Excessive. Over the top. Larger than life. Camp is almost impossible to define without delving into its propensity for blowing culture up into massive, magnificent, drag-queenly proportions. But camp is about more than just overblown parody — or, rather, it hinges on the notion that the very act of spectacle itself can have significance. Camp can often be a strategy of social critique. Susan Sontag famously defined camp as a "sensibility that converts the serious into the frivolous" — in other words, a tactic of taking some of the wind out of the sails of culture that takes itself a bit too seriously. But camp isn't all snark and sass either: it can also be a loving homage to something very near and dear to the camper's heart, an example of teasing as loving. What camp does is make something so big and so silly that its flaws can't be hidden, but it also can't help but look fabulous.
In music, camp can encompass an exaggerated tribute act, immersion in the stylistic and structural particulars of a particular genre or just over-the-top, gooey-centered pop goodness. Campy aesthetics come in and out of fashion in music: the disco era, for instance? High camp. But grunge, not so much (though it's itching for a camp parody). And present-day pop is so steeped in it that its fingers (fiercely manicured, of course) are all pruney:
Gaga is the most obvious example, of course, but every diva from
Beyonce to
Shakira gets into the game (and cases could be made for the likes of
Fall Out Boy and
3OH!3, too). And then there's
Katy Perry. Her songs themselves aren't always so shticky, though there are exceptions to that rule: "
Ur So Gay" from her first album, for instance, and the innuendo-laden sass attack "
Peacock" from her latest. But the girl
is high drama, and she works very hard in both her videos and her general persona to create a kitschy aesthetic so excessively candy-coated, it's guaranteed to necessitate filler — er, fillings. Perry's a little too self-serious (and a lot too mainstream) to truly be camp, which is historically a territory of the margins and the underground (not to mention, uh, the actually gay, as opposed to gays-for-a-day pink-face poseurs like Perry). But we've assembled this album guide to the girl who kissed girls' fabulous foremothers.
