''Over here we've had all these different stages of Kylie,'' says London-based NME contributing editor Peter Robinson. ''The pop Kylie, then the dance Kylie, the indie Kylie, the club Kylie, and pop Kylie again. In the U.K. there's such a warm part in people's hearts for her, especially people who grew up watching her in the soaps.''

''In America, her big problem will be that she doesn't have that history,'' says Britain's Radio 1 DJ Dave Pearce. Indeed, aside from the Pauly Shore devotees and kickboxing fans who caught the buzz from her inglorious roles in Bio-Dome and Jean-Claude Van Damme's Street Fighter (yikes!), the only Americans truly fluent in Kylie-ese seem to be those ministers of world culture: club DJs. ''There was this record called 'Got to Be Certain,''' remembers Sharam Tayebi of pioneering D.C.-clubland duo Deep Dish. ''In the underground in the States that record was huge. Every year she had two or three songs that the DJs were dying to play. She's been helpful in putting a face to dance music. She has to be one of the main catalysts for why dance music is where it is today.''

Unfortunately for Minogue, in America dance music does not add up to much of anything. ''All the hype is around dance in Europe,'' says DJ-producer Felix Da Housecat. ''Every store you go into, the majority of [magazines] are dance magazines. The dance culture is in the fashion magazines -- and she's so iconic when it comes to fashion -- whereas in America it's just so hip-hop-and R&B-dominated.''

Though her last album, Fever, sold over a million copies here, household name recognition has evaded Minogue to the point where The Wall Street Journal recently described her as ''an international superstar who seems perpetually unable to conquer the U.S. market.'' Perhaps it's more that she's perpetually uninterested.

''It wasn't a conscious decision to try and make a record for America,'' says Miles Leonard, managing director of Capitol's U.K. sister label Parlophone Records, which released Language in Europe in November. Indeed, plans to work with the ubiquitous Neptunes (the producing team behind Kelis and Mary J. Blige) -- which would have pushed Language in a more Stateside-friendly cookie-cutter hip-hop direction -- were shelved early on, in favor of more funky, '80s-inflected electro-pop. As for the overt Timberlake/Timbaland sound of the next single, ''Red Blooded Woman,'' Leonard again insists that there's no ploy to try and crack U.S. radio. ''People [would] see straight through that -- not just in America, but in the rest of the world.'' Which is, after all, where Minogue comfortably resides.

''There's a lot of talk in other countries about 'Will she break America?''' says Minogue. ''That's the phrase, 'break America.' And it's like that because [lowering her voice to a cutesy whisper]you're difficult. You're a big country with a lot of people and a lot of competition. And to make a noise and to be heard is a challenge. And to have some success on top of that...''