"Kylie herself could be said to look like a robot. A robot version of herself in human form, a version of herself manufactured in the minds of robots. The buildings around her might exist only in the imagination of the robots. The sound we hear, the soundtrack to her journey, might exist only inside the imagination of the robots." This is a vision of Kylie Minogue, spied driving in the video for "Can't Get You Out of My Head", as she figures throughout Paul Morley's brilliant 2003 book Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City. Morley was writing in the wake of Kylie's monster hit and its attendant album Fever, both of which established Minogue as a mesmerizing figure fit for all manner of imaginings. She could be a minx, a glamor puss, an oblivious messenger, a wizened pop emblem. She could even be, as the storied post-punk critic Morley sketched in delirious detail, a worthy hero to measure against the most lionized icons of music as serious capital-a Art.
Part of Minogue's pliability owes to the way she seems to recognize and understand her many various roles, but part of it owes to her voice, which is simultaneously blank and playful-- the coy coo of a character who knows that she herself matters less than what her spirit (as Morley took pains to note) "might" or "could be said to" suggest. This is the Kylie who would figure into Boombox, a collection of remixes from 2000 to 2008. Or so it would seem.
Opener "Can't Get Blue Monday Out of My Head", one of the older tracks here, sets Minogue's best song against the instrumental backdrop of New Order's "Blue Monday". Her voice sounds a bit rootless, floundering in the best suggestive way. Listen closely and it's almost like Kylie knows she's implicitly conflicted within the rub of what plays now like a throwback to a time when mash-ups consciously toyed with the tension between source material and imaginary ideals.
It's a rich start, but unfortunately an anomaly in a collection that leans more often on less-interesting mixes that cast Kylie as little more than a dance siren. She's a good dance siren, to be sure. The Chemical Brothers' enticingly gaudy and patient remix of "Slow" gains a lot from the sly sensuality in her voice as it stretches out, and she sounds defiantly human within the constraining squeeze of Fischerspooner's lithe electro mix of "Come Into My World".
But too many tracks rate as generic "club" mixes that relegate Kylie to a mere bit player with little to say in the midst of overly splashy electro-house beats and trance-y longueurs. She sounds like a Gwen Stefani-aping cheerleader in Death Metal Disco Scene's mix of "Wow", and she's barely audible at all in Kid Crème's vocal dub of "Love at First Sight". It's as if the remixers, with so much at their disposal, thought less about what Kylie can signify than she herself seems to when adopting her own stock strategies.
