price recalls, and public perception of her started to shift to “Kylie the Artist.” When he met her around 2009 — a match made by her label at the time, Parlophone, where she had moved in 1999 — Price saw up close one way in which her soap opera training had benefited that artistry.
“She was able to so consistently deliver great performance after great performance,” he recalls — a skill, Minogue matter-of-factly told him, she supposed might come from the days when she would drive to set with a script she had just received and memorize her lines at traffic lights. “Her memory and recall is incredible, and it was the same when we were writing things together,” Price continues. “If she came up with a melody, it was just there — we could go eat a meal, then she’d bring it straight back up.”
“There’s probably a misconception out there that she’s not a traditional songwriter, but she’s phenomenal,” BMG’s Nelson says. “She’s got a belief that the song is God. She’ll really scrutinize her own music in comparison to outside songs, and anything that’s not up to scratch will get dismissed.” Minogue’s collaborators describe her as a fount of fully formed ideas. “The last three albums I’ve done with her, she has been coming up with whole ideas on her phone,” says Richard “Biff” Stannard, who co-wrote the 2002 hit “Love at First Sight” and, more recently, seven Tension tracks with Minogue. “She’s really confident to say, ‘I’ve got this melody that’s bugging me, I’ve got to get it out.’ It’s proper songwriter stuff.”
That said, Minogue has never been precious about accepting material from other writers — “Padam Padam” was co-written by Norwegian singer-songwriter Ina Wroldsen and producer Lostboy — and she relishes figuring out not just whether a song presented to her is a likely hit, but a hit for her. “Songs like ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ and ‘Padam,’ I can’t reply fast enough,” she says. “Not only is it an amazing song, but it and me… it’s like, ‘I can do this!’ If someone else performed ‘Padam’ it could’ve been great, but it would have been different.” Lately, she has been spending time in Los Angeles (her home base is Melbourne), working with two entirely new collaborators she won’t reveal quite yet, other than to say she has long wanted to work with them. “I was on cloud nine for like the next couple of days” after their most recent sessions, she says, grinning.
But since 2020, Minogue has also become a lot more independent in the studio: By necessity, amid pandemic isolation, she taught herself Logic and other essential tools of production. “It’s so liberating,” she says. “I’ve had a lot of uncomfortable moments [in the studio]. No one would have known because I just pretended my way through it. But to have my own mic and do it on my own time? It’s amazing. I could go for hours.”
Minogue’s manager, Polly Bhowmik of A&P Artist Management, says Minogue’s infatuation with studio tech has gone so far that “there is now very much ‘studio engineer Kylie’ as well as artist Kylie.” (Minogue has vocal engineering credits on much of Disco and Tension.) At Stannard’s suggestion, I ask about her personal mic collection (“She’s really geeky about microphones now”), and she quivers with excitement describing her current favorite. “It’s a Telefunken 251, and it’s beautiful,” she gushes. “It’s more to carry, but it’s like graduating to the big leagues.”
Her new studio skill set has been both empowering and freeing (she can now record herself and work on music from her Vegas hotel room, for instance), as well as impressive to her collaborators. “She’s actually useful in the studio!” exclaims singer-songwriter Sia, who co-executive-produced Minogue’s 2014 album, Kiss Me Once, and just released the duet bop “Dance Alone” with her. “She’s actually good at her job. And I would say she’s one of the most prolific idea generators of all the artists I’ve worked with.”
It has also helped her to achieve more vocal precision. “She’s very forensic about getting her vocals exactly how she’s happy with, and this has given her that ability,” Stannard says. On Tension, the strikingly wide range of Minogue’s voice — she goes from a sultry purr to full belt to stratospheric whistle tones, and at one point even raps — is on full display. The confidence she now has in her voice took time, Minogue says, and voice lessons starting in 2001 taught her techniques that have helped her preserve and develop it.
“Maturing as a person and my voice maturing too, add to that these past two years of self-recording — [my process] is becoming more vacuum-sealed, and that’s so pleasing to me,” Minogue says. “And to accept that I don’t have that big voice, but being proud I have my voice, and really owning that? That has again taken a long time. But I can adapt and be many voices, just like my [visual] presentation. I’m chameleon-like,” she concludes, satisfied. “That is who I am.”
The morning after her “Padam Padam” Grammy win in early February, Minogue still seems to be wrapping her head around what happened.
“I don’t think I’ve touched down yet,” she admits over the phone. She wore a bright “Padam red” gown; she marveled at Miley Cyrus’ hair (“Amazing. She absolutely smashed it”); she sat with Karol G at the ceremony (“I don’t assume anyone knows who I am, but she’d been on my radar for the last year”); she finally met fellow Aussie Troye Sivan. She was embraced by fans new and old, including Olivia Rodrigo, Ed Sheeran and Dua Lipa, who invited Minogue to appear in her Studio 2054 pandemic-time livestream and, shortly after, featured on a remix of Minogue’s Disco track “Real Groove.”
As for the award itself: “It’s a big win for longevity — let’s put it that way,” Minogue says. It’s also concrete proof to both Minogue and her team that she has, as Sia puts it, “broken her glass ceiling” in the United States. “I’ve had this kind of to-and-fro thing with America,” Minogue reflects. “I was the ‘Loco-Motion’ girl for a long time, then I was the ‘la-la-la’ girl, and I guess I’m ‘Padam’ now. But now that we’ve got streaming, the algorithms will take you to discover more of my music.”
Nelson says BMG has seen “an uplift on the catalog” since the Vegas residency began in November (it runs through early May), but is careful to note that it’s the culmination of a gradual increase in listenership — beyond the devoted core fan base that already buys multiple vinyl and cassette versions of Minogue’s records — over the past few years. “We are firmly seeing a new audience embracing Kylie,” Bhowmik says, pointing out that 60% of “Padam Padam” and Tension streams have come from listeners under 35 and that her audience on TikTok has grown 43% since the song’s release.
And that expanded audience includes the U.S. market, where Minogue hasn’t done a major tour since 2011’s spectacular Aphrodite trek. Considering the momentum behind her now and the fact that the pandemic prevented her from touring Disco, the time seems ripe for a major Minogue tour hitting America — and indeed, UTA just signed her for representation in the United States and Canada. Bhowmik says that with “more opportunities and accolades than ever before,” there are plans for her to perform across the United States and internationally “in the not-too-distant future.”
It’s a rebirth for Minogue — but really just the latest of many she has had throughout her career. “It’s a continuation, not a comeback,” Price says. “Everything from [Tension], it’s just a short steppingstone away from every other hit she has had. They all sound like innovative pop records made in the year they were released that are ahead of their time. And what they all have in common is that Kylie fever.”
That ineffable Kylie essence is always present regardless of whether Minogue wrote on a song or not. It’s the fizzy effervescence that makes “Love at First Sight” a euphoric dance party starter. It’s the very adult, subtle magnetism that makes songs like “Hands” and “Tension” sexy rather than ridiculous. And above all, it’s the true joy — the kind that’s all the more meaningful because you’ve known sadness, too — that suffuses every moment of anthems like Aphrodite’s “All the Lovers,” Disco’s “Say Something” or Tension’s “Hold On to Now.”
“Joy can come from a dark place,” Minogue says. “But if someone’s able to feel that joy and they might not have felt it this morning? It’s a moment of release. I want the audience to feel…” She searches for the right word, waving her hands excitedly, and then just exclaims: “Feel! I’m a conduit for all the emotions.”
Posted by: Liam.k. 5th March 2024, 11:14 PM
I feel like it’s customary for another artist to perform a song of the artist that receives the award. I remember Labrinth performed Frozen in tribute to Madonna, although that was for Woman of the Year not the Icon Award.
