The Beauty of Bad Music

Written by Adrian McLean

It’s a cold, dark evening in New York City, but a pool of warm light spills outwards from Carnegie Hall and illuminates the crowd surrounding it. There is a sense of hysterical excitement, even now, even before the show has begun. Two thousand people were turned away at the doors tonight - the theatre is at capacity. You, of course, are one of the lucky ones. You show your ticket; you are led to your seat; the lights are dimmed. 

The night is October 26th, 1944, and this is the last performance of Florence Foster Jenkins’ life. I’ll admit a slight anachronism - the recordings of her life’s work were made in a studio, probably between 1941 and early 1944. Still, there is a truly indescribable quality to these recordings. The first bars of Mozart’s Queen of the Night aria float forth and I am immediately struck by Florence’s brave disregard for the notes written on her sheet music. Every - every - time I listen to it, the bit that really gets me is how the piano discretely slows down for Florence’s big moment. The visual it conjures is fantastic - Cosmé McMoon, her long suffering companion, desperately trying to get through the performance, thinking about his childhood in Mexico, where it all went wrong, thinking about retraining, perhaps as a lawyer, perhaps as anything other than a concert pianist. It builds incredible anticipation for what is perhaps the most famous moment in operatic history. The bathos is insurmountable when Flo absolutely cocks it up. She struggles to control her breathing; it sounds like she is getting light-headed, McMoon slows down even more to let her catch her breath. Eventually, we make it through to the other side, and in an absurd flourish the tempo shifts to a breakneck speed. To cap it all off, Florence belts a glass-shatteringly shrill final note. You will not be surprised to hear that this note is in an entirely different key to anything that she or McMoon have delivered throughout the song. It is perhaps an entirely new note, cooked up just for one special performance. 

Jenkins is remembered as one of the worst singers of the time. During her life she was also received as one of the worst singers of all time. Since her death, only a month after this final performance, people have debated whether or not she knew that her musical talents (she was supposedly a decent pianist) did not extend to singing. The most interesting part about this debate is that everyone she personally knew seems to give a different answer. Far more interesting to me is the fact that I, alongside the thousands of people who flocked to see her perform in 1944, get a very sincere enjoyment out of her music. Why? 

Plenty of music critics are concerned (even obsessed) with ‘Bad Music.’ It was a fascination of mine before I even listened to music that I liked. In retrospect, I find that I enjoy a lot of music deemed ‘Bad’. Rebecca Black’s Friday comes to mind; The Shaggs, obviously; I own a Crazy Frog CD and two DVD copies of Cats (2019) replete with behind the scenes bonus content. Nostalgia is frequently cited as the reason that we might enjoy music so offensive to our aesthetic ideals. Flashy dissonance and overwrought melodrama appeal to us as children, so returning to these songs evokes memories of a bygone cultural moment. There’s definitely an element of that, but it’s an unsatisfying answer. It doesn’t even begin to explain the anarchic joy derived from a Florence Foster Jenkins recital. More than nostalgia, I love the manic haze that songs like these suggest. They sound like music half-formed in a dream, built with pieces that plainly do not fit together here in the waking world of common sense and good taste. 

Take Friday as example - the instrumentation is extremely generic yet the lyrics are completely nonsensical (‘fun, fun, think about fun’), and the harmonies bear almost no relation to the melody. There’s something addictive about it. I get a kick out of its accidentally surreal listening experience - it paraphrases ‘normal’ songs, but stretches their conventions into something unfamiliar. It’s almost exactly a ‘normal’ song, but the subtle creep of absurdity transforms the listener’s perception, illuminating the truly absurd nature of pop music more generally. Genre and normality become a flashing procession of repeated tropes abstracted from their originals - it’s a masterclass in postmodernist art. 

Except - it’s not. At least, not intentionally. It’s closer to outsider art, but not quite - Clarence Jey and Patrice Wilson, who wrote and produced the song, knew all the rules of music, even if Black didn’t. They were just too lazy to apply them consistently in pursuit of making a quick buck. So if Friday isn’t really the postmodern masterpiece that I genuinely consider it to be, what is it? As usual, Susan Sontag comes to my rescue:

‘The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. [...] Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is “too much.” [...] What is extravagant in an inconsistent or an unpassionate way is not Camp. Neither can anything be Camp that does not seem to spring from an irrepressible, a virtually uncontrolled sensibility.’  

Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp (1964), page 7. 

Sontag’s Notes on Camp is something of a manifesto, one that seeks to organise the elements of art and media instinctively perceived as Camp into an internally consistent aesthetic vision. Camp is an essential element of Postmodernism but is crucially distinct in its embrace of sincerity. The strobe-lit hodgepodge of the Friday music video exists on the same continuum as Jenkins’ theatrical costumes and her uncoordinated dances during recitals. They are extravagant examples of artistic passion, eclipsed by the sheer ridiculousness of the final product. Debates over the core intent of Jenkins or Black’s producers helpfully become irrelevant when we acknowledge that their presentation is with absolute sincerity. In a word, they are undeniably Camp. 

How is this categorisation useful? Firstly, Sontag asserts that genuine artistic value can be found in Camp by distinguishing it from Clement Greenberg’s Kitsch. Where Kitsch is mass-produced, formulaic simulations of real emotion, Camp ‘nourishes itself on the love’ of its creator, whether the final product is good or bad (Avant Garde and Kitsch, 1939, page 10; Notes on Camp, page 13). An absence of palpable, sincere passion denigrates a Camp production to simple Kitsch. 

Secondly, it operates as a new aesthetic register, completely separate from mainstream taste. Earlier I mentioned The Shaggs, whose 1969 debut/final album Philosophy of the World is an unrelenting, disorienting, and strangely endearing example of outsider art. The album features three sisters - Dorothy Wiggin on lead guitar and vocals, Betty on rhythm guitar and vocals, and Helen on drums - effectively coerced into forming a band by their father, who believed that he was fulfilling the destiny established for him by a psychic who read his palm. None of them were remotely interested in becoming musicians, and it shows. Sheer sonic dissonance is the partial source of its unintended comedy. The title track features some truly inexplicable musical choices. The rhythm guitar is not only completely disconnected from everything else happening in the song, but it has no internal consistency or recognisable patterns. That Little Sports Car is similarly excruciating; the tempo meanders in weird, unexpected directions, and the melody is sung off-key with a tone of exasperated boredom. Trying to maintain focus throughout one of these songs, even on one instrumental part, is like trying to look at an object in the fourth dimension. It subverts expectations of what music should sound like, pushing familiar elements past the point of incomprehensibility. 

More than that, it subverts all that is expected of the serious and the vulnerable. The album’s title suggests grandiose ambitions; its music suggests an epileptic seizure. Playing music is inherently vulnerable. To perform is to open yourself to an unending series of value judgements, made instinctively by an audience who may not even realise they are doing so. Instead of trying to evade judgement through lack of effort, Camp commits completely. In doing so, it becomes unassailable. It is serious and vulnerable, as The Shaggs’ lyrics frequently are. It is also mildly deranged. With absolute confidence, it prioritises its own aesthetic sensibility above mainstream conceptions of good or bad taste. The Shaggs are immune to critique, because they have created something so far beyond the boundaries of taste that it cannot be engaged with in any way except on its own unique terms. By the time we get to my personal favourite track, It’s Halloween, each musical non sequitur feels like a flash of divine inspiration. Dorothy’s deadpan, disinterested delivery of ‘why, even Dracula will be there,’ tripping over every word in the rush to get the line out before the drums come back with a mind of their own - it’s spectacular. 

I laugh at The Shaggs, Black, and of course Jenkins, like thousands of people laughed at her in Carnegie Hall. The joke is beautiful in its simplicity: expectation (Mozart’s masterpiece), subversion (a voice described very kindly by Jenkins’ friends as evoking ‘the untrammelled swoop of some great bird’). And I very sincerely enjoy all of their music, particularly Jenkins’. There is something thrilling about the image of her, standing on stage, giving a performance so unbelievably bad that the entirety of New York was thrown into turmoil over whether or not she was doing it deliberately. It speaks to the uncanny status of all great Camp art, the process of trying and failing to appear natural. And from this process, the dethroning of the natural, the serious, the good that we aspire towards. The victory of passion, the brilliant and irrepressible vision of all who lack the skill to realise it.