Aqua’s Aquarium by C.C McKee – Book Review

Aqua’s Aquarium by C.C McKee

Published by: Bloomsbury Academic

Release Date: 08/08/24

A wolf in sheep’s clothing or conveyor pop for an empty generation. The latest in the 33 1/3 series opens up the debate.

There’s a danger in trying to claim intellectual rights on what initially seems conformist material, in that it might ultimately be more in the eye of the researcher than the actual artist. If you’re going to go to the commercial hinterlands though, you might as well go full throttle, and in Aqua’s “Aquarium” you can’t accuse writer C.C McKee of tying a mast to anything approaching pop culture cool. The much-derided early noughties band may have had huge sales but they also had the critical kudos of a fat seagull squawking on a pub step. The question is was there anything in between, more subtle and interesting shades that reveal something beyond the day glo chutzpah and the singalong choruses.

Like all 33 1/3 books, there is a mixture of inspiration and critical analysis here, but McKee’s book is slightly different in that it sets its aim on something more rudimental. For whilst Aqua’s music was always presented, especially visually as heterosexual pop, McKee argues that its queerness and fetishism were its secret, hidden power.

The bawdiness of European pop music has often been both its weakness and its strength, veering between absurdism and salaciousness but McKee argues that Aqua deliberately went further than their peers. Dissecting tracks from “Aquarium”, there’s an unravelling of both the hypocrisy of modern rock criticism ( where mainstream pop is always judged the enemy ) and the history of the band, whose meteoric rise was not without its pitfalls. Most famously the book covers the surprising controversy their uber hit “Barbie Girl” caused. From Mattel’s failed lawsuit against the band to the subversive nature of the track itself, which saw lead singer Lene Nystrom gleefully verbalising the many twisted things people do to the doll. It was not the only time the band sailed into slightly salty waters. As McKee points out, their videos and in particular the visual Easter eggs from “Aquarium” were rife with submission, whips and even at one point an Oedipal suggestion, hardly the staple for an average pop bands demographic. The problem being that Aqua would end up being so big on a global scale, it was hard to figure out who their audience was anyway.

Whilst some might shrug at this meticulous study of Aqua’s pop sheen, McKee’s book throws up the interesting question as to whether we culturally put up our own taste barriers when it comes to music and even more so, why artistry has to be always based on the profound. In a Mojo-type world where the same iconoclasts and their back catalogues are rehashed weekly, it feels kind of refreshing to have the same kind of analysis based on the camp of pop and gender which deserves more recognition at the very least. It’s worth pointing out that Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” has been hailed as some sort of post-modern masterpiece, yet “Aquarium” riffs just as heavily on the false floor of the perceived. McKee argues the bands corner well. “Parody is a form of ironic inversion..playing with multiple conventions,” the book reminds us. By the end of it you might question just how throwaway bubblegum dance music is, given its influence of genres such as trance, industrial and new wave, and whether rock music, not its chart nemesis is the real cliche.

It will also, given its subject matter, divide opinion and your enjoyment of this book may well be in whether you find all this revelatory or not and whether it’s slightly too easy for artists to play their ironic card two decades down the line. What can’t be argued against is the smartness of the writing. Ultimately this is both an erudite and passionate celebration of queer culture and a band who may well have been a great deal more layered and whip hand than most of us ever imagined.

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Words by Craig Campbell, you can read more book reviews at his author profile. He also tweets here