All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

— Richard Brautigan, 1967

Kylie Minogue’s new album, Body Language, fills me with a feeling of warmth and comfort. She’s playing with the sound of the early 1980s, the synthed-up post-soul sound of Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam or the Tom Tom Club. (Indeed, one of the producers on the record is Kurtis Mantronik, an Eighties electro hip-hop icon.) But the album never feels cold or implacable the way electronic pop far too often does. It feels exactly right.

Kylie tried to make an alt-pop record in the mid-1990s (Impossible Princess); it tanked. Only in the embrace of machines can she find commercial and artistic success, it seems. And on Body Language, she’s finally achieved a near-perfect balance. Her voice is totally human, in that it’s often weak. She’s not a great singer by any stretch, but she knows it and never goes in for cartoonish oversinging like Mariah Carey or Christina Aguilera. Instead, she allows the programming that surrounds her to cushion and bolster her, floating amid the electronics with the aplomb of a female Bryan Ferry.

Her two previous albums, Light Years and Fever, were both extremely appealing, too. Fever in particular was a sugary yet sophisticated pop album, understanding the value of choruses and perky melodies but never dumbing itself down. Its Euro-disco feel was very different, both in contrast to what was getting played on US radio at the time of its (belated) American release, and what I was listening to day-to-day when its single, "Can’t Get You Out Of My Head," was released. Fever holds up two years later, too. I still pull it out from time to time, and it still rewards me the way it did in the first few weeks I owned it. It reminds me of Daft Punk’s Discovery, in that its disco-derived repetition never becomes monotonous. Further, I view both Fever and Body Language, but particularly the latter, as part of a cybernetic musical tradition going back probably all the way to Conlon Nancarrow, but certainly having strong roots in Kraftwerk and Gary Numan—performers who embraced technology not as a tool, but as a home.

When I listen to Kylie sing, as the machines hum and click around her, I’m reminded of the Richard Brautigan poem I quoted at the top of this page. She seems to treat the machines that make her music as protectors, as collaborators in an almost symbiotic way. She doesn’t want to become a machine, like Daft Punk or Kraftwerk did, but she understands that the computers are her friends. For a useful contrast, examine the career of Britney Spears.

Britney’s first album was almost entirely computer-built, but it wasn’t overt about that fact. She sang in a relatively naturalistic voice, with only occasional tweaks (aside from the pitch correction that surely went on pre-release). On each subsequent album, though, she’s become more and more artificial. Part of this is the result of the latitude granted her by her audience. Since Britney Spears concerts are universally recognized to be more about the dancing than the singing, she feels free to commission tracks that have little or nothing to do with organic song construction. At this point, there are often two and three Britneys singing on any one track, most of them vocodered. That’s more than anyone could lip-synch, and she, being of moderate entertaining skills at best, is pretty much at sea through substantial stretches of her shows. Sometimes, like on her last HBO concert, she doesn’t even try to pretend she’s singing. Watch her lips, and you can see her counting dance-steps as the vocal track plays. Plus, the voices are quite obviously no longer human (at minimum, they’re post-human, like a David Cronenberg vision of pop).

It’s that post-human quality that makes Britney’s songs so weird and off-putting. The beats are much more hyped-up than Kylie’s, and whoever’s writing Britney’s stuff has no idea how to flow from verse to chorus. Her newest single, "Toxic," is a perfect example. It jerks from one rhythmic mode to another and back, with pings and clunks and sproingy sounds substituting for melody. Somewhere in the middle of this pachinko-parlor of pop, Britney herself floats, sounding out of breath and a little panicky. Her own voice is thrown back at her, bent and crushed under the weight of technology. (The first single from the current Spears album was called "Me Against The Music," and it couldn’t have been more aptly titled—it, too, sounds like a video game where the object is to keep Britney alive till the end. Madonna appears as the supervillainess who mocks the heroine until she’s confronted and vanquished on the final screen.)

Kylie has no such conflicts with her electronics. She’s comfortable with them, caressing them with her voice as one would stroke a domesticated big cat. The sounds, in turn, coil around her, protective and familial at once. Within the glossy, yet emotionally accessible world of Body Language, she is, indeed, watched over by machines of loving grace.