“I Wanna Go Out Dancing”: Disco and the Performative Persona of Kylie Minogue

A persistent factor that defines the performative career of Kylie Minogue—like that of a number of women pop stars in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including Madonna, Lady Gaga, and Rihanna—is the tension between transformation and consistency in terms of persona and musical aesthetic. Minogue is known for frequently changing her image and elements of her sound, yet these transformations are informed by a consistent pop music sensibility focused on dance music and the act of dancing. Minogue’s work frequently evokes the disco sound and culture of the 1970s, itself a genre that has undergone numerous transformations, with periodic infusions of electronic and classical instruments and further post-disco dance iterations (Dyer 2012; Shapiro 2002/2020).