Imagining a Queer “Creative Archive” for Aqua’s Aquarium

Upon its release in 1997, Aqua’s Aquarium became an instant classic for many queer music-lovers. In today’s blog post, C.C. McKee explores ‘Aqua’s camp approach to dance music’. It was this exploration that led McKee to create Aqualaxy, a “creative archive” of covers by contemporary queer and trans* electronic musicians. Keep reading to find out more.

by C.C. McKee

When I first began conceptualizing my approach to writing a book on Aqua’s smash debut Aquarium, I had to address a feeling that had lingered with me since my own childhood encounter with the album: There was something queer about Aqua’s camp approach to dance music that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Once I began to discuss this project with queer friends from across North America and Europe, almost everyone had a memory to share about how Aqua played some part in their own queer cultural formation. For one, an older sister was infatuated with Aquarium and so she absorbed it first by proxy and then incorporated it into her own adolescent taste. Another friend immediately fetched the CD from her collection to play on a Hello Kitty boom box (and was so excited that she later gifted me a wonderfully kitschy toy with two plastic dolphins that rotate while a tinny chorus of “My Oh My” plays). Yet another described his relationship to Aquarium as one of gay camp reverence, that feeling of cheeky and insistent adoration when “good taste” might say otherwise.

Although this deluge of anecdotes confirmed my suspicion that there was something to my hunch about Aqua’s queer coded-ness, the archive of reviews and articles discussed in the book initially rebuffed my attempts to locate queer engagements with the album after it was released in 1997. When I thought all hope was lost, a critical detail arrived while interviewing members of the production team. Looking to test the market for Aqua in the U.S., the international marketing team at Universal distributed white label promo vinyl to DJs working in gay clubs. This fact was a revelation and gave me one piece of critical evidence for reconstituting a history of millennial queer camp in electronic music where Aqua played a critical role.

Yet my evidence to trace Aqua’s queer camp sensibility and subsequent influence was still scant. So, I decided to try and flesh out this history myself by curating what I call a “creative archive” of covers by contemporary queer and trans* electronic musicians. The hope was that these covers would be discussed in the book to provide a meaningful counterpoint to my own analyses and offer means of complicating the overarching argument about millennial queer listening practices. After talking through this idea with Falk, a friend and collaborator in Berlin, he suggested a collective approach and connected me with Hendrik from Warning, an outstanding independent record label in Berlin. Beginning in the fall of 2022, I reached out to queer/trans electronic musicians in Europe and North America and asked if they would be interested in working with a vocalist, or vocalists, to make their own cover of a song from Aquarium. And so, Aqualaxy was born.

Each of the five covers took a markedly different approach to reinterpreting their chosen track. Copenhagen-based peachlyfe, Kim Kim, and PROXY transformed “Roses are Red” into a trance banger. Evelyn and Scotia (based in New York City and upstate respectively) metamorphosed “Barbie Girl” into a sexy darkwave synth track. JCow (Berlin) and The Moon Baby (Philadelphia) manipulated the tropical tone of “Doctor Jones” with a slick drum and bass sensibility. Ariel Zetina (Chicago) and Paula (London) pull a b-side from Aquarium and play with its gendered implications in “Happy Boys.” Finally, Gendered Dekonstruktion (Toronto) reworked “Barbie Girl” into a scintillating DJ tool. All five tracks revel in the queerness of electronic music with one ear in the camp history of Aqua and the other on the dancefloor. The aesthetic for these covers was united by the artist Murat Önen who executed the painting of an amorphous multigendered aquatic fantasyland used for the album cover.

If you want to see how the covers inform my argument, you’ll have to read the book! To preorder Aqualaxy on vinyl or digital, check out Warning’s bandcamp: https://warningberlin.bandcamp.com/album/aqualaxy