Blending Bubble Gum Pop and Queer Theory: C.C. McKee Unpacks Aqua's Iconic Album
“I’m a Barbie girl in a Barbie world.”
This culturally iconic lyric has become a pop phenomenon, but what do we really know about Aqua, the group behind the song? Bryn Mawr College’s C.C. McKee, assistant professor of history of art and director of the Center for Visual Culture, wrote Aqua’s Aquarium, to find out.
McKee’s academic work mostly focuses on 18th and 19th century French history. In fact, a forthcoming book, based on their dissertation, explores 18th and 19th century paintings from the French Caribbean as a lens to examine colonial mechanisms of oppression and racial constructs, while also highlighting the ways Afro-Caribbean people forged lives and identities in the face of systemic oppression.
But like many others during the COVID-19 pandemic, McKee decided to pursue a passion project, one fueled by their love of electronic music.
“It started deep in quarantine when we were all stuck inside. It was a confusing and scary time, but with that, came a period of deep introspection. I was listening to a lot of bubble gum dance music from the 90s and rediscovered Aqua’s discography,” says McKee.
As Aqua’s discography became McKee’s soundtrack to 2020, they reflected on Aquarium’s intersections with queerness, nostalgia, and the interplay of camp aesthetics in electronic music, ultimately inspiring their book, Aqua’s Aquarium.
Serendipitously, an opportunity emerged to propose the book to 33 and 1/3, a series of short books, from publisher Bloomsbury, on popular music across all decades and genres. Ultimately, McKee was picked up by 33 1/3 Europe.
The book looks at the Danish band Aqua’s album Aquarium through a queer theoretical lens, delving into the concept of camp while chronicling the band’s formation in 1995 and their rise to stardom in the late 1990s.
“In my definition, camp is a type of queer reading practice that appropriates objects from mass culture that may have nothing to do with one's own queer identity, or even, a societal queer identity, but that the in-group of queers redefine and appropriate as having some sort of queer valence,” says McKee.
To inform their research, McKee had the opportunity to interview Aqua and those involved in the production of Aquarium in the band’s native country of Denmark.
“It was such a funny day, because we did the interview in my office in the Copenhagen University library, and people recognize Aqua in Denmark. People were doing double takes, trying to piece together why in the world Aqua was casually strolling through the stacks,” McKee said.
McKee also brought together five groups of queer and transgender electronic musicians from North America and Europe to cover songs from the album through their own artistic interpretation. McKee then had those recordings pressed into a vinyl record and a digital release through the label Warning in Berlin.
“It was a lovely way to fold in my respect and admiration for electronic musicians with this project,” says McKee.
This semester, McKee is teaching Critical Approaches to Visual Representation: Landscapes, Art, & Racial Ecologies and Topics in Interpretation and Theory: Affect, Art, & Psychoanalysis, both fully designed by McKee.
McKee looks forward to incorporating their pop culture research in the classroom and is currently designing a course that analyzes the relationship between queerness, the sonic and visual culture of the rave, and the history of electronic music.