Music & Camp, Christopher Moore, Philip Purvis

Through the LCC library, I stumbled across Music & Camp and found it quite useful for my current research, though my project itself does not veer in the camp direction. Doing an exploration of queerness through sound requires an understanding of its’ theory and history. Music & Camp dives into the lineage of camp and its’ relevance within twentieth/twenty-first-century music culture. Containing a collection of essays from this period, it is an in-depth examination of this genre and how it became a coded political vessel. The concept of camp is a theatrical tool that is used to teach queerness and provoke heteronormative expectations. Though the term camp is ever-evolving and morphing, it can define itself as; “something that provides sophisticated, knowing amusement, as by virtue of its being artlessly mannered or stylized, self-consciously artificial and extravagant, or teasingly ingenuous and sentimental”, or “something so bad, it’s good. Except it’s gay”. Purvis and Moore acknowledge the present queer musicology and intertwinement of sexuality and gender within the discussion on how to define camp and this genre of work. Queer history and camps’ history run parallel to each other, the two topics perform in tangent in order to emphasize each other to the point of absurdity. Providing many examples such as; the kitsch nature of Christmas carols and their queer presentation, or making sense of violence against men in Christina Aguilera’s music video. Pulvis and Moore show how this form of art has been used as a pungent political vessel, I can reflect on the various methods used to present and explore queerness sonically. “Rather, what camp offers is a way to read certain kinds of the excess as the creation of a gay reality. In doing so, the spectacle of camp in turn reveals- and reveals -in the style of artifice of the world that exceeds” I can find this useful for my current work by way of gaining a grasp of its’ absurdity and flash. If my piece deviates from camps’ polarizing and maximalist nature, what would the other end of this spectrum of queer vessels sound like?