The Tao of Kylie

As an omnipresent international celebrity, Kylie Minogue is no stranger to unfounded gossip, but this one persistent item, as Australians are wont to say, is making her shit itch.

“Do I look pregnant?” she demands, rising to her full five feet, one inch and lifting her black sweater so that we might better inspect her bare stomach.

Blender is no physician, but Minogue doesn’t appear to be with child. “I might have put on a bit of weight,” she frowns, pinching a spare millimeter of skin. “Am I…heavier?”

In the physical sense, heavy isn’t a word you would normally associate with the Hardest-Working Diva in Discodom. She has, after all, the physique of a fairy.

But — be warned — unlike the pouting poppet she has skillfully portrayed for more than half of her 35 years, Kylie Minogue is no lightweight.

Do not be distracted by her thigh-length black leather boots and her jeans, which are currently tighter than her work schedule. Do not be sidetracked by the fact that she’s now digging down the back of these spray-on pants to show you the label on her underwear. (And it truly is her underwear — Love Kylie brand. She co-owns the company.)

Show steely resolve when she giggles girlishly and plants a perfumed peck on your cheek, for Kylie Minogue is no pop pushover. She is a formidable and complex woman with a daringly spare new dance record, Body Language, and she has ridden a rollercoaster career that would have disposed of an entire army of bed-wetting metallers.

She has lived and loved like a Rat Packer — her boyfriends have included Lenny Kravitz, the late Michael Hutchence and her current beau, actor Olivier Martinez — and made more money than most platinum-selling rappers. She is, lest we forget, a woman who duetted with Nick Cave and survived.

Minogue paces across her spacious suite in Manhattan’s Mercer Hotel displaying little of the toothsome innocence that has won her a worldwide audience ranging from Japanese preteens to San Francisco drag queens. (Such is the strength of her gay fan base that she is in New York now to appear as a celebrity guest on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy). Appropriately for this still and frosty afternoon, her demeanor is cool and serious.

A friend in London, where Minogue is based, describes her as “a lady with a business brain that could snare a grizzly bear, and balls bigger than AC/DC,” yet she is still perceived as little more than a model who got lucky.

“I’m used to it,” she says with a shrug. “I’m the soap actress who got a few lucky breaks and who sings the song that goes ‘La la la, la la la la la.’ There was no work involved at all. Everything just fell into my lap.”

She graciously accepts a gift from Blender, a copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, and is intrigued to learn that Elvis Presley always kept a copy of the spiritual guidebook at his bedside through his later years. “I read it when I was younger,” she says, gazing at the cover. “But I’m definitely at a point where I want to read it again.”

The poetic story of one man’s journey for meaning takes our conversation into a different realm. Soon, Minogue is considering some of the great imponderables, and this, in turn, leads her to contemplate some of life’s Really Big Questions.

The Tao of Kylie, anyone?


Blender: Do we have souls?
Minogue: Yes. The soul is the endlessness of our beings. The soul is infinite, and we’re just passing through. The light that might normally flash VACANCY is flashing NO VACANCY at the moment. For this lifetime, my lifetime.

Is this all there is?
Well, I can’t think that this is all there is. I just can’t. It’s a cliché, but there has to be more. From experiences with the deceased and with the sixth sense, even instinct, there must be much more than the here-and-now. I believe in a universal power. That’s how I would define spirituality: as something universal that we don’t understand but that somehow governs and guides the aspects of our being that aren’t merely physical.

Have we lived before?
I believe that I have, but that I’m not very far advanced in my series of lives. I’m not even into double figures. I don’t have an especially visual memory or recall of my past lives, but I believe I came from somewhere and that I’m going somewhere beyond this life — so therefore I must have lived before.

Is evolution still in its infancy?
I think we’re very early in the evolutionary scale. We don’t use a fraction of our brains yet. To be honest, mine is on “economy” some days, if it’s switched on at all. Maybe we’ll end up with chips in our heads. I often ask myself this question when I’m madly paddling away below the surface but not really getting anywhere. It frustrates me. So you end up asking yourself these eternal questions: “Where am I going? Why? What’s the point?”

Does the body rule the mind, or does the mind rule the body?
You’ll have to let me argue aloud with myself over this. My first thought is that the mind rules the body, but if that was the case, we would never get ill — unless the mind was thinking negative thoughts. Conversely, if you’re in a room with someone who has the flu, you always end up convinced that you’ll catch it. Does that make any sense?

All you need is love. True?
Ultimately, yes. Of course you need other forms of stimulation and endeavor, but it would be a sad and empty life without love. In literature and songs we always try to get away from the topic of love, but we keep coming back to the same old subjects: finding love, losing love, craving love, keeping love. We’re meant to have come from love, after all.

Should we fear death?
If I’m being very honest, I do. I could say it’s because I love life and there’s so much left to do, but really, it would be the idea of my death upsetting the people who I love and who love me. That is very, very painful and therefore frightening and something to be dreaded. Because despite all this talk, we simply don’t know what happens when we die.

Does heaven exist?
Well, I certainly don’t think that there’s an elevator that goes up to heaven and down into eternal damnation, but there has to be a peaceful place. And I believe that people who have lived good lives — and good is very difficult to define — will achieve peace.

Is there a God?
Yes. God is either a universal energy outside of us or a life force within us. Or both.

Why are we here?
You could argue that we’re here only to procreate and further the human race, but I would like to think there’s more to us than that. There are so many other things you should experience and achieve and feel in this life. But we also have to procreate, or else there would be no one left sitting around answering these questions.


Still in a gently philosophical mood, Minogue reminisces about the time she spent with Michael Hutchence in the early ’90s. It was widely assumed that during their brief dalliance, the INXS frontman led wide-eyed Kylie down the road of rock & roll damnation and introduced her to the devil himself. “Oh, come on,” she says, sighing. “We were both adults, but the public’s perception of us as people just couldn’t have been more different.”

Hutchence died, hanged by his own belt, in Sydney, Australia, in 1997. Although the two had long since parted ways as a couple, they remained good friends, and Minogue is still regularly reminded of him.“Sometimes when people have passed, you feel as close if not closer to them,” she says, smiling. “I’ve had one particularly intense experience that let me know Michael was still around, like he had come to say hello.”

Sensing that we might be crossing the border between the professional and the personal, Minogue swiftly directs the discussion back to her underwear. Oh, well, if we must.…

“Big knickers are back,” she decides, and once again digs into her denim to provide evidence. “Women want comfort again. And I don’t mean that we’re going to start wearing the sort of underwear our grandmothers wore. It’ll be more French and sexy, but definitely bigger. The G-string is last year’s thing.” This small woman then announces with a big, loud laugh: “The thong is gone! The flossing has finished!”