We're here to talk about Alex Cameron. But first let's talk about broken promises and the ways in which we have attempted to escape each other.
Every record should make music critics reconsider their lives. Like, maybe every record should make everybody reconsider their lives, but especially music critics because music critics are lazy. Obvious narratives get headlines obviously. Timely social context expressed poorly is big upped (better headlines.) Unfashionable ideas expressed sharply are thumbsed down (messy headlines.)
You gotsta know: in this game, it's all about the headlines, baby.
This isn't, y'know, wrong: music fandom is largely (if not entirely) about identity (more on this later) so it’s only natural that a critic would express themselves through what they choose to rave for/rant against in public. Obviously there is money involved too: with word counts down and shareability up, a critic’s taste and affiliation ultimately has more to do with their prospects right now than their ability to scalpel a record.
(Hey dude, back in my day, we didn't give a thing about prospects, 'cos we knew: there were none.)
Well shit, that basically sucks. But just because we know why it sucks doesn't mean it should keep sucking. Criticism doesn’t amount to much if it amounts to “Things are bad, but it’s for a reason, so I guess it’s okay if they keep being bad.”
on poptimism
"Things" didn't always "suck". A decade ago critical thinking (re: music) was shifting. Poptimism and its attendant feminist critiques were introduced by veterans (Tom Ewing for the poms, the crues at Idolator and NYMag stateside), but became standard operating procedure when a generation of critics closer to my age started getting their first jobs. This was a large scale response to the previous dominant mode of pseudo-apolitical criticism as shorthand for serious criticism which littered the aughts (and uh, every other decade.) This is how we were cursed with indie rock.
The opposite is how we were blessed with Alex Cameron. (And the tendency to hear Carly Rae Jepsen at parties.)
I don’t have to tell you why change was exciting. The parallels to wider shifts in society are obvious. In spite of widespread reactionary violence, the world is probably still closer to any vast concept of equality than it ever has been. (Even if it doesn’t seem like it a lot of the time (If humanity is defined by its ability to hope without reason, let this essay stand in for the human condition.)) The mid to late-aughts were bonafide magical, y'all. It felt like things were only going to get better. Like, forever. And that was reflected in music crit by previously obscured writers and artists and perspectives finally getting their shine. Sweet.
The uncomfortable result for music fandom is a schism has formed along ideological lines that feel more entrenched and turbopersonal than the Old Ones. Around the same time as folks started throwing around ‘poptimism’, there was an idea that the internet had shattered The Monoculture. Half a century ago folks thought there would never be another Elvis; contemporary critics thought there would never be another Nirvana. The infinite real estate of cyberspace meant room for infinite hypothetical dancefloors in which only we controlled the iPod, and the only people invited liked the same weirdo blogshit we did.
("iPods" were like iPhones before Vine. "Blogs" were like Twitter but, if you can imagine, worse.)
This was as much a fantasy as the total destruction of major labels, or the tech-utopian ideals of your Clay Shirkys etc that the web represented total emotional and intellectual liberation; as we’ve seen with all those promises, power wasn’t decentralised, it was just redistributed and consolidated. Similarly, what felt for a hot second like a genuine flowering of fragmented cultures has been consolidated by political orthodoxy into a polemiculture. In certain circles it feels like your record collection is either with us, visibly and publicly and every second of all time, or you’re some /pol/ack Fantanbro troglodyte and therefore obviously, willfully ignorant of the suffering of humankind. In others, it's entertainment qua entertainment, and if you bring politics into it you're a Soros-shilling libtard cuck BTFO by the leftist media conspiracy.
(In the center are closet conservatives.)
Hopefully it’s clear that I lean closer to the straw-former, but there’s a critical flatness on both sides of this dichotomy. The result is criticism like this one which struggles to find a point beyond limp handwringing for cheap hits while also denying the artists any agency or complexity. Do the Barthes, man: hell yeah the author is dead. You’re welcome to ignore what Alex Cameron tells you about this record’s meaning and read it as ironic. But at what point is your post-structuralist critique actually just juking the stats so you can critique a record that doesn’t exist? "Majors become colonels."
This is the part where we talk about Alex Cameron’s album. Alex Cameron and his business partner Roy Molloy are two stateless artists whose record earlier this year, Forced Witness, was generally liked by critics. But it was also released into the nexus of broader dialogue around what stories people want their artists to tell, and how.
Forced Witness is a nelsonian fist-pump over the scorched football field of civilisation.
Forced Witness is a challenging listen without context. Its lyrical seediness lurches out the second you start to believe you're listening to comfortable, nostalgic radio rock. To my ears the production sounds incredible; others read it as an obnoxious wink that none of it is meant to be taken seriously. Vamping this genuinely takes effort. Check how the drums fit together with Molloy nailing the whole Gerry-Rafferty-moonlit-sax-on-the-rooftop thing and Cameron singing husky and sorta out of breath on ‘Country Figs’ and how it brings the heat and urgency out of the city. Dig how Cameron eyeballs the camera stone cold serious in all his videos, like the drama of ‘Stranger’s Kiss’ or the post-’Hotline Bling’ dancing of ‘She’s Mine’/’Runnin Outta Luck’ etc. There’s a sorta cultural cringe in Australia where bad music-likers (unlike you and I) presume anyone working in this vein must be joking. They can’t understand, as John Maus says of his own music, that there are ideas from the time when music that sounded like this was popular that are worth exploring again, and further.
Hey, there is nothing about combining keys and a saxophone that is intrinsic to "the 1980s" as a discrete object of Time. What you are describing as "80s synths" is in fact "2017 synths." (Wow, pretty soon it will be "2018 synths.")
The other exception taken to Forced Witness is Cameron’s use of slurs: some women are referred to as “pussy”, ‘Marlon Brando’ features pretty jarring use of the word ‘faggot’. I'm totally not consciously trying to sound like a PMRC rating here. This is just what Getting Into The Weeds sounds like.
After Forced Witness was released, there were some takes. This record is good for describing bad people with realistic clarity. This record is bad for shocking without purpose. But my favourite take so far was offered by a friend months after Forced Witness was released. He proposed that every song on Forced Witness takes a pop music staple and hoists it like a shining yacht out of the bay to show the barnacles that were always clinging to its hull. In this idea, Cameron’s wager isn’t just that cretinous people exist, but that they’ve been the primary demographic and subject of pop music for all time. In that sense, Cameron’s songs fit into a tradition that includes Toto’s ‘Africa’ and The Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me?’ as well as modern critiques of ‘Every Breath You Take’ and ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’. Not for nothing does opener ‘Candy May’ share names with two of the most famous songs about fucked up love (‘Candy’ and ‘Maggie May’) while invoking a fickle female protag (cf. ‘Ruby Tuesday’.) You could rope in artists like Lily Allen, LCD Soundsystem, Lorde, Arcade Fire and other recent entrants making pop music about pop music's mawkish facade, but their overtness is a different thing altogether.
on applicability
That marks Cameron’s critique as not exactly pioneering, so the underlying question asked by Cameron’s detractors is, “Should this exist?” The answer should be self-evident: of course, yes, and the fact that the question is even implied so casually is a problem. I reckon this has more to do with expectations of form than anything else. Let’s talk about applicability.
If your expectation (and history) with music is that it applies to your experience more directly than literature or film or video games, it makes sense that you’d be that much more affronted when it doesn’t. I’m going to be as bold as an essayist can be and say: this is most people’s experience of music. Metalheads get to leave class early. They already grok how music can be as silly and fake as the rest of art. They already know how a riff can evoke the orgasmic screech of a space elf as she's stabbing the guts out of Literal Satan, or whatever DragonForce are on about. This is why statistically all metalheads love wrestling (kayfabe) and hate football (for its insistent self-regard of the scientific realness of its Spectacle, and also, The Kids Made Fun Of Me At Auskick.)
Applicability goes hand in hand with the celebrations of authenticity that dominated music until poptimism formalised its rejection. Audiences wanted artists who were believably, relentlessly themselves, and therefore music which could be applied to a person’s own experience (or one adjacent to their experience) were privileged over those that felt more alien. This is why Bruce Springsteen is a megafamous white guy from a working class background and Nile Rodgers only just got into the Hall of Fame. This is why Bob Dylan is one of the most celebrated artists of all time - even outside of his medium - while most people couldn’t tell you anything about Muddy Waters. Can you even imagine how most people would respond if they met HABITS? Half the city's talkback callers wanted to murder Spike Fuck before they found out who she was, just based on her name. We're not reckoning with the open-minded here, friends.
So poptimism’s thing was that authenticity is dogshit. There is more to be expressed, more being expressed and being ignored, than the immediate experience of whoever’s holding the guitar. (Particularly because most of that authenticity was a con anyway and as much performance as even the lowest schmaltz.) Maybe inauthenticity could tell folks more about existence than they’d figured. Maybe it could even be music criticism itself (cf. deconstruction.)
This much is obvious: music has the dimensions to reflect parts of our living experience in ways that are less literal and so, sometimes, more true (or more holistic, anyway.) But cultivating ambiguity creates problems.
If Cameron had written an essay, or spoken into a camera and uploaded a video blog to YouTube, making the same points he claims Forced Witness is making, nobody would find it controversial. Essays are explicit and (ideally) good at making their meaning clear. The rules of grammar are established to minimise ambiguity. Everybody would proclaim that Alex Cameron is One Of The Good Guys and you only need to go so far as the essays critical of Cameron making the exact same points (amid superficial moral assignations) to see that’s true. Further, if he’d realised these character studies in a medium that we know gets downright exhibitionist re: physical and emotional trauma like television… well, Breaking Bad is literally the most critically acclaimed television show of all time. Forced Witness is a genre album — folks understand the tropes of pulp noir and hard sf to be just that, tropes, and not endorsements. Why not on a record?
(The extent to which this ambiguity has created problems is the only actually ironic thing about its release: Cameron gave several interviews saying he believed the record spoke for itself, that he wanted to make something that couldn’t be mistaken for anything but what it was (to him.))
I’m not here to transliterate Cameron’s music or intent into that essay and I’m not here to pass judgement on him as a person either. I don’t need to agree with everything Alex Cameron says or does. I’m just here to figure out what this record is trying to do and whether it does that well. To that end, the first time I heard ‘Marlon Brando’ I thought: it does sound like it revels in its slur too much, and could’ve made the same point without it. Hey, yeah, actually, it did remind me of every time I'd been called that for doing nothing more than standing on a corner of Smith Street. It felt like Tarantino slinging the n-word — there are uglinesses to the human condition that are more interesting to exemplify and less couched in a familiar and pervasive trauma than that. Worse, it seemed like it overshadowed and undermined everything else in the song. But at the end of the song, Cameron grants the character this admission: “I know that I blew it and I know it ain’t right to be calling men / faggots and to be starting fights / but I can’t stop.”
on resonance
This pathology is ultimately what separates it from Tarantino’s self-inserts. It’s not whiskey that Cameron smells on the breath of the people, it’s venom in the back of every throat, how it pools in moments of lust and is unleashed by obsession. And this is why the idea that each song is a critique of pop songs rings so true to me: these traits uncritically form the bedrock of 20th century Western pop culture, a canon that, in tandem with the capitalism that enables it, emphasises dominance while making token gestures towards impulse control. Cameron and business partner Roy Molloy might strike people as Bukowski types (i.e. problematic stylists) but Forced Witness is spiritually closer to Flaubert, a work of Realism following the Romantic sentiment of late 20th century pop. Or hell, how about Huxley? That aforementioned venom? It’s synthetic. Just another process in our bokanovskification. i.e., it's there by design, 100 or 2000 or 6 million years of the finest cultural engineering the cosmos could afford all to make you angry, wary, and scared. (Do you have any idea how much money the CIA has spent on art? Yo, we think of ourselves as high-minded for all this, but all art is really an attempt to invoke (evoke) our primal nature.)
What’ll really mess you up if you subscribe to this idea is how you reckon with the lines that genuinely resonate. Cameron’s deplorable pop star persona is a keen student of his genre, so even if you’ve never peeled the gym pants off a single mother you might find the chorus of ‘Stranger’s Kiss’ genuinely moving. It’s classic radio heartbreak pop and Olsen’s “Don’t bother flying when we jump off the cliff / Make sure it’s headfirst if you don’t wanna deal with what ifs” is enough to keep 2017 in the record books. The most obvious parallel to the Al Cam/Molloy dynamic is Springsteen/Clemons and you really see it on tracks like this, Molloy’s moody stabs punctuating the transition from chorus to verse. If this is Deliberately Pop Music For Assholes, what happens when you like it?
The answer is something 2017 bore out ad infinitum: the nazis were inside us all along. Which is a hyperbolic way of saying, if you don't identify with some of this while the rest of it repulses you, Forced Witness isn't doing its job. The usual metaphor here is "cracked mirror", but friend, this mirror is crystal clear. Time was, it was easy to feel good about being a music fan. You knew Skrewdriver fans were lowlives and Powderfinger fans were dweebs and that's all there was to it. Now we're all tearing the posters down from the wall.
Even taken as direct observations of humanity, it’s hard to see where anyone might think Cameron is sympathetic to (as opposed to pitying) these people. ‘The Chihuahua’ and ‘The Hacienda’ are both hedonistic and empty, characterising the pursuit of pleasure as ultimately doomed. Superclubs and Vegas excess are the setting for so much misery. Diabetes, both literally and as metaphor, shows up a few times — a disease which urban legend said could be caused by eating too much sugar. You getting the message? Too much of a good thing…
I said Cameron’s critique isn’t exactly pioneering but that doesn’t make it any less necessary. We’re only 12 months past the middle class pearl-clutching over being stuck in the “liberal bubble” that precluded them from foretelling Trump’s Presidential win. Hordes of adult babies HURLED themselves at this bandwagon, self-flagellation as proxy for introspection. This was staggering at the time and made more hideous as so many have gone even further to distance themselves from exactly the people Cameron is singing about — people who see civic progress as a threat and who vote for corporate interest and “traditional” values. It’s been underwhelming, to say the least, to watch the type of people who started the year committing themselves to expanding their horizons later argue to have Cameron wiped from the face of the planet. In a similar vein, folks tweet their indignation at the emerging genre of Dapper Nazi Journalism for associating fascism with the mundane, meanwhile in their own lives cloistering abusers and giving their most obnoxious friends unlimited free passes. Why doesn't Forced Witness have a song about a hypocrite who leverages their impotent politics for social cachet? Is it on the Japanese deluxe version?
The type wouldn't fit on Forced Witness. For all of their galling traits, none of these characters (insofar as they are) are disingenuous. They are all ruthlessly Out Front (in the Keseyian sense) and there is no room on the bus for the undecided.
(It's too late in the game to dwell on the fact that the title, at the very least, confirms Cameron’s intent. “Forced Witness”. As in forced to bear witness to all… this.)
(Imagine I’m sweeping a hand over the hills from the Windows XP default wallpaper but every blade of grass is a headline from the past year.)
Whether you take Forced Witness to be showing up the pop canon or popular attitudes themselves, the questions it raises do more than if this were translated to novel or TV show. It’s a neat trick, inviting the audience to identify with a high fidelity pop record, and then repelling them with the contents. Yes, folks. This is us. The shadowselves who we swallow at the last second so the slur doesn’t come out, the fist doesn’t swing, the lie isn’t told, the line isn’t crossed. They aren’t the truth of who we are, but they are a part of it. They’re the songs we love and live laid bare. The artists whose abuses we pretend not to know. The ideal narratives overturned. Forced Witness succeeds not because it’s authentic or ironic, but because it’s honest. And baby, truth hurts.