Sex Kylie and the Queer Legacy of “What Do I Have To Do?”

This article has been peer reviewed

In recent years, scholars of pop culture and celebrity studies have posited that the career longevity enjoyed by Australian performer Kylie Minogue is due, at least in part, to the malleability of her public image. Barron describes the singer as a “postmodern chameleon”, observing that Minogue, her creatives, her fandom, and the media are all responsible for naming her various star personas – Dance Kylie, Indie Kylie, Country Kylie and so on.¹ This paper considers how music videos helped shape Minogue’s image over time and how these images have influenced and been influenced by her queer fan base. Specifically, it charts Minogue’s first major image change, from “girl next door” to “Sex Kylie”, an evolution which occurred in a pair of music videos released in 1990. It also considers how this transition coincided with Minogue’s first acknowledgement of a queer audience, and the role one of these videos played in my own queer awakening. 

Ch-Ch-Changes

It is now ubiquitous for mainstream pop performers to create personas or drastically change their appearance with each new phase of their career. Wark likens the fluidity of Minogue’s image to the star personas created by Madonna and David Bowie and contends that artists assume different characters because “professional celebrity requires constant reinvention.”² There has also been a tendency for artists to reprise past personas in music videos or live performances, affirming career longevity and rewarding eagle-eyed fans. Consider Bowie’s final music video, “Lazarus” (Johan Renck, 2016), in which his “Thin White Duke” character (1974-6) emerges from a closet to compose one last song. Similarly, Taylor Swift’s “eras” and Madonna’s “reinventions” have culminated in concert tours where the singers interact with, and perform as, their previous personas onstage. 

The early years of Minogue’s music career were hampered by her fixed public image of the “girl next door”. Although she’d left the television series Neighbours in 1988, she remained fused, at least within the public’s imagination, to the character of Charlene Robinson (née Mitchell): the perm-haired mechanic she’d portrayed in the popular soap opera. McIntyre and Taylor observe that the idea of “Minogue-as-Charlene” was central to the star’s ability to establish and maintain her attention capital and has “continued to reverberate culturally since the mid-1980s.”³ Renzo and Giuffre add that although Minogue was an adult when her first album, Kylie, was released in 1988, she was initially marketed to the public with child-like, “girl-next-door” imagery which built on her characterisation of Charlene as a spirited tomboy.⁴ They also note that her “brand of pop didn’t ‘fit’ into the local imagining of what Australian music was” and her fanbase was assembled from disparate groups: children, teens, young women and gay men.⁵ By the close of 1989, Minogue had released a string of chart-topping bubblegum hits, though she was yet to be viewed as a credible artist. Her two albums, produced in England by Stock Aitken and Waterman, were commercially successful, but critical reception was often lukewarm. Reviewing Minogue’s second effort, 1989’s Enjoy Yourself, People magazine bemoaned it was “another Charlene album”,⁶ describing her as: “a cog in a grey-noise machine.”⁷

“Better The Devil You Know”

Relocating to London, Minogue began work on her third album, Rhythm of Love, in early 1990. Lyrically, the songs dealt with more mature themes, and Minogue insisted that Stock Aitken and Waterman fuse heavier dance beats to their hit-making formula.⁸ When it came time to shoot the video for the album’s first single, “Better The Devil You Know”, she returned to Melbourne. Australian director Paul Goldman recalls that Minogue’s choice of location was an effort to wrest control of her image away from Stock Aitken and Waterman, and also PWL, the company responsible for distributing her music in Europe.⁹ Terry Blamey, Minogue’s manager at the time, reiterates this, noting: “that’s the day where Kylie took over… that’s when she stopped being a blank canvas with regards to her image.”¹⁰ Both Blamey and Goldman assert that it was Minogue’s idea to reintroduce herself to the public with more mature, sexually charged imagery.¹¹

“Better The Devil You Know” (Paul Goldman, 1990)

“Better The Devil You Know” (Paul Goldman, 1990)

“Better The Devil You Know” opens with Minogue dressed in a transparent raincoat as she sprints along St Kilda Esplanade in slow motion. We then glimpse her dancing, in silhouette, and briefly illuminated by a strobe; although filmed in a studio, the lighting and streetwear of these scenes evoke a nightclub setting. For most of the video, Minogue is seen singing to the camera, tossing her (uncharacteristically straight) hair, the strap of her mini dress falling off one shoulder. Towards the end, we find her in a dimly lit apartment, caressed by Richard Allan, a muscular Black dancer. Many of these shots are tightly framed, suggesting both performers are nude. Upon its release in April 1990, the video for “Better The Devil You Know” prompted outrage in some quarters. Goldman recalls receiving “pretty aggressive” phone calls from Stock Aitken and Waterman and PWL,¹² and Allan remembers the image of Minogue in the arms of a Black man became headline news in British newspapers.¹³

I was eight and a half when the video for “Better The Devil You Know” was released, so the implication of its imagery – that Minogue had experienced some kind of sexual awakening within an interracial relationship – was lost on me. However, the singer otherwise loomed large in my childhood. The house I grew up in is a 25-minute drive due east from Pin Oak Court, Vermont, which doubled as the fictional Ramsey Street in Neighbours, and my family were avid viewers of the soap opera. In 1987, along with two million other Australian households, we were glued to the television as Minogue’s character Charlene Mitchell married Jason Donovan’s Scott Robinson,¹⁴ one of the highest-rating television programs of the 1980s.¹⁵ In the intervening years, I became aware of Minogue’s output as a singer. I vividly recall the release of 1988’s “Je Ne Sais Pas Pourquoi”, perhaps because it puzzled me that someone from Melbourne’s suburbs, with an accent not unlike my own, was now singing in French. My young ears also failed to appreciate the sonic shift occurring within 1990’s “Better The Devil You Know”. My older sister (who was infinitely cooler and generally preferred the music of Prince and Janet Jackson) must have been aware of Minogue’s evolution, though – I distinctly recall her changing the lyrics from: “Better the Devil You Know” to “Better than Danni Minogue”. 

“Step Back in Time” (Nick Egan, 1990)

“Step Back in Time” (Nick Egan, 1990)

Rhythm of Love’s second single “Step Back In Time” was released in October 1990. Though the song contains ‘90s dance beats, the romantic strings and nostalgic lyrics ache for an earlier era of music. Directed by Nick Egan, the music video is a pastiche of 1960s and ‘70s pop culture, complete with vintage costumes and location filming in downtown Los Angeles. Minogue retains aspects of her recent makeover – notably, her straightened hair – but, viewed today, the video is curiously asexual, as though Minogue and her dancers had rifled through their parents’ wardrobe. At the time, it may have seemed like the charged imagery of “Better The Devil You Know” was a blip in Minogue’s videography. But then, the weekend after Christmas 1990, the video for the third single from Rhythm of Love began appearing on Australian television, cementing the idea of Minogue as a sexually awakened young woman, and shattering her “girl next door” image forever. 

“What Do I Have to Do?” (Dave Hogan, 1990)

What Do I Have To Do?

Filmed in London during the summer of 1990, “What Do I Have To Do?” was directed by American Dave Hogan, whose prior experience included music videos for Prince, Fleetwood Mac, Diana Ross and Tina Turner.¹⁶ Though it was customary for directors of this era to tender for music video work by writing short film treatments, Hogan recalls he was engaged to helm the shoot without one.¹⁷ The production team drew inspiration from a recent issue of Vogue Italia, which Minogue described as “bulging with black and white photos of impossibly beautiful women.”¹⁸ The resulting music video contains striking images, adult themes and possibly more eyeliner than has ever been committed to three and a half minutes of film. It is also a formally adventurous work, and Hogan combines numerous filmmaking techniques in rapid fire. A long take unexpectedly transitions from strobe lighting to a spotlight (Fig 1); static shots are juxtaposed with kinetic handheld camerawork (Fig 2); and high-speed filming is frantically intercut with operatic slow-motion (Fig 3). The video is largely monochrome, though shots filmed in colour are occasionally intercut. 

Fig 1. A long take.                 

Fig 2. Static vs. handheld cinematography.

Fig 3. Fast vs. slow motion

Fig 4. Nightclub sequence.

Throughout the video, Minogue is seen performing the song against a white cyclorama, with teased hair and dramatic makeup, occasionally rolling around on a leopard print coat. We also glimpse her in other locations: emerging from an indoor pool, dancing in a nightclub, lying on satin sheets, attending a daytime house party dressed in lingerie, revealing a tattoo to the crew of a film set, and donning a high-fashion maid’s outfit as she irons a shirt. The video contains a distinctive milieu – the hedonism of affluent and beautiful Europeans – but its numerous scenes are not structured into a discernible narrative. Vernallis argues that music videos are generally non-narrative, though rarely anti-narrative. She cites the competing demands of the medium to showcase the artist and the song, as well as the cyclical structure of most pop music, as some of the reasons why videos rarely contain a conventionally structured narrative.¹⁹ As such, these non-narrative works – of which I would include “What Do I Have To Do?” – encourage and reward revisiting, inviting the audience to participate in subjective interpretations of their meaning.

Queer awakening(s)

My reading of “What Do I Have To Do?” remains largely unchanged since I first saw it, wide-eyed, at the tender age of nine: Minogue’s character owns a lot of wigs. Orbiting her is a brooding male (played by model Zane O’Donnell), and she fantasises about taking him to bed. But it doesn’t matter if Minogue is blonde or brunette, snarling or coquettish, performing acts of service or dancing erotically, wearing eyeliner… or wearing even more eyeliner… O’Donnell’s character is unwilling or incapable of making a romantic advance. Towards the end of the video, there’s a brief sequence of the two characters drinking coffee where Minogue dangles a teaspoon between her thumb and forefinger – a pendulum that seems to swing between “Will we?” or “Won’t we?” And in the final shot, we see the pair striding gleefully towards the camera, Minogue dressed in her leopard print coat and a PVC outfit that resembles fetish wear. Their physical distance suggests the pair are friends, perhaps even housemates, but certainly not lovers. The notion of Minogue’s unrequited ardour is underscored by the song’s lyrics, which Kerrigan observes contain “queer inflections that the community responded to.”²⁰ Take, for example: “It’s always inside my head / Never inside my bed, or the chorus, which alludes to a love that cannot be uttered aloud: What do I have to do? / To get the message through? / How can I prove / That I really love you?” The coalescing of these ideas confounded me as a nine-year-old, though they awakened something in me, too. If only I had a word to describe the curious man depicted by O’Donnell? Perhaps, in time, it would come to me…²¹

In hindsight, “What Do I Have To Do?” is the first of Minogue’s videos to acknowledge the singer has a queer following. Ahead of its production, Minogue learned of “Kylie Night” at The Albury, a gay bar on Oxford Street, Sydney, where drag performers lip-synched to her music in exaggerated versions of her costumes.²² While promoting “Better the Devil You Know”, she had appeared in a Coca-Cola commercial, flirting with a pizza delivery boy in the doorway of her hotel room. In light of this, one of the performers arrived to “Kylie Night” dressed as her can of Coke.²³ Part of “What Do I Have To Do?”’s queerness arises because Kylie herself is donning a kind of drag, paying homage to screen goddesses of the mid-twentieth century. She conjures Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita (1960, dir. Federico Fellini), Brigitte Bardot²⁴ in Le Repos du Guerrier (Love on a Pillow, 1962, dir. Roger Vadim) and two brunettes who could be Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Joan Collins and/or Elizabeth Taylor. Reflecting on the video in 2002, Minogue noted: “With that much artifice, it was easy not to take it too seriously.”²⁵ Minogue was by no means the first artist to reference iconic screen actresses in a music video – take, for example, Madonna’s “Material Girl” (1985, dir. Mary Lambert) in which the singer reenacts Marilyn Monroe’s infamous “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” number from Gentleman Prefer Blondes (dir. Howard Hawks, 1954), or “Vogue” (dir. David Fincher, 1990) in which she emulates the glamour of Monroe, Marlene Dietrich and Jean Harlow, namechecking these women in the song’s spoken-word bridge. But it could be argued that something more complex is occurring within the image construction of “What Do I Have To Do?” Like the performers at “Kylie Night”, Minogue’s mimicry of screen icons is deliberately exaggerated and undeniably camp. If we are to consider camp via Sontag’s writing on the subject, particularly her observation that camp taste “transcends the nausea of the replica”,²⁶ then the music video reveals something about Minogue as a public figure, and the relationship she has with her audience. Revelling in artifice, Minogue appears to acknowledge both the constructed image of women on film, particularly women in pop music, but also the diva worship and drag imitation which occurs within the queer community. 

Queerness also arises from the music video’s key location (Fig 4). Unlike the “nightclub” sequences in “Better The Devil You Know”, the venue in “What Do I Have To Do?” is a physical space, replete with textured walls, a grimy floor, a bar, tables, chairs, and even a telephone. When we first enter, Minogue is dancing with a woman. Later, their limbs are interlocked as they drink champagne, stroke each other’s arms and share a private joke. Minogue is occasionally distracted by other women who pass through the foreground, notably a female couple holding hands. O’Donnell’s character also watches from the periphery – first with concern, later bemusement – before disappearing. When O’Donnell reappears, he is inexplicably wearing a cowboy hat, suggesting an encounter with someone off-camera. Hogan’s decision to shoot these nightclub sequences in multiple frame rates imbues the location with a dreamlike quality. His nightclub is a utopia where queer bodies are safe, and where – given the suburban spectre of Charlene-as-Minogue – familiar, heteronormative identities might be abandoned. It is a place where new, perhaps even queer, identities might emerge. While music videos of the previous decade occasionally ventured into queer spaces (notably Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Relax” (dir. Bernard Rose, 1983), or contained explicitly queer characters (Bronksi Beat’s “Smalltown Boy” (dir. Bernard Rose, 1984)). “What Do I Have To Do?” is among the earliest depictions of a queer milieu by a mainstream Australian (albeit transnational) pop artist.   

Enduring impact

Like the idea of “Charlene-as-Minogue”, it could be argued that the impact of this music video has continued to reverberate in the wider culture. More than any other video Minogue had released prior, “What Do I Have To Do?” spawns the notion that she would continue to adopt and shed numerous identities and guises. Fashion designer and stylist William Baker (who would later work with Minogue from 1993 to 2015) contends it is a significant work because: “in those three and a half minutes of celluloid hi-camp, her whole future and the infinite diversity of possibilities opened up…”²⁷ Since the video’s release, the malleability of Minogue’s star persona has continued to be the subject of both press coverage and academic writing. This fluidity has also been acknowledged by the singer herself on numerous tours, where each “act” of a concert was framed around a different, sometimes new, iteration of “Kylie”. But perhaps the most overt reference to Minogue’s multiple personas is the music video for “Did It Again” (1997). Directed by Pedro Romhanyi, the work takes its inspiration from The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995).²⁸ Four different “Kylies” meet at a police lineup: Cute Kylie, Dance Kylie, Sex Kylie and Indie Kylie. Introduced to the viewer via police identification slates, the four Kylies begin to argue and physically assault each other. With her teased hair, copious eyeliner, and leopard print coat, the incarnation minted “Sex Kylie” is undoubtedly a reference to Minogue’s persona from “What Do I Have To Do?” Barron gestures that the video “marked a moment in which Minogue consciously began to engage in a playful awareness of image construction and self-referentiality, acknowledging her distinctive ‘personas’ up to that point.”²⁹ 

“Did It Again” (Pedro Romhanyi, 1997)

“Did It Again” (Pedro Romhanyi, 1997)

In 2021, Minogue once more reprised the original iteration of Sex Kylie featured in “What Do I Have To Do?” for a new music video. Directed by longtime collaborator Sophie Muller,³⁰ “A Second to Midnight” is a disco duet; Minogue’s recording partner, Years and Years’ queer vocalist Olly Alexander, was born in July 1990, within days of “What Do I Have To Do?” being filmed. Throughout “A Second to Midnight”, the artists swap clothes, wigs and makeup, further blurring the line between Kylie-in-drag and Kylie-as-drag. “A Second To Midnight” gestures to the enduring impact of “What Do I Have To Do?” within Minogue’s videography. It also underscores the longevity of her career and her status as both an ally and an icon of the queer community.

“A Second To Midnight” (Sophie Muller, 2021)

“A Second To Midnight” (Sophie Muller, 2021)

Conclusion

In a music career spanning thirty-eight years (and counting), Kylie Minogue has cultivated numerous star personas. Two music videos signalled her first metamorphosis: from the “girl next door” (or Charlene-as-Minogue) to a more sexually charged public image (which later came to be known as Sex Kylie). “Better the Devil You Know” marked Minogue’s coming of age with a drastic makeover and allusions to an interracial sexual relationship, and “What Do I Have To Do?” gestured that Minogue’s star persona would continue to evolve. With its camp sensibility, drag aesthetic, and affirming depiction of queer characters in a queer space, the latter video also acknowledged the singer’s queer fandom. In preparing this article, I pondered what my nine-year-old self would make of Minogue’s career longevity and her numerous star personas that have emerged since the release of “What Do I Have To Do?”. I suspect his thoughts would echo my own whenever the latest “era of Kylie” comes to an end: I wonder what she’ll do next?

Endnotes