It’s a Padam-ic! Kylie’s sex-positive hit is brilliantly upending the mainstream
Just two days ago, a spokesperson for BBC Radio 1 was explaining why Kylie Minogue’s Padam Padam hadn’t made its playlist, despite the writhing electropop song being her first Top 10 single in 12 years and now bordering on a national obsession. (Last week, it even made it into Hansard, referenced by Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle in a speech about Pride: “And finally Mr Deputy Speaker, in the words of Kylie, padam.”) “Each track is considered for the playlist based on its musical merit and whether it is right for our target audience, with decisions made on a caseby-case basis,” the spokesperson said.
Kylie turned 55 last month, leading to accusations of ageism against Radio 1. In response, the station claimed that “an artist’s age is never a factor” in decision-making. Technically, that bears out – David Guetta is a perpetual figure on the station, currently on the C-list with Baby Don’t Hurt Me, and he’s also 55. But Guetta is a fairly faceless dance producer. The stakes are evidently different for women whose appearance and physique contribute to an overall performance of pop in which the suggestion of desirability is key. As culture perceives women to become less attractive and sexually viable as they hit middle age, the assumption is clearly that an older female artist is of little relevance to Radio 1’s demographic of listeners aged 15-29, even if – or perhaps specifically because – she’s singing about a dancefloor infatuation so delirious that she and the song’s intended have to go straight home “and take off all my clothes”.
But the target audience had other ideas about what is or isn’t right for them, and petitioned the station so hard that days later, it confirmed Padam Padam would be added to its C-list this Friday – Kylie’s first song to make it into rotation since Get Outta My Way in 2010. If this week’s midweek chart predictions are correct, that day the single will also climb two places to No 7, making it her highest-charting hit since All the Lovers in 2010. The song’s success has been driven in large part by social media, from the staff of Hobbycraft Wimbledon spoofing the video to fans who probably weren’t born when she released 2000’s Spinning Around, her first club comeback, dancing to it on TikTok. “What’s interesting is it’s the younger generation,” Minogue said recently. “They are not ageist, they don’t care, which is so refreshing: we love that song, it’s a banger, they’re in!”
Padam Padam’s success fulfils the prophecy in its own lyrics: there’s no standing in the way of true infatuation. It also underscores the magnificent reciprocity between Kylie and her longstanding LGBTQ+ audience. For years, she has empowered fans with her relentless ability to reinvent and thrive in the face of perceived obsolescence (and to overcome real hardship, such as her brush with cancer in 2005). As Nick Cave told me when I interviewed Kylie in 2020: “On some level we understand her ordeals, yet she radiates pure joy. This is an extraordinarily powerful message.” This is true diva-dom, embodying the promise of liberation. In return, by insisting that a 55-year-old woman singing about being gripped by the desire to go home and shag a perfect stranger is pop music, isprofoundly sexy and deserves to sit at the centre of culture, her fans are queering the idea of the female pop ideal sold by an industry of limited imagination.
Written by Ina Wroldsen and Peter Rycroft, Padam Padam continues Kylie’s career-long ability to seize the narrative and thrust it towards joy. The titular phrase comes from an Édith Piaf song released in 1951, in which it stood in for the beat of a haunted heart, forever reminding the chanteuse of old follies, lost love and desultory memories of a life spent falling for the same old tricks. But in Kylie’s hands it is the throb of real-time excitement and potential, a suggestion, a wink, an invitation to pleasure and escape. (Sex Kylie lives.) It exists only in the moment, just as Kylie does as a pop star – the secret of her five-decade longevity; she knows, too, that the alchemy of a perfect moment in the club is also an escape for queer fans, particularly during this hideous period of heightened assaults on LGBTQ+ rights.
It’s deep – but it’s also not deep at all. Padam Padam is an absolutely perfect bit of pop nonsense, an explosive awopbop-a-loo-mop a-lop-bom-bom! of delight. It can mean whatever you want it to: euphemism, affirmation, declaration of insanity, nod of recognition. (Jessie Ware, who has collaborated with Kylie, recently joked that she should introduce herself on stage by telling her own very LGBTQ-centric audience: “Hello, I’m Jessie Ware: Padam! And everyone will go: Padam!”) What’s been called the “Padam-ic” resonates with a cultural moment in which frivolity and lightness seem to be breezing back after the pandemic and after an era in which culture has been taken very, very seriously. (Yes, I see you, person in the comments saying “doesn’t writing 900 words about this invalidate your argument?” Clearly you have not been Padam-pilled.)
It’s pop art by a master of the form who once ensured that no one would ever hear “la la la” the same again. “We don’t need to use our words,” Kylie sings. She’s singing about infatuation, but could just as easily be speaking to her connection with her staunch fanbase, one that understands Kylie as a byword for transcending limitations. The gatekeepers never stood a chance.