The great examples of diva drama in the last few years have gone largely unheard: a Vegas performer named Kristine W.'s first album -- another retro-disco special -- called "Land of the Living," which had one of the hugest sounds dance music has produced since the '70s, with a voice to match; and especially Billie Ray Martin's "Deadline for My Memories," a Gothic cathedral of dance music, brooding, paranoid, slightly forbidding and thrilling. Both Kristine W. and Martin know how to build a song, know enough not to give everything away from the first note. So that by the time the singer reaches full throttle, there's an overwhelming sense of release. These records (can you even get them anymore?) are melodrama as performance, not as self-analysis and self-display.

Neither "Light Years" nor "Fever" offers a single clue to Kylie Minogue's psyche, personal life or current romantic status. While she looks poised to finally extend her stardom to America, there are some who think that what they see as her impersonality will stand in the way. Writing about her in the New York Times, J.D. Considine said, "American audiences prefer self-defining divas on the order of Mariah Carey and Madonna. After all, both Madonna and Ms. Carey write or co-write their own material and have created some of their biggest hits by drawing from their own inner struggles." Uh-huh. Does anyone doubt that the next Mariah Carey record, coming after her much publicized nervous breakdown, the flop of her movie "Glitter" and the commercial disappointment of her last two albums -- which led to a buyout from her enormous recording contract -- will be its own Vanity Fair profile, a chronicle of her brave comeback after the sort of "inner struggles" Considine writes about?

It's not that there's no reason to look for the personal content in diva albums. For too long, mostly white rock critics ignored the personal content of soul music (especially Philly-influenced '70s soul) while parsing everything that flowed from the pen of St. Joni (or, God forbid, Janis Ian) for driblets of wisdom. But in diva pop, self-promotion has too long passed for personal statements. In that atmosphere, it's no wonder that singles like Nikka Costa's "Like a Feather," with its borrowed '70s funk-isms, or the bad-girl brattiness of Pink's "Get the Party Started" (and its terrific video) with its "get da fuck out my way" confidence, sound so great.

And it's why Kylie Minogue offers so much uncomplicated pleasure. What some people hear as impersonality, I hear as professionalism, a dedication to the spirit of fun and community and release that has always been at the heart of dance music. "Fever" kicks off with "More More More" (not the Andrea True Connection hit of the '70s) and the title gives the game away. For all the cool control of her voice (and of the sound of the record in general) there's an appetite at work here, a generous appetite.

"Fever" is about a determination to give the listener a good time, to make sleek, catchy dance pop in which nothing -- neither the vocals nor the sexuality projected by the singer -- overwhelms the sound as a whole. "Fever" allows you to relax, in the way you can when you know your enjoyment is in the hands of people who aren't going to screw it up. The hooks arrive on schedule; the beat and, more important, the swirl of the music keep returning to stir you into the mix. It's strange to speak about an album that is a bid for U.S. stardom as self-effacing. But in terms of what her contemporaries are doing, Minogue, who's now 33, hasn't let her ego get in the way of the music.

A Time Out profile quotes alt-rock legend Nick Cave, a fan who performed a duet with Kylie on his album "Murder Ballads," saying that her music takes place in "that space between innocence and sensuality that is the playground of all great pop music." I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that Minogue has made great pop music. It may be that "Light Years" and "Fever" are just passing pleasures, although that's nothing to sneer at. But Cave's image of the music as taking place on a playground feels absolutely right, a playground that magically expands to encompass whoever listens and wants to join the game.

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