Creativity Quote by Bruce Johnston

“Of course The Beach Boys will be camp” lands like a shrug and a dare at the same time. Bruce Johnston isn’t defending the band so much as pre-empting the critique: yes, the striped shirts, the sun-kissed harmonies, the hyper-clean teen fantasy of it all can read as artificial, even ridiculous. And that’s precisely the point. “Of course” signals inevitability, as if camp isn’t an insult but the natural aftertaste of any pop mythology that’s been around long enough to harden into iconography.

Johnston’s choice of “will be” matters. He’s talking about destiny, not a current aesthetic choice. In pop culture, time turns sincerity into performance. What once played straight becomes stylized; what was aspirational becomes a costume people try on with a wink. The Beach Boys started as a soundtrack to an imagined California, and any imagined place eventually looks like theater. Camp is what happens when the audience can see the seams and loves you anyway.

There’s also a quiet flex here: camp status implies endurance. Plenty of acts disappear; only the culturally overexposed get reinterpreted, remixed, and ironized. Johnston, a member who joined after the early mythmaking, understands the band as an institution that’s survived multiple value systems - earnest teen pop, counterculture backlash, classic-rock canonization, meme-era revival. Calling it camp is a way to reclaim authorship over that reinterpretation: if you’re in on the joke, the joke can’t be used against you.