Camp is not a joke (even if you laugh)

I'll say it fast, because nobody hangs around long on a dashboard: camp is the most serious way I know of telling the truth.

I know. It sounds like something printed on a mug.

Let me explain.

When somebody exaggerates wildly, everybody understands they're exaggerating. And then something curious happens. You lower your guard. You laugh. And while you're laughing, the line you'd never otherwise have let through slips right in.

That's the trick. I've been using it for a while now, without apologising.

PLANETA GAYFOLK is queer alternative pop in Spanish, with humour, with camp and with a whiff of copla, the old Spanish torch song, that I have no intention of losing. And copla, by the way, knew all this before anyone. A woman in a flamenco train-dress telling a packed theatre she's dying of love is textbook camp. And nobody in the room thinks she's lying. Quite the opposite. They believe her more than if she'd whispered it.

Glitter has a bad reputation

It looks shallow. It sticks to everything. It never comes off. You find it on the sofa three weeks after the party.

Which is exactly the point.

Something that refuses to leave can't be all that shallow. Glitter is a way of saying "I was here" that survives the hoover. Seems like a good model for a song to me.

A lot of people found me through «Tan Cateto» on TikTok. And look at that word. Cateto is an insult as old as the hills, the Spanish for a hick, a yokel, the kind of word people throw at you to make you feel small. Put a tan, "such a", in front of it and it changes. It's no longer a stone thrown at you; it's something you grab, blow up and turn into a chorus.

That's camp too. Taking whatever they used against you and sewing sequins on it until it stops weighing anything.

It doesn't always work. But when it does, you can tell.

People write to tell me my titles are jokes. And I get why. «No quiero otro novio cojín» (I don't want another cushion boyfriend). «La dieta del cucurucho» (The ice-cream-cone diet). «La vecina cotilla» (The nosy neighbour). Read like that, in a row, they look like the menu at a roadside café.

But look at the first one. A cushion boyfriend. That image tells you something before you've even pressed play: there's someone fed up in there. It's just said with a cushion in hand instead of a slammed door. And maybe the cushion hurts more. Or sticks longer, which for a song amounts to the same thing.

I'm not going to explain the songs to you. They're there to be heard. I'm only saying the joke in a title is almost never all there is.

Irony as a shield (and as a magnifying glass)

Irony has two faces and I use both.

One face is a shield. If I say something very vulnerable with one eyebrow raised, I can pretend I didn't mean it. Plenty of us queens have done that since we were small, I think. It's a way of surviving a hostile room.

The other face is a magnifying glass. You exaggerate something so it can be seen better. You take gay love, the exes, pride, self-esteem, everyday life, and give it all a bit more shine than it needs, and suddenly those small things look enormous. Which is what they are.

The hard part is not getting stuck with only the shield. I have my doubts there, I'll admit. Some of my songs may stay a joke and never reach the magnifying glass. I don't know which ones. It probably isn't up to me to decide.

The covers and the videos speak too

None of this happens only in the lyrics. There are more than 280 PLANETA GAYFOLK music videos, and I direct them. Plus hundreds of short clips. And in all of them I try the same thing: to make the image exaggerate as much as the song, or a little bit more.

Same with the covers. A sober cover for a camp song would be lying twice.

Some people think all that shine is there to hide something. I think it's the other way round. The shine is what makes you look. And once you're looking, you're already inside.

Something else that makes me laugh. I produce the music of PLANETA GAYFOLK with artificial intelligence tools that I direct; I write every one of the lyrics. And some people tell me that's terribly artificial.

Well, yes.

Camp has been standing up for the artificial forever. False eyelashes. Papier-mâché sets. The deliberately put-on voice. The fake that confesses it's fake has a very rare kind of honesty, far more than the "natural" that works so hard at looking natural.

I'm not saying it's the only way to see it. I'm saying it fits me.

So, do I laugh or not?

Laugh. Please. That's the first thing I want.

But stay for a second after the laugh. That second is where the real song lives.

With «La primera drag» (The first drag queen) I was heading that way, even if back then I couldn't have explained it. The title says almost everything: drag is camp made flesh. Total exaggeration, total glitter. And underneath, someone saying exactly who they are, without asking permission.

In about two years, 273 singles have come out. Some make me cringe, some make me cry, quite a few do both. Not a bad balance for someone who calls himself the first AI songwriter and goes around with one eyebrow raised most of the time.

If a song of mine ever makes you laugh and then leaves you quiet, that's it. It worked.

If it only makes you laugh, that's fine too. I'm not that demanding.

Everything else is at mikesaintlouis.com.