CHAPTER 10

 

 

 

#91: GIORGIO MORODER featuring KYLIE MINOGUE

 

"Right Here, Right Now"

 

from the album Déjà Vu

 

Released: June 2015

 

 

 

 

The beat is a little too forceful to be considered lithe. There appear to be trapped voices deep within the rhythmic sarcophagus. But a woman's voice emerges, slightly bruised by circumstance but still capable of mandated enthusiasm and only partially-stifled wonder. The flashing lights indicate that she is in the club - if the club is to be considered shorthand for the world, which it must - and dancing with someone she might not love but at this moment does not want to love. The sixties girl group "yeah?"s herald some doubt imposing on the singer's self-imposed ecstasy - she could look for love "to get over you," or "for a deeper kiss."

 

 

But the orchestral shimmers indicate that permanence is the last thing on the singer's mind. It illumines her what-other-world wonder and underlines the perceived fact that there is nothing, nowhere, no one, no time, but the singer and whoever is dancing with her and making out that they love her for, oh, another hour at least. It may all be a dreamed Holy Grail, but nothing in the singer's whole life has seemed so touchably real to her and this, and only this, is what she decides matters. In her partner's eyes, she sees the sunrise, but her song never climaxes; having made its point, it fades with gentle abruptness into nothingness, as all sunrises must, its guitar strokes casting the shadow of half a lifetime away.

 

 

It could be said that this singer feels love.

 

 

The song had nothing to do with Jesus Jones but may have been Giorgio Moroder's way of saying hey, I'm still here and haven't fallen asleep. The Daft Punk modules and Nile Rodgers chordalities underline a legacy perhaps a little too firmly, as though this union were convenient rather than symbiotic (as had already been demonstrated on "Get Lucky," which works so fully because not for one second does it sound as though it is trying to make a statement about something). Some wondered whether Moroder was now gamely following trends rather than creating them. Kylie Minogue sings as a Selfridges cosmetics assistant lost in consumable space might.

 

 

As a pop record it was slightly reticent. One radio disc-jockey commented that it sounded slightly dated. It didn't catch on. But its beacon beams an unreal, yet concretely palpable, aura of magic which only practised professionalism can blur into an adornment.