7/05/2007
Xabarín Club: treasures of Galicia
What is seen as camp definitely depends on the cultural context. As we see campiness in many japanese movies and tv-shows, they probably find the same from the products of western pop-culture. It hints that there might be some culture spesific elements that are found mainly from the entertainment of foreign cultures. Even though globalisation is told to make world small by making changing ideas easier, it seems that a lot of originally still prevails into an entertainment of each culture. What is it then?
You have to know what you´re looking for. I am a Finn so it´s easy to me invent the right keywords for Google to find something campy art of Finland. I already possess huge amount of information about the cultural history of Finland. It´s good to remeber that the most camp phenomena are underground. I think camp celebreties like David Hasselhoff are quite rare after all. Or at least a tip of the iceberg. There is a lot more to discover. And multiply it with amount of different cultures of this planet!
I have encountered the most of camp phenomena just by a coincidence. Going through cd´s at a second hand shop has been one of the most effective way to find campy music with hilarious covers. This basicly means that you´re restricted to the entertainment of the local culture. Depending where you live, this might contain sevaral countries though. Yes, we live in the information age where Internet rules and so, but to find some "treasures" you need know where to start. That is the difficult part. And right now I can know only two solutions: either you travel to the country itself or know someone who knows enough about it´s culture to give you some good tips.
The latter one we all can imagine: a friend tells you something hilarious video at YouTube and you go to see it. Imagine the same, but the the friend is from another country and the video is something very local - something that you could never find on your own. This kind of cultural trade is very important during the time. But don´t you still want to find something on your own?
At least for me it´s part of the "camp treasure hunting" to find something awesome on your own. It makes a treasure more valuable and exciting experience, when you find it yourself while travelling. An emotional bond is created between you and the treasure you found. Another part of the fun is to show it to your friends back home and see their faces when they see the ridiculous cover an album and/or play over the top gay music.
In the october 2006 I moved to Spain, Galicia, to study graphic design as an Erasmus exchange student. At December 2006 I visited La Coruña and found accomodation through HospitalityClub. Before I went there, I burned a cd-rom full with Finnish music. I took another empty cd and gave it to my host, asking him to put Galician music into it. He liked the idea of trading cd`s. Especially one folder in the cd I found very interesting: Xabarín Club. I remembered that it was some TV-show in the local, Galician tv-channel that had an animated boar as a host. It played another animated series such as Dragon Ball Z. The target audience of the show seemed to be kids and/or young teenagers. However, the thing I didn´t know was the fact that during the 90´s the show played a lot local music videos, both Galician and Portuguese. It was an important channel to broadcast the local music, generally punk, rock and folk. When I searched a bit more with Google, I found a huge collection of those videos from YouTube. The music alone didn´t reveal the whole campiness to me, but the videos finally did.
I tried to think what makes these videos to feel so campy. Is it just the amatourish visuals, technical clumsiness or what? One important thing was the karaoke style subtitles. Because the original medium was Galician tv-channel which promotes Galician language, it seemed to be important to underline the language by using the subtitles. When I listened songs alone I thought many of the songs to be in Spanish. Galician language is mixture of Spanish and Portuguese and some of the choruses of the songs sounded Spanish to me. However, subtitles revealed that it isn´t Spanish. It´s funny to think about how this linguistic (and nationalistic) choice to put subtitles adds greatly camp value to the video!
