Review Summary: A panoramic view of the traumas which define our modern world.
I’ve been drinking a lot more since I found out most of the world is run by pedophiles. Mainly cans of vague dollar store lager, nothing fancy. I wouldn’t say I have a problem yet, but the more I see and learn about the cogs of society, the harder it becomes to resist giving into the lowest effort vice there is. I’ve been shocked at the stunning lack of art that even attempts to tackle the ways in which human interpersonal exploitation is normalised, and been made completely instrumental to maintaining modern living standards. If you don't play the game, after all, you're the only thing worse than a victim: you're a sucker.
CAMGIRL is one such rare album about exploitation. From what I’ve read, apparently there’s a narrative with characters, conflict, scenes and resolution here. Other people with greater powers of literacy might even understand it. But I don’t care about narratives or Proper Nouns or electronic press kit copy when it comes to music, I care about how things makes me feel. In this music I feel the contours of forty-year old cracked concrete and faded carpets and weathered hotel room keys and the cheapest air-freshener you can buy, all supporting a million acts of exploitation a day toward women the world over who are coerced to sell their dignity to make ends meet. This is not even to mention those who are just forced into it, shipped across continents to be abused and destroyed and never heard from again.
Rain was pelting on the window of my Chongqing apartment when I first heard the booming kick drum of “Mr. Sentimental” and my brain chemistry changed forever. I’d always known the objective realities of how the perverted elite run the world and how cycles of physical, sexual and economic abuse which run rampant amongst the working-class are automated systems of abuse to sustain a permanent underclass. But I had never had the correct emotional response to visualising the fog of dread which encapsulates the world. It’s harrowing to know that on the subway to work every morning, the person next to you would probably say their neighbour deserved to be scammed over the phone, or that the girl on OnlyFans who exited a year ago and still faces daily harassment should have thought harder about the consequences before making an account. The world is cruel but it makes its inhabitants crueler, incapable of empathy or even a genuine smile.
The band name is not only a perfect marketing hook but also a cogent introduction to what the music is. The best art in any medium is made by alcoholics (former or practicing) and it’s really no contest. Alcohol has an elegant way of taking you down the most amazing roads to the most tragic results. When I abused alcohol I was running from my responsibilities that most people just put up with on a daily basis. I was, by my own admission, a pathetic and weak mess. In counselling I learned to replace one addiction with another, and now I practice the great middle-class sport of procrastination. But this record takes me back to those multi-day benders and the glimpses of the parallel worlds of depravity I would see during my worst moments. Inhuman sounds and scents are the wind at your back as you float slowly toward another annex, where the more PG-rated party begins.
Sometimes the lyrics are buried so low under pitch-black reverb you can’t understand them. You can read them, of course, just like you can read the lyrics of Jane Doe and realise there’s no correlation between the written and spoken words because these are two completely different forms of expression. The written is clinical and bound by stuffy rules of grammar and decades of learnt conventions as to what is “good writing”. The spoken is visceral and non-sensical unless you have been reared by the education system to conform to rules of etiquette. Alcohol is a wonderful way to revert a civilised orator to their natural ways. You can discern a great deal about the fragile constructs of spoken language by being the only sober person in a room of drunkards. It’s near impossible to articulate the true nature of the world, because under it all we are all animals desiring a return to pure hedonism and anarchy. The only ones who can literally afford these lifestyles are the uber-rich, and that’s why they were in those emails and on those airplanes. The end goal of drowning in wealth is not stability or security, but breaking every rule known to man and always having an escape hatch.
I won’t write a play by play of individual tracks because this record speaks for itself. Music is the rare art form that often can do so effortlessly at the hands of a skilled group of craftsmen. But this stanza from the penultimate track stands out:
“Cause all I know is sadness,
Don't know who my dad is,
Shoot my shot with death,
When I shoot up on my mattress.
Laughing like I'm bat***,
Like I'm seven tabs in,
Do a little glass,
Then I get up and start dancing.”
Sometimes records are praised for creating worlds that their listener lives in. For what it's worth I think this album’s best quality is that it simply observes a hidden-in-plain-sight layer of the real world, perhaps too honestly for a large swath of the public. The above lyrics happen thousands of times a day in countries and neighbourhoods you have never heard of and never will. It probably even occurs on your street, behind doors always closed which you’ll never see. And I suppose this record that catalogues a universe of SSN scams, hating your skinny-fat frame, clipping off fingers in concrete rooms, persistent substance abuse and dissolving dollar bills could be labelled as pessimistic and cynical. What we often forget is that cynicism is an observation of a reality that is proven again and again.
The people who run this slowly boiling sphere have shown themselves to only be interested in their own wealth and power, and rendering these two cancers upon the often-washed masses. The outcome of power is almost always abuse, and this abuse gets passed down like a fractured gene that metastasises throughout communities. The financialisation of the human soul is the end goal of this ride we are on, and more often than not women are the ones who bear the majority of the resulting trauma. That trauma might even be marketed an act of empowerment.
There have been hundreds of counter narratives marketed to men in the modern age to counter the depressing realisation of permanent, structural inequality. It used to be you could work hard at one job and have two kids and a swimming pool. Then it was you could start your own small business. Then it was making it big on crypto which eventually devolved into selling cartoons of ***ing monkeys on the internet. As for the ladies? Well, you could always try being a camgirl.
