Extract
Sam Davies
Not Bad Meaning Bad ... but Bad Meaning Good
That, I would venture, is how most people would define the idea of Camp taste if pressed. They might not phrase it quite that way – I’m quoting from ‘Peter Piper’, by Run DMC. ‘So bad it’s good,’ is the more usual version. Someone like Graham Norton would probably also figure as shorthand for Camp: gay, waspish, effeminate, never serious. So goes the popular conception. It’s a misconception; it sells Camp short.
Camp is more complex, more serious, and more important than simply a craving for the trashy and end-of-pier innuendo. And one of the ways to complicate it is to insist that it describes an enormous swathe of modern music: not just factory pop, glam rock, snowball disco, or the kind of art-school punk that lies in the gutter, gazing at the stars. But all of them, and hip hop too. I think hip hop – rappers, rap music, the whole culture – is Camp. Camper than a row of pink velvet tents.
It was a brief sketch of an idea that first made me think about hip hop and its relationship (or otherwise) with Camp. Writing about disco on The Wire magazine’s blog in 2008, Derek Walmsley asked, ‘What’s become of Camp in urban music today?’ He continued:
R’n’B and rap videos these days look airbrushed, as if hidden behind a plastic wall, a distancing effect exacerbated by the constant use of slow motion and fast cross-cutting. The big names of urban music are synthetic products of the studio system as much as (arguably more than) Hollywood stars. The overall impression is a fear of people finding out what they’re like. This look-but-don’t-touch sexual politics is, for me, deeply un-sexy, and it’s music’s loss.
But that sounded pretty Camp to me; like a reasonable working description of the average Kylie video.
– The rest of this article is printed in Loops Issue 01, available to buy from these Stockists.
Camp is more complex, more serious, and more important than simply a craving for the trashy and end-of-pier innuendo. And one of the ways to complicate it is to insist that it describes an enormous swathe of modern music: not just factory pop, glam rock, snowball disco, or the kind of art-school punk that lies in the gutter, gazing at the stars. But all of them, and hip hop too. I think hip hop – rappers, rap music, the whole culture – is Camp. Camper than a row of pink velvet tents.
It was a brief sketch of an idea that first made me think about hip hop and its relationship (or otherwise) with Camp. Writing about disco on The Wire magazine’s blog in 2008, Derek Walmsley asked, ‘What’s become of Camp in urban music today?’ He continued:
R’n’B and rap videos these days look airbrushed, as if hidden behind a plastic wall, a distancing effect exacerbated by the constant use of slow motion and fast cross-cutting. The big names of urban music are synthetic products of the studio system as much as (arguably more than) Hollywood stars. The overall impression is a fear of people finding out what they’re like. This look-but-don’t-touch sexual politics is, for me, deeply un-sexy, and it’s music’s loss.
But that sounded pretty Camp to me; like a reasonable working description of the average Kylie video.
– The rest of this article is printed in Loops Issue 01, available to buy from these Stockists.
