Kylie Minogue - Can't Get You Out Of My Head

In my new book, Words and Music, I accompany Kylie Minogue on a journey she takes through history, driving from the pre-modern through the modern into the postmodern and beyond. The book is an introduction to an edited history of everything with a soundtrack largely supplied by popular music. The fact that I chose Kylie Minogue to take us on this journey proves that my worldview was formed by the power of the popular song, and shows how hearing a song like Can't Get You out of My Head can help you make some sense of the mysteries of existence.

She drives towards a city, a city that is a metaphor for the future, for the internet, for the iPod, for music, for the mind, for a world where everything happens at once. At the end of the journey, I say to Kylie, or Kylie says to me: "Some day music will only be air. There will be no objects to hold or fetishise, and people will simply collect lists. No disc, nothing spooled or grooved, no heads to clean, no dust to wipe, no compulsive alphabetising. Nothing to put away in shoeboxes or spare cupboards, and be embarrassed about. A chip inside us and inside the chip a route to all the music that there ever was, which we can compile and organise and reorganise and reorganise and merge with and feel into and in whatever way possible find the time to listen to, and we'll need the time, all the time that music finds the time to press into."

Paul Morley
The Guardian
Friday 1st August 2003