Paula Abdul Raids Kylie Minogue's Pop Stash

 

Tonight on American Idol, Paula Abdul will be stumbling onstage, hair tousled and blouse wrinkled. She will be performing a new tune which is sure to bowl all of us over and herald the return of pop. Additionally, she may very well mime the words, because the performance will undoubtedly include intricate choreography. Her dancing will make you tenderly recall that time your spinster sister got knackered on wine coolers at your wedding and tried to unsuccessfully re-create the “Single Ladies” dance routine step for step in a bid to tell off relatives who, to this day, hush-hushedly admonish her woeful singledom. But as a pop peddler, even Abdul’s got a bit of a green (i.e. recycling) thumb. “Here for the Music” is just the latest instance of Abdul’s rummaging through Kylie Minogue’s pop pile for anything that could tangentially go Top 40.

The original cropped up on Minogue’s 2003 effort Body Language, which was mostly filler. “Here for the Music” teeters dangerously close to filler. But six years and half a ton painkillers later, what does Abdul’s update offer? Autotune, a masterful use of the vocoder, and not an iota of original instrumentation or vocals.

Last year marked the first time she borrowed from Minogue. Abdul plucked a song that wound up as part of Minogue’s setlist on her world tour despite being scrapped from her last album. Abdul endowed it with that same, heady, just-add-Oxycontin varnish.

But! Seeing as how she (and fellow Idol judge Kara DioGuardi) wrote one of Minogue’s better singles, Abdul’s probably entitled to dig through Minogue’s castaways (especially since she recently kicked the junk). Meanwhile, Minogue may find a way to make a rebuttal Stateside as she’s planning her first North American tour

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