If there is a place in which to ponder the significance and impact of pop music, that’s Budapest Sziget. One of the largest music festivals in the world, on which we have written extensively, kicked off its 30th anniversary on 8 August amid mildly searing central European sun and uncountable ostentatiously polychromatic displays (brat summer is riding high, folks).
More than 400,000 party monsters from over 100 countries are expected to flock for six days of around-the-clock blowout, and the Óbuda Island, just miles removed from Budapest’s opulent city center, readily welcomed tens of thousands of campers to its foliage on Tuesday (7 August) already. Two dozen stages, tents, and lounges, adorned with unending strings of lights and splashy art installations, tucked in between crisscrossed trees and tents propped up like troops of mushrooms – clichéd as it may sound, when you have an entire island on the magnificent Danube to go on a bender, it’s safe to say you’re in for a truly unique experience. No wonder the organizers provided pop-up supermarkets and (perhaps more importantly) pharmacies around the premises: few Szitizens, as they are called, want to leave the island once they’ve settled in.
As was the case in the past 13 years, the Wonderland-ish extravaganza sets the tone for five to seven days of mayhem by booking a most distinguished mainstream idol, the rarefied living legend, to kick up the dust and make the ground tremble (literally so) under the weight of up-to-95,000 starry-eyed fans. The frenzied inrun is purposeful: Sziget usually starts on a Wednesday and needs a major name to pull in the masses before the weekend. Over the years, Prince, Rihanna, Kendrick Lamar, Billie Eilish, Ed Sheeran, and more took to the main stage on opening nights and carved themselves into the urban Hungarian folklore with aplomb.
Kylie Minogue, often lauded as the “princess of pop”, is, in my opinion, a name that belongs (and then some) in the pantheon of these grand openers. I say “in my opinion”, as the local media had some reservations regarding how a 56-year-old star whose most prominent hits monopolized radio airplay over two decades ago could engage Sziget’s recent targeted audience, i.e., the people who weren’t even born when the Australian was in her commercial prime. This tension between what the organizing team believes ought to be and what is was palpable throughout the festival’s first day. Though she didn’t perform “I Should Be So Lucky“, Minogue, luckily, brought the house down with the force of her charm and impeccable back catalog, even if for a crowd half as big as it should have been.
Sziget’s “big” opening day started slow, the slowest in recent memory. Instead of the blistering afternoon (c)rush on the overground between the illustrious Margaret Bridge and the island, the crowd was no denser than on an average workday, even in the late afternoon. Given that the inaugural day is when the biggest number of ticket holders exchange their purchase confirmations for actual wristbands, the drill is that the bottleneck starts when you hop off the overground, a third of a mile away from the festival entrance, with the wait to get in potentially lasting well over an hour, if not more. One could comfortably stroll uninterruptedly with the rest this year, entering the premises within – I counted – eight minutes. Local outlets have been coy about providing attendance estimates on Thursday, but I would say there were at least 30 percent fewer Szitizens than usual.
This is where we get to the criticisms seen in the Hungarian press. As a fan who’s been reporting on the event for the past 20 (!) years, I wasn’t surprised to see fewer people coming to see Kylie Minogue than, say, Ed Sheeran. Sziget always took a lot of pride in its wonderfully diverse programming but gone are the times of the incomparable World Music and Opera stages or the days when Skinny Puppy (I’m serious) smeared blood across the Main Stage. A 70 percent stake in the festival was sold to Providence Equity Partners in 2017 (and now again to the global investment firm KKR), which is when the delightfully eclectic lineup started to lean heavily in the direction of the most commercial pop and child-friendly house. Some variety remains, but in the past years, the most rock you could hope for at Sziget were the Arctic Monkeys or Mumord and Sons, not Queens of the Stone Age or Nick Cave (both headlined in the past decade). Most alternative music stages were removed from the setup, and the already commercial electronic and party stages submerged themselves exclusively among the most TikTok-friendly performers.
In short, Sziget Budapest, which once served as a window into the manifold cultural trends of the global Northwest to the newly liberal Central and Eastern Europe, is now a gargantuan, unique six-day fiesta where music serves at best as a complementary offering, and at worst as background noise during idle hours of frolicking. Nobody there seems to mind this much (or at all), and the operationally slight but structurally crucial change in the event’s aesthetic explains plenty concerning bickering about Sziget’s profile, its “atmosphere”, or the visitors’ main impressions. Coy as Sziget’s managing team might be when it comes to dishing out numbers; it is quite possible that the Óbuda Island had something close to a full house at the start of this year’s edition, too – it’s just quite likely that many of those in attendance wanted to do something else and not huddle around the Main stage during primetime.
Whatever the truth, it’s a shame because Kylie Minogue threw a party for the ages. Minogue’s career as a pop, dance, disco, fashion, and LGBTQ+ celebrity icon took off before most of the audience, myself included, were born. She smiled as she pranced onto the stage in a suavely fluttery glitter mini dress. The disco ball loomed brightly above her, the Tron-esque, abstract neon visuals stretching wide behind her; eight male dancers in shimmery latex coalesced around the “princess of pop” to throw down to the first chords of “Tension“. Three backing vocalists and a full band greeted some 50,000 folks, launching the familiarly millennial synth line (think electronic duo Moloko), over which Minogue’s purring “touch me right there” and a distinctly 2020s all-inclusive beach bar beat set the tone for 85 minutes of reminiscence and joy.
Nearly four decades and over 80 million records sold, it’s no surprise that Kylie Minogue is a sly pro who knows how to set the tone. After a recent 20-night residency at The Venetian in Las Vegas, which concluded this May, her entertainment chops are as fresh as ever: not that one wouldn’t expect a masterfully structured, lovingly ebullient show from pop royalty. However, what set this concert at Sziget Budapest apart from another well-crafted but emotionally inert party wasn’t any sort of plenitude – it was musical diversity.
Witnessing a Kylie Minogue show today is a rare, glorious trip down memory lane of contemporary pop, disco, and dance music. To this end, the singer, acutely aware of her work’s strengths (and especially its lack of pretentiousness), configured the many songs we (well, at least some of us) know and love to reflect on the aural setup of the dancefloors from the past 40 years. While Madonna, the undisputed pop queen, made her Greatest Hits Celebration tour into a supreme aesthetic exercise, showcasing the sociohistorical background of her tunes more than the music itself, Minogue opted for the inverse approach. Her hits – lyrically simple and melodically straightforward – experienced live don layers of rhythmically mixed beats and samples, evoking memories ranging from children’s birthday dances to sloppy drunk afterparties. The end result is a fantastic peek into the history of the music that made (so much of) us.
It’s a fact that much of Kylie Minogue’s repertoire has flaunted these multifaceted arrangements for over a decade, but this does not diminish the concert’s effect in the slightest. The superstar last performed in Budapest in 2014, anyhow. “Come into My World” is the first hit to be deconstructed and cunningly thrown back at us through a splendid dichotomy. A slow, dreamy, poperatic chorus hinging on only piano and strings immediately swerves into a big beat reprise. “In Your Eyes” follows suit, mixing languid swagger with the force of the Daft Punk-ian early noughts disco. “Get Out of My Way” is another smartly implanted upper, though only the front rows reacted with appropriate booty shaking.
Close to me, several mothers in their 50s with teenage daughters screamed their throats out; the rest mostly just leisurely nodded to the beats or made videos for TikTok and Instagram. As I’ve said, Kylie Minogue was wonderful, but Sziget changed, and so has the visitor profile. The 30 and 40-somethings who would have appreciated this kind of a spectacle no longer make up a large percentage of Szitizens, as Sziget has few other acts to offer them. Some make an effort to purchase a day ticket, but $100 is plenty for an average Hungarian to attend a single show, and the majority at Sziget are quite plainly young foreigners for whom Hungary isn’t exorbitant the way it is for its citizens. Those youngsters did well enough throughout the evening, but the aura of ecstasy usually present at Minogue’s performances was palpably lacking.
“Confide in Me“, a three-decade-old banger and Kylie Minogue’s best song in the opinion of many critics (myself included), was the only departure from the otherwise utterly uplifting affair. Heavenly minor-key strings morphing into Middle-Eastern melodies with amplified percussions elevate this seductive ballad into a powerhouse of dramatic expression. Minogue not so much beckons as compels the faithful to “confide in her” in a forceful vibrato over a deafening backdrop of drums and guitars. Not a month ago, her performance of this song in London’s Hyde Park sported a sermon-like warlock dance in black cloaks. Too bad we didn’t get that choreography.
The rest of her Sziget concert followed in the vein of the opening segment. “Slow“, a fan-favorite, reached orgasmic heights with its own Chemical Brothers remix (another crafty nod to the dance music of the 1990s), while oldies such as the cover of Carole King’s “The Loco-Motion” evoked the 1980s and the sugary beginnings of women’s sexual emancipation through pop culture. “Padam Padam“, Minogue’s 2023 sleeper hit, brought about the most enthusiastic reaction from the younger audience. This was to be expected – the single was made a hit through frequent plays on TikTok.
“Can’t Get You Out of My Head“, Minogue’s biggest success and arguably the high point of the evening, unsurprisingly stayed true to its original form more than any other song on the setlist. A new wave disco tune whose bassline is a nod to Kraftwerk and vocals an ode to triphop and Madonna’s Erotica, its raw glory is best left unspoiled, and the Australian understands this. The crowd rewards her appropriately for this gem, and she smiles, having changed her outfit for the fourth time, pouncing and shimmering.
In a capella rendition of “Where the Wild Roses Grow“, the 1990s megahit Kylie Minogue sang with Nick Cave, is met with stupefied silence, another indicator of the changing times. “All the Lovers” is a fittingly warm closer but a brief encore, with “On a Night Like This” and “Love at First Sight” sizzling as one last reminder of the delights dance brings into our lives.
It’d be senseless to claim Kylie Minogue’s music is “profound”. After all, she never shied away from being an amicable pop pixie, at ease with herself and her music’s simple message of embracing one’s instinct for pleasure. Nevertheless, with close to four decades in the industry under her belt, she has seen and done it all, and so have we, with the music made by her and her indomitable peers blasting through the speakers all the way. The opportunity to relive all these intimate and collective memories at once is Minogue’s biggest selling point and pop’s greatest treasure. Like a diary, pop music may not be the most sophisticated artistic undertaking, but in its simplicity and comfort, sometimes it can be the most honest.