VILLAGE PEOPLE Vinyl Records and CDs

Campy is as campy does, and the Village People did it better than anyone else had even imagined possible in the late 1970s. The brainchild of Jacques Morali, the boys in the band were initially a novel concept -- a motley crew of stylized homosexual "types" (dressed in what's best described as same-sex drag) who would score big with the gay community and their straight and narrow counterparts. The shtick worked astonishingly well: none-the-wiser midwestern housewives (and their husbands) learned the words to "Y.M.C.A." as thoroughly as urbane gay men. When Disco faded, so did the Village People, and while they haven't had any comebacks on the charts, they've become cultural icons. Aside from crafting several Disco standards, the Village People should also be credited with giving Americans a reason to learn terms such as "leather queen," and teaching the clueless that a cowboy can be a "man's man" in several very different ways.