Raw Meat, Redrum and Rosary Beads
The lovechild of satire, drama and raw immorality. A beast wearing six-inch red acrylics, shoddily glued-in extensions and cheap lip gloss, cradling a baguette bag in the crook of its arm. With its mugshot nestled between the vapid, pouting portraits of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Khloe Kardashian, camp is here to trample puritan settlements and their value systems and leave the inhabitants drenched in synthetic blood and glitter..
Camp was first elaborated in Susan Sontag’s cultural critique Notes on Camp in 1964, where she lays out criteria of what may be considered as camp. In her essay, Sontag largely focuses on the self-involved upper echelons of high art and the culture of underground urban LGBTQ communities, suggesting that removal from everyday society is critical to the ridiculousness and vulgarity that makes something camp.
Notes on Camp is an excellent manual by which to qualify camp. What it does not consider is how camp evolves with the contemporary popular culture of an era. The evolution of camp post-Notes is a criminally underwritten phenomenon. Criminal, because this lack of coverage is overlooking the obscene, money-hungry and vivid tracks camp has left through Western pop music from the 1990s to the present.
The gentle but steady erosion of the hold which conservative values had on the cultural production of the USA in the latter half of the 20th Century allowed the music industry to sink its claws into the lucrative shock value of taboo. With this freedom and platform, camp became something new and all the more extreme: something which was post-verbal and hypersexual, violent and sacrilegious. It smelled like parma violets and sounded like synths and tasted like Amaretto. This camp vehicle had money pulsating through its engine, and it wasn’t keen to hit the brakes.
It was clear to even the casual observer of popular music in the 2000s that the music industry was becoming increasingly focused on the camp dramatization of three taboos: sex, death and religion. From 1998, with the success of Britney Spears’ hypersexualised, hyper-feminised brand, sex became a sure-fire way to capture media attention. A rotation of similarly blonde, slim and white pop stars quickly followed Britney into the limelight: the likes of Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson, Hilary Duff and Shakira all dipped their toes into the same performative sexuality. Camp sex appeal in popular music was epitomised when Spears and Aguilera were joined by Madonna at the 2003 VMAs. Spears and Aguilera, dressed as brides, and Madonna, dressed as a groom, performed Like A Virgin and Hollywood, after which they French-kissed as the camera switched to the dismayed face of Britney’s recent ex, Justin Timberlake.
Camp’s assault on traditional values rapidly spiralled, led primarily by Lady Gaga in the late 2000s. Gaga’s violent and brazen take on pop music employed not just sex, but also violence and sacrilege as tools of publicity. Her music video for Paparazzi shows her lover throwing her from a balcony; the video for Bad Romance has her drugged and sold to the Russian mafia; in her 2009 VMAs performance she begins to bleed mid-performance before she is hung onstage; and her 2010 VMAs red carpet is notorious for the excessive and grotesque Meat Dress that became synonymous with celebrity culture. In her Judas video she is stoned to death as Mary Magdalene, and in Alejandro she swallows rosary beads while dressed in a latex nun’s habit. Despite its initial success, this cocktail of raw meat, redrum, and rosary beads quickly proved to be too much for the public to handle.
It was soon after Gaga tore apart religious and funerary iconography that the prevalence of camp in pop music came to an end. Gaga’s conceptual third studio album Artpop marked a comparative drop in sales and a drop of interest in camp pop in general, selling 2.5 million records in comparison to Born This Way’s 5.2 million and The Fame’s 4.9 million. After this drop, popular music drifted away from the self-aware theatricality of camp, and retreated to traditional emotional sincerity that was more reliably commercially successful.
Despite this, camp’s untimely demise in the music industry was a narrative thread that was short-lived. She would claw her way out of her grave after little rest, skin smeared with dirt, extensions matted, vocal fry exacerbated and washboard ribs more visible than ever. Although the canon of popular music had largely rejected camp as a commercial tool by the late 2010s, this blow to the head was not a knockout but simply a slap to the face. It encouraged the vivacious queer subcultures around the globe that had held a monopoly over deliberate camp in the era of Notes on Camp to realise that a rejection from the ‘popular’ was actually an opportunity to be released from the musical restraint that popularity had placed on camp music.
Without commercial restraints, the hegemonic form of camp in music became a means of abstract queer self-narration. Transgender women such as the late SOPHIE and Venezuelan producer Arca have pioneered the evolution to ‘hyperpop’- the abrasive, experimental re-imagining of pop music as an entity with an objective not of melodic appeal, but of complete and radical sonic innovation.
The platform that camp in pop music provided for formerly unheard voices has cleared a space in the music industry for radical self-expression, where transgender and gay self-narration can unfold in unbridled and transcendent glory. Artists unlike anything the music industry has beheld in the past such as A.G. Cook, Ayesha Erotica, Charli XCX, Dorian Electra, Sega Bodega, and Slayyyter, have populated alternative music scenes with extreme takes on traditional genres in recent years, saturating the modern taste with self-aware, lively and innovative variations of camp.
Camp’s polarising recent history in the music industry reflects its nature. Both the wave of commercialised camp in the 2000s, and the more recent underground resurgence of camp in hyperpop are demonstrative of its mercuriality and mocking wit. But the most important thing to be taken from its popularity and consequent legitimisation, is its roots in the underground queer cultures that kept it alive before society facilitated this popularisation. A showcasing of camp can not only open the audience’s mind to discussions of merit and value in performance, but also enable a legitimisation of overlooked and marginalised identities, if we keep in mind those which pioneered its modern format.
The lovechild of satire, drama and raw immorality. A beast wearing six-inch red acrylics, shoddily glued-in extensions and cheap lip gloss, cradling a baguette bag in the crook of its arm. With its mugshot nestled between the vapid, pouting portraits of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Khloe Kardashian, camp is here to trample puritan settlements and their value systems and leave the inhabitants drenched in synthetic blood and glitter..
Camp was first elaborated in Susan Sontag’s cultural critique Notes on Camp in 1964, where she lays out criteria of what may be considered as camp. In her essay, Sontag largely focuses on the self-involved upper echelons of high art and the culture of underground urban LGBTQ communities, suggesting that removal from everyday society is critical to the ridiculousness and vulgarity that makes something camp.
Notes on Camp is an excellent manual by which to qualify camp. What it does not consider is how camp evolves with the contemporary popular culture of an era. The evolution of camp post-Notes is a criminally underwritten phenomenon. Criminal, because this lack of coverage is overlooking the obscene, money-hungry and vivid tracks camp has left through Western pop music from the 1990s to the present.
The gentle but steady erosion of the hold which conservative values had on the cultural production of the USA in the latter half of the 20th Century allowed the music industry to sink its claws into the lucrative shock value of taboo. With this freedom and platform, camp became something new and all the more extreme: something which was post-verbal and hypersexual, violent and sacrilegious. It smelled like parma violets and sounded like synths and tasted like Amaretto. This camp vehicle had money pulsating through its engine, and it wasn’t keen to hit the brakes.
It was clear to even the casual observer of popular music in the 2000s that the music industry was becoming increasingly focused on the camp dramatization of three taboos: sex, death and religion. From 1998, with the success of Britney Spears’ hypersexualised, hyper-feminised brand, sex became a sure-fire way to capture media attention. A rotation of similarly blonde, slim and white pop stars quickly followed Britney into the limelight: the likes of Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson, Hilary Duff and Shakira all dipped their toes into the same performative sexuality. Camp sex appeal in popular music was epitomised when Spears and Aguilera were joined by Madonna at the 2003 VMAs. Spears and Aguilera, dressed as brides, and Madonna, dressed as a groom, performed Like A Virgin and Hollywood, after which they French-kissed as the camera switched to the dismayed face of Britney’s recent ex, Justin Timberlake.
Camp’s assault on traditional values rapidly spiralled, led primarily by Lady Gaga in the late 2000s. Gaga’s violent and brazen take on pop music employed not just sex, but also violence and sacrilege as tools of publicity. Her music video for Paparazzi shows her lover throwing her from a balcony; the video for Bad Romance has her drugged and sold to the Russian mafia; in her 2009 VMAs performance she begins to bleed mid-performance before she is hung onstage; and her 2010 VMAs red carpet is notorious for the excessive and grotesque Meat Dress that became synonymous with celebrity culture. In her Judas video she is stoned to death as Mary Magdalene, and in Alejandro she swallows rosary beads while dressed in a latex nun’s habit. Despite its initial success, this cocktail of raw meat, redrum, and rosary beads quickly proved to be too much for the public to handle.
It was soon after Gaga tore apart religious and funerary iconography that the prevalence of camp in pop music came to an end. Gaga’s conceptual third studio album Artpop marked a comparative drop in sales and a drop of interest in camp pop in general, selling 2.5 million records in comparison to Born This Way’s 5.2 million and The Fame’s 4.9 million. After this drop, popular music drifted away from the self-aware theatricality of camp, and retreated to traditional emotional sincerity that was more reliably commercially successful.
Despite this, camp’s untimely demise in the music industry was a narrative thread that was short-lived. She would claw her way out of her grave after little rest, skin smeared with dirt, extensions matted, vocal fry exacerbated and washboard ribs more visible than ever. Although the canon of popular music had largely rejected camp as a commercial tool by the late 2010s, this blow to the head was not a knockout but simply a slap to the face. It encouraged the vivacious queer subcultures around the globe that had held a monopoly over deliberate camp in the era of Notes on Camp to realise that a rejection from the ‘popular’ was actually an opportunity to be released from the musical restraint that popularity had placed on camp music.
Without commercial restraints, the hegemonic form of camp in music became a means of abstract queer self-narration. Transgender women such as the late SOPHIE and Venezuelan producer Arca have pioneered the evolution to ‘hyperpop’- the abrasive, experimental re-imagining of pop music as an entity with an objective not of melodic appeal, but of complete and radical sonic innovation.
The platform that camp in pop music provided for formerly unheard voices has cleared a space in the music industry for radical self-expression, where transgender and gay self-narration can unfold in unbridled and transcendent glory. Artists unlike anything the music industry has beheld in the past such as A.G. Cook, Ayesha Erotica, Charli XCX, Dorian Electra, Sega Bodega, and Slayyyter, have populated alternative music scenes with extreme takes on traditional genres in recent years, saturating the modern taste with self-aware, lively and innovative variations of camp.
Camp’s polarising recent history in the music industry reflects its nature. Both the wave of commercialised camp in the 2000s, and the more recent underground resurgence of camp in hyperpop are demonstrative of its mercuriality and mocking wit. But the most important thing to be taken from its popularity and consequent legitimisation, is its roots in the underground queer cultures that kept it alive before society facilitated this popularisation. A showcasing of camp can not only open the audience’s mind to discussions of merit and value in performance, but also enable a legitimisation of overlooked and marginalised identities, if we keep in mind those which pioneered its modern format.
Header Image Credit: Stephen Lavoie – Rappler
