Music & Camp

Description

This collection of essays provides the first in-depth examination of camp as it relates to a wide variety of twentieth and twenty-first century music and musical performances. Located at the convergence of popular and queer musicology, the book provides new research into camp’s presence, techniques, discourses, and potential meanings across a broad spectrum of musical genres, including: musical theatre, classical music, film music, opera, instrumental music, the Broadway musical, rock, pop, hip-hop, and Christmas carols. This significant contribution to the field of camp studies investigates why and how music has served as an expressive and political vehicle for both the aesthetic characteristics and the receptive modes that have been associated with camp throughout twentieth and twenty-first-century culture. Cover Music & Camp Title Copyright CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction PART ONE THE SACCHARINE AND THE SACRED 1. On Fairies (and Mothers): Beatrice Lillie Sings 2. The Uses of Extravagance in the Hollywood Musical 3. Musical Camp: Conrad Salinger and the Performance of Gayness in The Pirate 4. The Camp Sincerity of Christmas Carols 5. Camping the Sacred: Homosexuality and Religion in the Works of Poulenc and Bernstein PART TWO FLAMING LIPS AND FLAMING HIPS 6. Watch My Lips: The Limits of Camp in Lip-Syncing Scenes 7. Camping Out: Queer Communities and Public Sing-Alongs 8. “The Booty Don’t Lie” and Other Camp Truths in the Performances of Janelle Monáe PART THREE GENDER AND GENITALS 9. Strauss as the Pervert? Gendered Subjectivity, Ambiguous Meaning 10. Poulenc’s (Sub)urban Camp: L’Embarquement pour Cythère 11. The Straight Bookends to Camp’s Gay Golden Age: From Gilbert and Sullivan to Roger Vadim and Mel Brooks 12. The Dark Side of Camp: Making Sense of Violence against Men in Christina Aguilera’s “Your Body” Bibliography About the Contributors Index