In 1964, academic lit-critic Susan Sontag wrote "Notes on Camp," a list of items riffing on the slick and cool subject. In her rudderless series of comments, the most useful working definition of camp she wrote was "Being-as-Playing-a-Role." That is to say, there is little concern for reality or meaning in camp. There is only costume, façade, and big-fun playtime.

Remarkably, this was decades before camp, and other shades of "role-playing" (like kitsch and irony), became not just a recurring device in art, but a muse in itself--a source of inspiration for art, as it is for Felix da Housecat's album Kittenz and Thee Glitz.

I wonder how much Sontag is getting down with Felix da Housecat right now, because Felix is definitely getting freaky with camp. The Chicago DJ has been known for his excellent (and serious) dance music for about a decade, but he's shifted into another level of musicianship with this album: to camp, where "musician" necessarily means "showman."

The story of Kittenz and Thee Glitz is that while Felix was on tour in Geneva, he met up with the French and Swiss DJ Miss Kitten, and they decided to do a project together. I read an interview where Felix said they wanted to make fun of "the glamourous life," but since camp makes fun of everything--and since making fun of everything is so much fun--they drowned in camp themselves. The album is a massive, wonderful indulgence in playing roles.

To push "play" on the CD player is to say: "Action!" Kittenz and Thee Glitz is the soundtrack to the lives Felix and his Kittenz lead. Naturally, these are unimaginable lives--not just because one would have to be super-rich to live them, but because there's no real meaning in them. In the alternately hard-edged and spacey song "Silver Screen Shower Scene," Miss Kitten's sultry voice repeats the lyrics, "Sweet seduction in a magazine/endless pleasure in a limousine/ in the back shakes a tambourine/ nicotine from the silver screen."

One instrument, the shaking tambourine in the background, is given brief mention in the imagery Miss Kitten presents, though the real focus of the album is not so much the music itself, but the glamour (or "Glitz") surrounding the music industry-- magazines, limousines, and "silver screens." The lines are sexy jump-cuts between locales of pleasure, a script for a sexy movie.

The fast and loose role-play of camp can be disconcerting, however, especially when exploited by electronic music. Typical of electronica, much of Kittenz and Thee Glitz is faceless music. Voices are so drastically altered by electronic devices that there is nothing fleshy or organic in the words they speak. Camp is a celebration of style over meaning, and electronic music can be stylishly meaningless to the extreme. In the disco-funk of "Glitz Rock," for example, a voice repeats the words "baby, baby" for sheer effect. It is as glossy and shallow as a page out of Vogue. The listener is not meant to care or even consider whose voice it is, to whom it's speaking, or why. In the world of Thee Glitz, language is empty.

In the catchy, synthed-out "Happy Hour," the disaffected voice of Melistar says, "Every city looks all the same," one in a string of seemingly unrelated lines (like the train of thought in "Silver Screen Shower Scene"). This remark on global homogeny is not a complaint: Every city looks all the same because that's the vision behind Thee Glitz. Everyone in the clubs will move to the unifying sounds of Kittenz and Thee Glitz, and clubs all over the world will bump its beats. The last glib thought in a prior string of "Happy Hour" lines is "Go out all night/Next: international flight."

Though camp is ultimately creepy in its compulsion for role-play, especially when it is exploited in electronica (the most disembodied of all musical forms), the album does not suffer. "Madame Hollywood" and "What Does It Feel Like" are nothing less than gorgeous dance tracks, and "Pray for a Star" and "Runaway Dreamer" are genuinely dreamy and sentimental. If Susan Sontag and I went to see this show at I-Spy on Friday, she'd probably jab me in the side, because "Notes on Camp" appears in the book Against Interpretation, in which she denounces the clouds of "interpretation" that eclipse the pleasures of art.

Sontag ends the essay "Against Interpretation" by writing about how the persistent critic's "interpretation of art" should be replaced by an "erotics of art." As with "Notes on Camp," however, Sontag never successfully defines her terms: It is not clear what an "erotics of art" would look like, or whether an erotics would not itself be an interpretation.

But whatever, because Kittenz and Thee Glitz sounds absolutely fucking fantastic.