Just North of Something Important

It occurs to me that the problem with determining whether or not an R. Kelly leak is a prank or not is that it is pretty much impossible to write a parody of an R. Kelly song that couldn’t plausibly also be a real R. Kelly song.

On the bright side

I have here what purports to be a leak of the new R. Kelly album, and…all the vocals seems to have been T-Pain’ed?  That can’t possibly be right, can it?  On the other hand, one song had yodeling (!), which is pretty much only something Kells would do, so maybe it is real.  Further updates as events warrant.

Hypercamp

Via Maura, Annie on Miles Raymer on Blood on the Dance Floor, who are a punk/emo/crabcore (?)/scenester band that is very popular and sounds like…well, I’ll leave it to Raymer:

What is that? Happy hardcore with sub-2 Live Crew dick lyrics delivered by an anime character who sounds like Steve Urkel, with occasional death-metal screams? Amazing. The sound of “fuck you, dad” is now a mixture of musical styles that would’ve been inconceivable a generation ago, given that the people who originated each one generally hated all the others.

Annie makes a great comparison between BOTDF and Atom and His Package, pointing out that where Atom (who I love, btw) was a “controversial” figure in the hardcore community, BOTDF seem to be uncomplainingly accepted and even embraced by the modern incarnation of that community, despite basically sounding the same but with lady-hatin’ lyrics instead of awesome ones about Rob Halford.  So what’s the difference?  I don’t think we can chalk it up to time or demographics or temperment.  Rather, I think it’s presentation, signaling—the way they situate their style.

Let me back up.  Studies have shown that people tend to discount valid information given through jokes, because they know they are jokes, and so discount the value of the information.  To put this in cultural terms, people want their art to be “serious” and so reject things being clearly presented as “a joke.”  In this particular case, however, it’s not like we’re making a comparison between something presented as a joke and, say, Bono.  BOTDF…well, let’s just throw in their picture at this point:

…clearly not serious exactly.  You could say the same thing about Lady Gaga: people are accepting her as some sort of valid artist despite presenting in all these sorts of ridiculous ways.  What’s the difference?

Here’s my argument.  Atom’s jokey presentation relied in large part upon his association from objects from the past, in that his only instrument was an 80s drum machine that he didn’t tweak or run through FX, just programmed with its dinky sounds and let fly.  Camp relies on this reuse of old objects, and that assists it in its function, because to participate in camp you have to have enough knowledge of these particular past objects to understand references and make ones of your own.  This intentionally limits the discourse to people who have, or want to have, this knowledge.

But BOTDF and Lady Gaga are, instead, taking camp techniques and turning them on the style of the moment.  BOTDF sounds sorta-kinda like rap, and certainly its lyrical themes are taken from rap.  Their hair and clothes are entirely scenester, up-to-date and fashionable (I guess).  Part of the meaning you’re supposed to get from this is that they’re not being entirely serious, which is why they signal with the use of rap tropes: sure, we’re yelling these awful things, but we’re just yelling them because rappers yell them, and we all know that’s stupid, right?  It provides an excuse to a particular audience to partake in the pleasures of the other without the guilt or self-consciousness.  And it’s not a joke because BOTDF is signaling as pop.  Their expression of style as of-the-moment allows them, for some reason, to pull off basically novelty songs.  The same theory allows Lady Gaga to pull off essentially really well-thought-out and produced SNL parodies as serious music videos.  Call this hypercamp: camp that, instead of relying on a carefully-curated sensibility of appreciation for underappreciated (because they were not serious) items of the past, expresses itself straight-facedly as pure mainstream fluff, taking the tastefully tacky and turning it into the extravagantly tacky.

This is not new, I think, but it does seem to be awfully prevalent.  Take, for instance, Sarah Palin.  Her appeal is as a kind of hypercamp: it’s pretty much impossible to take what she says seriously, but because she does it in such a way that cuts to the heart of what we really want to hear, her supporters accept and champion it.  She has mastered the language of the moment, and as long as she can express herself in that language, whatever she says will be valid.  It’s the third way between serious and comic: distancing itself so firmly from anything thought-out that critiques come off as silly or pointless.  It gives up any claims to a certain kind of credibility in order to entirely lay claim to another.  I’m not saying that Palin supporters are being ironic, or kidding.  I’m saying that adherents of camp find something that resonates with them in material they know to be disreputable and impute repute through their dedication, becoming able to dismiss naysayers on the basis of their lack of knowledge about the subject at hand.  Same with Palin.  Her supporters consider the fact that she’s not a policy wonk to be a positive thing, and if you think the complexity of politics is a big problem, then this makes sense.  We are running here into a conflation of art and politics that is problematic in that sophistication has consequences in politics that it doesn’t in art.  But as expressed by the individual, taste and ideology are not so different.